Where It All Began: My Father, My Daughter, and the Divine Meadows

In 2011, while I was pregnant with my first daughter, my father suffered a stroke just a few months before my due date. It was a grief I had never prepared for, arriving at a moment that was supposed to be one of the most joyful of my life.

My father was the one who taught me to love the outdoors. He was a man with an extraordinary zest for life, the kind that was contagious the moment you were near him. He loved to explore, to road trip, to travel, to seek out new experiences. He moved through the world with a curiosity and a brightness that I have spent my whole life trying to carry forward.

Some of my most treasured memories are the simplest ones. Waking up before sunrise to take long walks and runs along the beach together, pushing until the heat became too much, then running straight into the ocean to cool off. Just the two of us and the world waking up around us.

After his stroke, my father spent over a month in the hospital in an induced coma. He never returned to his normal state. And while he was lying in that hospital bed, I gave birth to my firstborn, Layal.

I still do not fully understand how I held it together during that time. I believe that when God takes something away from us, He replaces it with something else, and that is what kept me standing. As I was losing my father, I was simultaneously becoming a mother. Two of the most profound things a person can experience, arriving at the same moment, pulling in opposite directions.

In the weeks that followed, the sadness caught up with me all at once. I was depressed, hormonal, and exhausted in every sense of the word. I had never felt more alone, even with a beautiful newborn in my arms and a deeply supportive husband beside me. Something in me was breaking.

When my daughter was one week old, I knew I had to do something. I did not know what. I just knew I needed to get in my car and go somewhere to breathe, to think, to let my emotions exist somewhere outside of the walls of the house. So I did. I drove from San Jose to Point Reyes, California.

I arrived around sunset and found the first ranger I could. I had never hiked alone before in my life, let alone with a three-week-old strapped to my chest. I asked him where I could do a short hike. He said, "Keep walking until you reach the Divine Meadows." I asked him how I would know when I had arrived. He smiled and said, "Trust me. You will know."

So I walked. The air was cold and crisp. The trail was quiet, nearly empty, most hikers already heading home for the evening. The fear of being alone and the weight of everything I had been carrying for months began to surface with each step. The overwhelm. The loneliness. The sadness. The helplessness. It all came with me onto that trail.

And then, slowly, something began to shift. With each step, I started to feel something else rising alongside the grief. Gratitude. I looked at the trees. I looked at my daughter sleeping against my chest. I thought about my health, about the air filling my lungs, about the extraordinary beauty surrounding me in every direction. About how much I had, even in the middle of so much loss.

The beauty overwhelmed me completely. In that moment, one thought rose above everything else: how can you be in a place like this and not be grateful? How can you stand in the middle of all this and not believe that something greater is watching over us, holding us, answering us in ways we do not always recognize?

That was the Divine Meadows. And the ranger was right. I knew.

In that moment, something became clear to me that has never left. This is my calling. The outdoors is where I heal, where I thrive, where I breathe, where I feel fully alive and at peace. It is the place my father first brought me, and it is the place I keep returning to whenever life asks more of me than I think I have to give.

It is also the place I want my children to know. Not just as a backdrop for adventure, but as a sanctuary. A place to feel small in the most liberating way. A place where gratitude comes naturally, and where something much bigger than any of us is impossible to ignore.

This is why I do what I do. This is where it all began.