Web Weaving Free Space

Make your own connetions and weave your webs here...

When people understand the story of how I lived between cultures, it becomes easier to see why the way I ask for help, offer help, and build relationships looks unfamiliar in a Canadian context. The reciprocal model I use now is not a recent invention or a strategy. It grew naturally out of the systems I lived in for twenty years and the ways I learned to survive without hierarchy, without shame, and without the belief that life must be handled alone. It is simply the structure that makes the most sense for the kind of life I have lived.

At its core, my approach is based on two principles. I only ask someone for help if the task aligns with their strengths and brings them some ease or satisfaction, and I only ask when I know I have something meaningful I can offer in return, whether now or later.…

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it really means that I lived in Korea for twenty years. People hear that number and nod, but I don’t think anyone, including me, truly understood the weight of it until recently. Twenty years is not travel. It is not a phase. It is an entire adult life. It’s long enough that people I knew here had newborns when I left, and those children are adults now. It’s long enough for the place you lived to shape your instincts, your expectations, and the way you understand relationships. I didn’t just live abroad. I grew up there in every way that matters.

What I absorbed in Korea was not “Korean values” in the cultural sense that locals live them. I didn’t assimilate. I observed, worked, translated, adapted, and built my own frameworks within the structure of that society. What stayed with me were the…