Something new has coalesced . . .

Spring 2026

For months now, I’ve been asking, “What is mine to do, in this gorgeous ruckus?” “What is needed now that I can offer?” and the idea for my next project finally dropped in — simple and all at once, the way ideas sometimes do — and I’m here to share it with you because your input and participation will give it life.

The Hearthfire Project, a series of online gatherings, hatched with the simple image of a central open fire, a hearth: People gathering around it. Taking inspiration and encouragement from the warmth of the fire and the generative companionship of the circle.

While it felt new, it coalesced from the Ancients.

Hestia — goddess of the hearth in ancient Greece and Rome — was for centuries one of the most revered figures in the pantheon. Not because she was the most politically powerful, or the most dramatic, but because she held the center of civic society. She tended the fire. Her round temples held an eternal flame at their center. She was the one around whom others could gather and be restored and inspired.

Over time, she was eclipsed. The more assertive goddesses — Athena with her strategy, Artemis with her fierce independence — rose to prominence. Hestia quietly receded.

What Hestia represented — the sovereign leader who holds space with warmth and inspiring continuity — is the kind of leadership we need to empower in civic society now. Not instead of strategic brilliance or the ability to be decisive under pressure, but alongside them. A presence and a place that holds true to vision and purpose.

I’ve been thinking about what was lost when Hestia receded into the mysteries. And what can be gained by bringing her narrative forward again.

There’s a quote from Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine that I keep returning to: that in complex systems far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system toward a higher order. I believe that’s true. And I believe a small, deliberate gathering around a real question — a fire tended with care — is just that kind of island.

That is what I want to create with the Hearthfire Project. This brings Hestia’s much-needed narrative forward while creating islands of coherence.

This feels like mine to do . . .

I’m finding delight at the prospect of it.