Over the last seventeen years my career has been a journey through leadership roles in politics and government, non-profit programming, large scale land development, small business entrepreneurship, and academia, all while raising a now grown daughter as a single mother. I attended a contemplative based University in the hope of bringing something more to the mainstream political world I had grown up in, perhaps learn to meditate, and maybe even become a better mother. What I didn’t know is that I would learn to slow down, to listen, to hear, to hold space, and to sit with the complexity of belonging.