Welcome, dear one. With hands on my heart and belly, and a deep breath in, let me introduce myself.

My name is Kare Parker. I’m a walking miracle writing from my nest high above the salmon-colored walls of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; where ringtails steal bananas from my kitchen table and hummingbirds answer prayers by landing on outstretched fingers. This hillside perch feels like that Maine island King described, the kind of inaccessible place where stories insist on being born. At the moment, the insisting is coming from: my second YA Fantasy (a trilogy), a memoir, and this.

For eleven years, the Wasatch and Oquirrh mountains cradled me through Lyme disease. A time that taught me to live in the space between breathing and not breathing, between limitation and possibility. I Bum bumped downstairs to feed myself then crawled back up, and took countless hot baths to ease the fire pain. Mount Timponogos was a daily presence outside my bedroom window. From that perch I watched a decade of seasons come and go.

Chronic illness became my unwilling monastery, forcing the kind of stillness that reveals what actually matters, even when one’s children need to wrap the Christmas gifts. In 2018, ozone treatments killed the spirochetes that had colonized my body, returning me to the land of the living; though, I still choose to live slowly, protecting the life force I nearly lost.

Somehow the years have alchemized into words that want to be shared. And so, I write about the mysticism hidden in ordinary moments, the healing that happens in liminal spaces, the secondary trauma experienced by those who stand by helpless, as the cross-carrier shoulders the burden mostly alone — and the particular wisdom available to those who have died twice and learned to live fully. (Don’t ask. Never talked about it. Eventually I will tell the tale.)

My work explores how exile can become homecoming, how breakdown becomes breakthrough, and how the spaces between breaths hold everything we need for transformation.

Born on the spring equinox, two weeks in an incubator away from my mother’s warmth, I’ve spent six decades learning the difference between separation and authentic connection.

Partnerships taught me that seeking love outside myself is self erasure. Exile taught me love needs no seeking. It is ever present within and without myself. It is everywhere.

I’m a certified aromatherapist whose thesis explored how aromatic compounds affect the limbic brain. The olfactory system is unique. It is the only sense that bypasses the brain’s filtering system to connect directly to our emotional and memory centers. This knowledge served me well after a life-altering event.

My studies in trauma, aromatic medicine’s and Dr. Bessel van Der Kolk’s work had prepared me to be my own advocate. Within days I began immediate EMDR therapy. It transformed what I had witnessed into just another film I’d seen, proving that knowledge plus fierce self-care can protect the nervous system from carrying what isn’t ours. Still, each anniversary arrives with foxhole memories and I have to consciously hold myself through the knowing my soul carries.

Creating became my conscious choice to rewire trauma’s grip on my mind. Today, six years later, I want to put my arm around the shoulder of anyone who has been where I was to say, “Create. Doodle to wordless music. Dance and move at home. It will transform you, because creativity bypasses the wounded mind and speaks directly to the healing body.” I know because I live it. I breathe it.

Between This Breath began as sacred letters to kindred spirits who understand that healing rarely follows medical timelines, that transformation happens in spirals rather than straight lines, and that the most important conversations often occur without words — between species, between worlds, between the inhale of experience and the exhale of understanding.

Here you’ll find essays that range from delightful diversions about what Totoro teaches us about wonder, to pregnant pauses exploring the grammar of grief, to gentle rebellions about reclaiming feminine power after centuries of exile.

Some pieces flow like morning meditations, others pulse like midnight musings. All are written in the spaces between breaths, where healing lives. Some of them are written with guffawing laughter.

As a School Library Journal star-reviewed author, I’m currently working on a continuation of a YA fantasy series for children who need moments of pause and wonder mixed with fairy tale gruesomeness; stories that might be for them what Totoro has been for my family.

Why? Because delight is not luxury. It’s life support for souls learning to be alive again.

Whether you’re here for playful meditations or profound explorations, for stories of miraculous healing or honest (if not awkward) reckonings with limitation, you’ve found your way to the space between breaths where all transformation lives.

Welcome to the conversation that never ends - not in words but in the wordless space where healing happens, where trauma releases itself like morning mist, where broken wings learn to fly again.

Be still between this wondrous breath, dear one. Be at peace.

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