I almost didn’t go for my walk, and started to come up with a list of why I should just stay in and sit in my rocking chair instead, drinking copious amounts of coffee, and dreaming about a lush forest that I am brought to in my journeys. The pull toward staying in was strong, as I wanted to fully immerse myself in that forest, where I could get lost in the woods and not see another human. What I have is a beach community. Lovely, but still…people.

Still, I put on my shoes, and I reminded myself that a short walk is better than no walk, and that I always, always feel better after. And I did. The sun was out, genuinely out, not the pale winter kind, and the air was that perfect temperature where you don’t need a jacket and your whole body exhales. Green leaves are unfurling on the trees, and birds everywhere. After weeks of rain and wind, this felt like a small gift.

I was listening to an interview with Sharon Blackie as I walked, and something she said pulled me into a thread of thought I’ve been circling for a while now: this midlife journey. This mid-life awakening, (I love this term, don’t you? So much better than a mid-life crisis). This beautiful, sometimes disorienting threshold we find ourselves standing at, and the deep soul-level question it keeps asking us. Who do I want to be in this next chapter? Not what do I want to do, but who do I want to be?

This isn’t a reflection that we need the whole path mapped out, but we can begin by turning inward and asking: what doesn’t feel right in my body anymore? What doesn’t feel right in the way I’m living in the world? What am I ready to release?

For me, this letting go has been happening slowly, over years. Some of it has been obvious in hindsight. The hard-worker identity, always pushing, sometimes holding two jobs, needing to be the best, has quietly dissolved. There’s nothing in me anymore that wants to be in a soul-sucking environment, surrounded by complaints or gossip or disconnection. That energy belongs to past chapter.

There is grief too, and I think it’s important to name it honestly. There is a grief over my slimmer body, over the physical self I once inhabited. I don’t struggle with it every day, but it is present, especially when I’m trying on clothes and the fit is different. What has helped me is a simple reframe I keep returning to: I am in a woman’s body now. One that is doing exactly what bodies do, they grow, they change, and they continue to change until we leave them.

Something else that has faded: the people-pleasing. The nice-girl performance. The holding of my tongue so that someone else could remain comfortable while I quietly swallowed discomfort. That has gone, and I do not miss it.

What remains, the place where I still feel friction, is a whisper that sometimes rises up on walks like this one: Am I too late? I know the answer is no. But I understand why so many women at this threshold ask the same question. We’ve built an identity, and we have lived inside a story about who we are, which has been decades in the making. And stepping out of that story, choosing the unknown, choosing the call that is quietly, or not so quietly, asking us to walk a new path? That takes courage. It is a genuine threshold crossing.

And then, just as I was sitting with all of this, five white cranes flew directly over the house.

I’ve always thought of cranes as creatures of a particular grace: slow, deliberate, extraordinarily still when they need to be. Watching the cranes made me think of a Japanese folk story - the Crane Wife, which felt very synchronistic in the moment. A man saves a crane, and later a woman appears who becomes his wife. She weaves something beautiful and asks only one thing of him: do not watch me while I work. He agrees, until curiosity and fear override his trust, and he looks. In that moment she is revealed as the crane, and because the boundary is broken, she must leave. What the story holds, I feel, is something true about the feminine inner life: the creative, intuitive, spiritual self cannot survive being controlled, scrutinised, or rushed. It needs to be trusted, and it needs room to weave.

Isn’t that exactly what this season is asking of us?

The softness I am learning to inhabit is not passivity, nor is it giving up. This is a stillness, and a refusal to rush, a choosing of slow living over hustle, of nature over noise, of genuine connection over performance. The city, the pace, the constant stimulation, I genuinely loved those things once, though I cannot imagine them now. Even my quiet lake community sometimes feels like too much. What I want is depth. Quiet. The rhythms of something larger than my own to-do list.

There is, I’ll admit, an impatience underneath the softness. A part of me that wants to be over the threshold already, and to have landed in the new version of my life rather than standing in the in-between. But I’m learning to recognise that impatience as its own kind of old pattern: the ego that always wanted to be the best, to have it figured out, to not be caught in the middle of becoming.

