In this mid-month reflection, Katherine shares a deeply personal experience from a friend's celebration of life — a gathering that revealed what real community looks like when it has been intentionally nurtured over decades.

Drawing from the work of Peter Block and his book Community: The Structure of Belonging, this episode explores how belonging is built through invitation, small gatherings, shared ownership, and love.

This was not just a memorial. It was a living ecosystem.

Women from college days. Women from work life. Neighbors. Mothers. Children who will now grow up together because their mothers loved well.

Katherine reflects on creative community — how women weave connection through crisis, how leadership often looks like hospitality, and how the spirit of one woman continues through the people she gathered.

She also reflects on how this friend was one of Mikelle's first roommates, and how over time she has found herself a kind of surrogate mom to many of the young women who orbit Mikelle's life — women who are now carrying the torch of thoughtful, inclusive leadership into the next generation.

Community is not a program. It is an act of creation. And creativity may be our most powerful form of resistance in uncertain times.