Karen and I have had a running joke for the last couple of weeks that – when I didn’t show up at the Today Party yesterday (hope you all had the best time ever!) – that we’d tell everyone that I’d opted for a nap. But, we figured no one would believe us.:)

I am, actually, in Toronto at a Canadian blogger event on eating local.

Like I’d actually have taken five days to do something non-work related.:)

It’s true, I pretty much eat and sleep Our Big Earth.

You’ll catch me (regularly) running off at the mouth about being perpetually exhausted, needing to clone myself x12 and seeking professional help for thinking I can take on yet another project.

But, really, Our Big Earth is like a living, breathing being and I love the energy it brings to our home life (O.K., not always. But, it’s pretty cool most days) and the community.

It’s all that I’d define as joy.

From Toronto, I can look across the country and step back for a minute, which is exciting. I’m perpetually asking myself, Ken and the universe “Gee, I wonder what’s next” with a big, stupid grin on my face.

Sometimes the next is hell, some days brilliant.

And this weekend, from a couple thousand kilometers away, I got a glimpse of that potential next step filled with momentum, community and a collaborative spirit that makes me gasp in the best of ways.

I’ve said it, at this point, way too many times – that the universe lets you see only so far down the road because there is a complete sense of wonderment in standing right at the center of an evolving life. A terror too at times. But, those moments of awareness when “A” connects through all the points to where you are standing way down at “T” or “X”, make all the crap in between totally tolerable.

I know it’s my once-a-month turn to talk about this strange adventure in entrepreneurial craziness and I feel like I need to leave you with some sort of takeaway, some super magic tool that I neither invented or use entirely properly, yet is super magic. You’d think that right now, for me, it would have EVERYTHING to do with this time in Toronto.

Instead, I want to talk about my grandma.

When the folks at Harbinger Communications here in Toronto pitched this food event to me a while back I was totally skeptical.

They’re the PR firm for Hellmann’s mayo and giant multinational Unilever – SOOOOOOO not what we’re about. But, they had an idea – a partnership that brought different people from all around Canada together to talk about something that I am completely excited about – connecting people to local food.

So, I said yes to hanging out in Toronto, talking shop about local food and seeing what this crew from Hellmann’s was up to.

It just so happened that, around the same time, my grandma – who lives in Niagara Falls – broke her hip and my mother was heading East to help her out.

So, I tagged on a few days ahead of the event to do some visiting, some hanging, apparently some much needed reconciling – and to make some space in life to see the rapidly evolving terrain of the road ahead for what it actually is.

I got to NF on Wednesday morning to see my grandma for the first time in five years – as she inches up on 93, that long space between visits was an unbearable risk to take and I saw it in her face as I walked through the door that life had gone on far too long apart from each other.

We visited and told stories of silly Summers and dancing stars, had a good cry about Linden’s death. I was taken back in time with grandma smells like lotion and starched cotton sheets. For the first time in so long, my head and heart, energy and enthusiasm settled into a place of familiar comfort where everything could sort itself out and find its home.

The next morning as I stood on my aunt’s porch where I had spent every Summer as a child – a place that looked, felt and even smelled exactly the same – it occurred to me that I had hit a reset button when I got on that plane in Victoria.

I had stopped – for the first time in nearly a year – to recalibrate and redirect.

All of the things that had consumed me could sit for a few minutes – finally - as grandma and I did her exercises up and down the hall or we sat in the shade sipping lemonade.

I knew, as I looked into her tear-filled eyes on Friday as I left for Toronto, that this – more than likely – would be the last hug she and I would share, the last time we held hands or got to say “I love you.”

And she gave me a piece of her spirit.

“Don’t forget to live while you are so busy with your life’s work,” she whispered, hands holding my face like she did when I was 5. “You cannot tuck your soul away, it’s always showing.”

I lost my breath for a minute, nothing possible to say. Sometimes, in order to move forward with your work in life you have to take a step back. You have to pause. You have to let the universe do its thing, sort and reveal the next step because sometimes it’s painfully blurry in full motion.

Often in work (guilty), women are so busy “achieving” and hoisting their forward motion onto what’s next that we don’t take those invaluable moments to remember why we started it all in the first place.

Thank goodness there’s always grandma to keep our heads geared in the same direction as our hearts while we continue to tackle our life’s work.