Sabrina Giacalone

Category: Letters From the Netherwood

  • What Faith Feels Like

    Faith disarms fear by making it visible and choosing trust anyways.

    My husband left yesterday.

    He is in the military and has been sent away for six months, something we had no say in. Last night was my first night without him since our wedding, and I’m existing in a strange space right now.

    There is a version of faith I used to think that I understood. The kind where everything is stable at home, life is predictable, and each day has a routine way about it that makes it predictable and easy to explain. This is not a normal day for me, and I am uncovering that there is another kind of faith. It is the faith you learn when everything looks the same but feels no different. When the day is full of children and motion to keep your mind busy and your heart full…then the quiet of night arrives, and the stillness is deafening.

    I am learning that when your body is afraid, small physical reminders become a tether. A shirt that still carries his scent, waking on his side of the bed, choosing to use his favorite mug for my morning coffee. Ordinary objects, yes, but also enormous anchors.

    Because fear is loud, and if I am honest, it knows my name.

    I am learning that faith doesn’t pretend that fear is not there. Faith names it. Looks it in the face. And refuses to let it drive. Because when we lean into trust, fear is disarmed.

    This is the kind of faith I am writing about this week. The kind that helps us discern what is true so we can disarm our fears.

    Read the full letter on Substack: What Faith Feels Like to Me

    Yours in ink,

    Sabrina

  • Navigating Shadows: Finding Strength in Connection

    Navigating Shadows: Finding Strength in Connection

    Sometimes the way out of the shadows is not through force, but choosing to move toward the light together.

    Two sisters holding hands on a misty forest path, walking beside a pale-tailed fox.
    Strength through togetherness.

    Sometimes it is easy to mistake the shadows for truth—especially when you’ve been walking in them for so long.

    Voices echo.

    Shapes distort.

    And what is real can begin to feel uncertain.

    This week’s Letter to the Netherwood is about togetherness. As practice. As a form of discernment. As a way back to truth when fear starts inventing endings in the silence.

    In Sera, Lily & The Fox Prince, Sera and Lily experience this again and again. The world shifts, the forest disguises itself, and doubt tries to blur what they know is real. But the turning point isn’t the absence of fear, nor is it a map.

    It is the decision to stay connected.

    There is a kind of strength that rises from standing beside one another, through the quiet presence of someone who does not turn away. Togetherness doesn’t always feel comforting. Sometimes it is simply proximity while your mind tries to spiral.

    But light returns differently when it is shared.

    It steadies.
    It clarifies.
    It reminds us what is real.

    If you’ve been walking through something heavy—if the shadows feel convincing, if your mind keeps trying to invent endings—this letter is a gentle invitation:

    Find one person. Reach. Not to be rescued, but to be accompanied.

    Where have you been trying to walk alone, and what would it look like to reach for togetherness this week as a way back to truth?

    Read the full letter on Substack: Strength Through Togetherness

    Yours in ink,

    Sabrina

  • Exploring the Depths of Love Beyond Romance

    Exploring the Depths of Love Beyond Romance

    A lantern for the path

    Love is everywhere in our culture—and most often, it’s framed as romance.

    Walk into any bookstore and you can feel it on the shelves. Story after story that teaches us, love is the bond between two lovers, the cinematic kind that makes your heart ache, and your tears spill over. And trust me, I’m not above a good romance.

    But love is larger than that.

    Ornate hanging lantern with a glowing heart-shaped center lighting a dark forest path, with fireflies and purple flowers.
    A lantern for the path. Love is the light that does not fail.

    The kind of love I write into Sera, Lily & The Fox Prince is more fundamental, more shared, more reverent. It’s the love carried in a child’s mind through a parent’s voice. The love between siblings when one of them is hurting and the other doesn’t flinch. The love between friends who stay steady in the hard moment. The love that returns home again—not with perfection, but with choice.

    In the Netherwood, love isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s practical. Attentive. A small act done with care that becomes shelter simply because of the hands that offered it.

    That’s why this week’s Lantern Note is simple:

    Not every bright thing is light.
    Even a beautiful voice can mislead.
    Not all things are true as they appear.

    Love is what remains when the forest grows quiet.
    Love is the light that does not fail.

    If you’d like to read the full Letters from the Netherwood letter with quotes from the book and a deeper reflection on the kinds of love that hold us, you can find it here:

    📜 Read the full letter on Substack: The Shape of Love

    What kind of love are you carrying this week?
    And what is one small way you can intentionally practice it today?

    Yours in ink,
    Sabrina Giacalone

  • The Unsung Cost of Our Society

    The Unsung Cost of Our Society

    The choice between providing and being present, and the family bond we build in the hours we’re given.