The middle of becoming is exactly where the soul work happens.

Our bodies are changing, energy levels shift, physical capacity shifts, sleep changes. But something extraordinary is happening on the inside at the same time. The interior self, the emotional, spiritual, intuitive self, is growing, expanding…asking to be heard. And I think this is the part we are not paying nearly enough attention to. We are so focused on the outer body, the outer world, that we miss the real invitation: to align with who we are becoming, not who we were.

I don’t see enough conversation about aging peacefully. Not gracefully in the performance sense, but peacefully, with genuine acceptance. So many women in my age group are fighting it: trying to stay young, trying to look a certain way, resisting the tide. I totally understand the impulse, but there is a real beauty in moving through this phase of life as though holding its hand. Listening, and respecting what the body is asking for. Trusting the weaving.

The cycle of life will do what it does. We are born, we live, we change, we flow, we grow, and we die.

Five cranes, flying slow and white against the morning sky. I think they were the right messengers for this morning. Graceful, unhurried, and at home in the threshold between water and air, earth and sky. Maybe that’s all we are being asked to be.

I’d love to hear what’s moving in you. Leave a comment below, or if something arises in your dreams or inner life that you’d like to explore, I’m always here for that conversation.

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One leg is outside the blankets, one leg is inside them, because apparently this is how a woman in midlife now regulates temperature. The cat is asleep beside me, deeply unbothered, while I am trying not to kick her and simultaneously experiencing what can only be described as a full-body internal weather system, hot, then not, then oddly alert for no reason at all.

I get up, wander the house like a Victorian ghost with unfinished business, and eventually return to bed to claim the cool spot in the sheets like it’s been diplomatically negotiated.

If this sounds familiar, welcome.

I’ve never been a perfect sleeper, to be fair. I’ve had insomnia for as long as I can remember. I’m a light sleeper, I dream vividly, and I’ve always had a kind of fractured relationship with sleep…less surrender, more negotiation. But midlife has added a few new layers to the experience that I wasn’t exactly warned about in advance.

Waking more frequently. Waking around 3 a.m. for no obvious reason. Temperature shifts that feel strangely personal. Random waves of anxiety that arrive without invitation. Feeling tired and alert at the same time, which is possibly one of the more confusing states of being a human I’ve encountered so far.

It’s not exactly a brochure-friendly chapter of life.

What I’ve learned, though, is that this isn’t just my experience. Many women in midlife notice shifts in sleep as hormones begin to change. Estrogen and progesterone play a role in regulating sleep, mood, body temperature, and nervous system calm. As those levels fluctuate, sleep often becomes lighter, more fragmented, and occasionally more chaotic than we would prefer.

This is both reassuring and deeply unhelpful at 3:12 a.m. when you are overheating and briefly reconsidering your entire existence.

At this stage of life, I’ve also had to rethink what “a good night’s sleep” even means. It doesn’t always mean eight uninterrupted hours anymore. Sometimes it means waking five times instead of fifteen. Sometimes it means falling back asleep quickly. Sometimes it means waking up without a headache and considering that a quiet victory. The standards shift. You adapt.

When I sleep badly, I feel it everywhere. My thoughts are slower, my patience is thinner, and my emotional landscape becomes slightly more reactive than usual. I call it brain fog, but honestly, brain frog feels more accurate. There’s something mildly damp and disoriented about it, like my nervous system briefly decided to become a swamp creature with opinions.

And yet there’s a strange side effect to this season of sleep as well. Because I wake up more often, I remember more of my dreams.

Instead of only catching the final remnants of sleep in the morning, I often wake in the middle of dreams or immediately after, still carrying their atmosphere in my mind. As a result, my dream life has become louder. More vivid and symbolic. More likely to leave me thinking, well, that was oddly specific.

I suspect many women in midlife begin to notice this shift, not necessarily because the dream world changes, but because our awareness of it does.

My night routine is not particularly elaborate. I’m not someone who thrives on strict bedtime rituals or complicated systems. I prefer gentle cues to my body that signal: you can soften now. I avoid screens before bed, keep the room as dark as possible, read for a while (sometimes ten minutes, sometimes far too long if the book is particularly juicy), and drink herbal tea.

