Let's begin where we ought to begin.

I.

There is a weight to founding something. Some may look at the romantic notion of creation—the lightning bolt of inspiration, the triumphant ribbon-cutting. No, it’s really the slow archaeology of building community from nothing. A careful excavation of shared purpose.

The patient architecture of belonging.

I think of Virginia Woolf’s lock on the door, the simple mechanism granting “the power to think independently.” But what of the keys? Who holds them, and what happens when they change the locks?

Founding requires a certain kind of loneliness first. You must be comfortable existing in the void where nothing yet is, where the only blueprint lives in your mind. You become intimate with emptiness, start going on dates with the lack, learning to trust that others will eventually inhabit the spaces you’ve sketched in air.

II.

Leadership is not about being indispensable. It is about making yourself dispensable in the most essential way. I carry Philosophy like a mantra. A prayer repeated during sleepless nights when the weight of responsibility felt heavier than winter snow on prairie rooftops. The good leader builds systems stronger than personality and creates culture that outlives ego.

There’s a paradox in obsolescence by design. When you succeed in making something larger than yourself, you discover the peculiar grief of watching it grow beyond your reach. You witness a child learn to walk and pride and loss braid together in the chest, relief and abandonment occupying the same breath.

III.

I watched the summer grass sway in the wind from my basement window. I had made what I thought was a simple observation. A question posed in daylight, posted publicly as questions should be in transparent organizations.

In retrospect, I see how those eight words contained everything—the founder’s assumption of perpetual belonging, the child’s bewilderment at suddenly changed rules. The naïveté of believing good faith would be met with good faith.

IV.

The thing about bridges is that they can be crossed from either direction, or burned from either end. What followed was a coordination I hadn’t anticipated—separate conversations all arriving within hours of each other like synchronized swimmers. The timing felt choreographed, though I was assured it was merely coincidence.

Coincidence: from the Latin con (together) and cadere (to fall). Things falling together. The universe arranging itself into patterns we tell ourselves are accidental. I think of the magpies outside my window in Killarney, how they move in murmurations—appearing chaotic until you realize the underlying intelligence, the way information travels through the flock faster than any individual bird can fly.

V.

What is peacekeeping? Is it the slow accumulation of small violences?

In the conversations that followed, I learned about grievances held like pressed flowers between book pages—preserved, dated, catalogued. Mistakes. The accumulation of small failures into large indictments. I wanted to say: But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t we talk?

Instead, there is the labour of education, how exhausting it is to constantly explain harm to those who cause it. How the wounded should not be responsible for healing their wounders. These are true things. They are also incomplete things.

VI.

There is a difference between accountability and annihilation. Between consequences and exile. Between growth and erasure. I sit with this distinction like a stone in my shoe—constant, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore. In the rush toward justice, where does mercy live? In the urgency of protection, where does redemption dwell?

The medicine wheel teaches about balance—the dynamic equilibrium of seasons turning, of life and death and rebirth cycling endlessly. East and west, north and south, each direction holding its own gifts and challenges.

But what happens when the wheel stops turning? When growth requires excision? Sacred geometry demands amputation.

VII.

The price of founding is that you can never really leave. Even in departure, the founder remains. In the systems you built, the culture you seeded, the people you brought together. Your ghost walks through every decision, your DNA codes every policy. You are both memory and cautionary tale, origin story and warning.

I think of the cottonwoods along the Bow River, how they drop their seeds on tiny parachutes each spring. Millions of white tufts drifting on the wind, most destined to find inhospitable ground. But a few—just a few—take root in places they’ve never seen, become forests in foreign soil.

The parent tree cannot control where the seeds land, cannot guarantee their success, cannot even witness their growing. It can only trust in the releasing, in the hope that somewhere, something beautiful will bloom from what it gave away.

VIII.

What if we are all doing our best with the light we have available?

This is the hardest lesson, the one that asks everything of ego and offers nothing to pride. To consider that those who wounded you might also be wounded. That those who excluded you might also feel excluded. That the systems that failed you might be failing everyone, just in different ways.

Excuse? Complexity. Absolution? Recognition. To recognize that hurt people hurt people and fear makes us smaller than we intend to be.

Love and justice sometimes pull in opposite directions.

IX.

In my dreams now, I return to a building that no longer exists. The floors are familiar—that distinct shade of grey-speckled industrial tile unique to schools. The hallways branch like rivulets, and in the courtyard, a circle of people I once called family speak in languages I can no longer understand.

I wake knowing that some distances cannot be bridged, some trust cannot be rebuilt, some stories have only one ending. But also knowing that creation continues, that other hands are planting seeds, that the architecture of belonging adapts to accommodate new blueprints. The measure of a founder is not in permanence but in propagation. Not in being remembered, but in making remembering unnecessary.

X.

Autumn comes to Calgary like forgiveness—slowly at first, then all at once. The ice starting to form on the rivers with sounds like breaking glass, like breaking hearts, like breaking free. New growth pushes through old root systems. The medicine wheel turns. The work continues without me, because of me, despite me.

You succeed to the degree that you become unnecessary. You matter most when you matter least. The bittersweet mathematics of legacy.

And in that paradox—in the exquisite, terrible success—there is a kind of peace. Not the peace of resolution, but the peace of release. Not the peace of understanding, but the peace of accepting what cannot be understood. The architecture of belonging was never about the architect. It was always about the building, and the building endures.

Sometimes the bridges we burn light the way for others to build better ones.

Originally posted here.