Finding Strength in Change: A Journey with Headwater Athletics

Bright Side Series | Headwater Athletics | June 2026

My back went out the same week my summer program didn’t come together as planned. I couldn’t stand. My father had just left the hospital after fighting for his life. I had emailed every parent in my program to apologize. I couldn’t call because I was afraid I’d start crying. Every child I had begun to love from a distance. Every friendship I had imagined. Gone. And my daughter — my darling Clementine — had just graduated from fifth grade and was heading into a new season of her own.

Grief, joy, loss, and hope all lived in my heart at the same time. My back held all of it as long as it could. And then it laid me down.

I rubbed Charlotte’s Web salve into my skin. I pressed a little holy dirt from Chimaýó into my hip and my back. I surrendered. I fell into a deep slumber. Three hours later, I opened my eyes. I had released it all. The world, which had never stopped, was right there waiting.

The sound of summer wafted in through the open window — a cascade of chickadees calling back and forth, the ravens squawking, the woodpecker drumming its steady rhythm against the wood, and the aspen leaves rustling in the breeze. Every summer morning, I wake to this. A symphony of nature pours through my window.

A walking path through the Aspens reminds me of just how small I am.

What It Means to Be Alive

Here is what I have learned about hard things. When an intense forest fire burns through a mountain pine grove, something remarkable happens beneath the ash. The aspens were never truly gone. An aspen forest is not a collection of individual trees — it is a single, massive underground root system, ancient and patient, waiting for exactly this moment. The fire doesn’t kill the aspens. It clears the canopy. Into the sudden sunlight, thousands of new shoots push upward — trembling and silver, a sea of new life rising from what looked like devastation.

The aspens were always there. The fire simply gave them room.

The Maroon Bells trail — a glorious symphony of color and calm.

What Nature Teaches Us

When a whale dies, its body sinks slowly to the dark and nutrient-poor ocean floor. The descent takes hours. Scientists call this a whale fall, and what happens next is one of the most extraordinary events in the natural world.

In the lightless deep, where almost nothing survives, a single whale becomes a world. Sharks and hagfish arrive first, stripping the soft tissue, sometimes for months. Then come crustaceans, polychaete worms, and invertebrates, drawn by the nutrients leaching into the sediment. Finally, bacteria colonize the bones, breaking down the lipids locked inside, releasing the same chemical energy that sustains life around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Creatures arrive that exist nowhere else on earth; species whose entire evolutionary existence depends on this one kind of ending.

A single whale can sustain this ecosystem for decades. Sometimes longer. An ending becomes an island of life in the abyss. Creatures that could not survive anywhere else in the ocean find their entire world in the remains of one whale.

Nothing is ever truly lost. It is only becoming.

The Boy Who Learned English from Birds

Hamza Yassin arrived in England from Sudan at eight years old knowing only four words of English. He learned the rest of the language not in a classroom — but by watching David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds. Frame by frame, bird by bird, the world opened up.

He has dyslexia. School was hard. The words moved on the page. But the natural world was always clear to him — vivid, specific, and precise in a way that language never was. At twenty-one, he drove alone to the Scottish Highlands, moved into his car, and spent years studying birds and teaching himself wildlife photography until the work was good enough. He says his dyslexia gave him something no classroom could ever have given him: a near-photographic visual memory for everything he sees in nature.

“Dyslexia is my superpower,” he says. He means it.

He is now one of Britain’s most celebrated wildlife presenters. He wrote a book about birds formatted specifically so dyslexic readers could find their way through it. The boy who learned English from birds gave the birds back to children who learn the way he does.

The classroom that couldn’t hold him was the fire. The birds were the aspen shoot.

Your Child's Roots Run Deeper Than You Know

My daughter has dyslexia. Years ago, we made a significant financial sacrifice to enroll her in a specialized private school for dyslexic children. I thought it would be perfect for her. It ended up being a poor fit. We left — without the money we had spent, but with a clearer sense of what she truly needed.

It hurt. We had given so much — money, trust, hope. But here is what I didn’t know yet: the pivot was the gift.

Clementine enrolled in the local public school down the street from us. It was free. It was, in every way that mattered, exactly right for her. She found her people. She found teachers who saw her and adapted their teaching to meet her needs.

She just finished fifth grade and is at a Level 7 in the Wilson Reading program. If you are raising a child with dyslexia, you know exactly what that number means — the daily effort, the mornings she chose to show up for herself again and again. We are so proud of her.

Two years earlier, she got in the water. She approached it the way she comes to most things — eager but holding back, curious but waiting until she felt safe. At first, she lacked confidence and focus. But her coach met her where she was, accepted her completely, and she blossomed. By the end of the season, she was lane lead, mentoring younger kids, sleeping through the night, and more regulated in ways I hadn't dared hope for.

That transformation was the seed for my new nonprofit. I wanted every child like her to have that experience. So, I began building a swim clinic for children with ADHD and learning differences.

Then it didn't come together as planned. I had to email every parent personally. I had to say the words I didn’t want to say. It broke my heart.

I don’t know yet what this pivot is becoming. I am in the middle of it. The ash is still warm. But I have lived enough of these moments to know — the aspens are already there. Underground. Waiting. The fire has simply given them room.

These children we are raising — the ones who walk through life differently, whose gifts are not always celebrated by the world around them — they are not the exception to this pattern. They are the finest example of it.

Their roots run deep. Deeper than the diagnosis. Deeper than the IEP. Deeper than the test scores and the evaluations and the midnight Google searches. The fire of a world that doesn’t always understand them has not destroyed them.

It is liberating them.

I walked through a grove of Aspens this morning. The birds were singing, and they will sing again tomorrow.

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This post is for informational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice.

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