I also try not to eat too close to bedtime, because I’ve noticed my sleep becomes noticeably more chaotic when my digestion hasn’t fully clocked out for the night. It turns out internal systems do not appreciate multitasking. As for herbs, I often create blends like passionflower, lemon balm, blue vervain, skullcap, and occasionally mugwort. I don’t treat them as a cure or a switch that turns sleep on, but more like a soft invitation toward rest. Some nights they help. Other nights, my hormones politely decline their offer.

There is also a lot of conversation online about whether waking at 3 a.m. is spiritual or symbolic. Some say it’s a “veil-thin” hour. Some say it’s a portal. Some say it’s ancestral communication. Science, meanwhile, points toward hormone fluctuations, cortisol rhythms, blood sugar changes, and lighter sleep cycles. My sense is that it doesn’t need to be either/or. The body can wake you for very physical reasons, and your inner world can still use that moment for something meaningful. Both can exist without cancelling each other out.

What midlife has been teaching me, more than anything, is that rest is no longer something I earn after I’ve done enough. Rest is something I need in order to function as I am now. It is maintenance, not reward. Listening, not performance. And sometimes that rest includes waking at 3 a.m., having thoughts that feel slightly too meaningful for that hour, and then eventually returning to sleep as if nothing happened.

If you are also awake at strange hours - overheating, overthinking, negotiating blanket territory like it is a diplomatic mission - you’re not alone. You may just be in a different rhythm now. One that asks for more gentleness, more listening, and less resistance to the fact that life, at this stage, does not always follow a neat or uninterrupted sleep cycle.

And if your cat is judging you for it… she will recover emotionally by morning.

Not in the vague, romanticized someday I’ll write a book in a cottage by a lake kind of way…although, if I’m being honest, that is absolutely part of the vision, and I stand by it. I mean, in the real way. The persistent way. The kind where ideas keep arriving, stories keep tapping at the window, and something in you knows there are things meant to be shared.

And yet, for a very long time, I didn’t finish much.

I would start something that felt brilliant in the moment, full of energy and possibility, and then somewhere along the way, I’d become self-critical, lose momentum, question everything, and quietly abandon it. A tale as old as time, or at least as old as women with notebooks full of unfinished brilliance.

So why now?

Honestly, something has shifted. There’s been a subtle change in me since my birthday last month. Nothing dramatic, no lightning bolt moment, no dramatic rebirth in flowing linen. Just a quiet but steady feeling that I want to move differently now.

Slower, and more mindfully. More cyclically feeling. More in tune with the rhythms of my own nature rather than the constant pressure to produce, perform, and prove. And strangely enough, from that slower place, words have started coming. A lot of them.

In the last little while, I’ve found myself writing with a kind of openness I haven’t felt before, less concerned with impressing anyone, less preoccupied with getting it right, and more interested in telling the truth as I know it now. And once I started, I could not stop. It feels like I have unlatched this cage, and everything is flowing out; it is freeing.

Lately, I think about dreams a lot, probably because dreams have always spoken a language I instinctively understand. I think about midlife too, this threshold that so many women arrive at, carrying stories about decline, invisibility, or the need to somehow become younger again. I’m not interested in any of that.

There is something beautiful about this season of life, and wisdom in letting old identities fall away. Women are allowed to choose paths our ancestors never had the freedom to choose. Intuition matters. Dreams matter. And I believe it’s entirely possible to begin again at an age when the world expects you to already be neatly defined.

And maybe that’s part of why I’m writing now. Because I’m no longer interested in living only the versions of life that were handed to me.

This space will be for writing about dreams, symbolism, inner seasons, soul remembering, midlife becoming, and the strange, beautiful ways life keeps trying to get our attention. It will also be a place for honesty, curiosity, humour, and the occasional lovingly raised eyebrow at modern nonsense.

Mostly, though, I hope it becomes a place where women feel less alone in what they sense, what they know, and what they’re still becoming.

If that speaks to something in you, you’re very welcome here.

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