    Storybook-style painting of a mother and three children sitting together in a glowing forest clearing, symbolizing family bonds and quiet moments of wonder in the spirit of the Netherwood.

    Familial bonds are one of the core themes woven through Sera, Lily & The Fox Prince—not only between the two sisters, but through their mother, too. Even in the dark Netherwood, she is with them. In the lessons she taught. In the boundaries she held with gentleness. In the internal voice she helped shape inside her daughters.

    I wrote that relationship the way I hope to shape my own children.

    But I haven’t always been this version of myself.

    I became a mother at seventeen—young, independent, still wrapped up in the shallow worries of high school, and then suddenly confronted with a sacred new reality: someone else needed me. It brought me back to my center. It taught me what love asks of us.

    And then life demanded trade-offs.

    In the years that followed—through instability, a rocky first marriage, and the weight of being the provider—I entered the workforce and slowly fell prey to the corporate machine. Long days. Early drop-offs. Late pickups. Minutes together in the morning. An hour at night. Weekends filled with adventures meant to “make up for it.”

    But the truth is: when you’re gone that much, other people begin shaping your children’s inner world more than you do.

    The pandemic brought us home—and it showed me, with aching clarity, what presence actually does. It gave me the chance to relearn my children, to rebuild connection in the daily, and to rewrite the voices in their heads with kindness, steadiness, and truth.

    This week’s full Letters from the Netherwood letter goes deeper into that story—how familial bonds are built, what absence costs, and why so many parents are forced to choose between providing and being present.

    📜 Read the full letter on Substack: Unsung Cost of Our Current Society

    Question for you: Have you ever had to choose between providing and being present—and what’s one small way you protect your family bond this week inside the life you actually have?

    Content note: the full letter includes references to relational instability and abuse. Please read gently.

  • A Precipice of Moral Conscience

    A Precipice of Moral Conscience

    The future is unwritten, and each of us holds an author’s quill.

    We are at a moment of great moral conscience and consequence.

    Collectively, we stand at a precipice. A fracture. A divide. Somewhere between where we’ve been living for decades and where we will go from here. The next chapter is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we are choosing—decision by decision, day by day—with our hands still on the pen.

    And I can’t stop thinking about the contradiction we are sold.

    We’re told that one little choice doesn’t matter, that one person cannot shape the future. Yet in this same reality, we are also sold the opposite lie—that one person can single-handedly change the trajectory of the world order.

    Both cannot be true.

    The moments we choose matter. They shape our own world first, and then the interconnected world of our relationships, our neighborhoods, our communities. Most of the time, those ripples travel farther than we ever get to witness.

    This weekend has made that truth feel painfully visible. Reports from Tehran describe fuel depots struck and burning, toxic smoke blanketing the city, and rain turning black and acidic as soot and chemicals fall back down.


    It is a reminder that our headlines are not abstract. They land on bodies. On lungs. On children. On the air.

    Which brings me back to the point:

    Change starts small, and in the quiet places no one sees. In the moments where you choose to be intentional instead of automated.

    Read the full letter on Substack: Letters From the Netherwood: A Precipice of Moral Conscience

    If you feel called to answer, what is one small, intentional choice you will make this week that moves the world towards good?

    Yours in Ink,

    Sabrina Giacalone

  • Navigating Trust and Trauma in Relationships

    Navigating Trust and Trauma in Relationships

    An Excerpt from Letters from the Netherwood

    Trust is one of the deepest themes woven into Sera, Lily, & The Fox Prince. Not as a soft idea, but as a backbone. As an invisible thread that holds when fear gets loud, and doubt tries to speak in a voice that sounds like your own.

    I didn’t realize how personal that theme was for me in my youth through my early twenties.

    There was a season in my life when I trusted with all of myself—open, full-bodied trust that didn’t keep a tally. And then, little by little, trust began to fracture. My parents divorced but remained close for a time… until a new influence entered the picture and relationships shifted in ways that changed the shape of my world. Later, in my early twenties, I found myself in a marriage where self-sacrifice was not romance—it was survival. If you want more of that context, it lives in my Wild-hearted Bravery letter.

    After enough breaks, I developed certain “truths” that were really just protection in disguise:

    Everyone will let me down eventually.
    Trust nobody.
    Enjoy it while you can… until the other shoe drops.

    That “other shoe” became an inevitability I carried—armor that felt like wisdom.

    But therapy, time, and healing love have taught me something different: trust can be rebuilt. Not blindly. Not perfectly. But humanly—through repair, understanding, and the steady proof of someone who continues to show up.

    This is the fervent kind of trust I wrote into the heart of the Netherwood. It is the kind that holds even when fear arrives wearing a familiar face.

    Read the full letter on Substack: Letters from the Netherwood → https://substack.com/home/post/p-189641086?source=queue

    Content note: the full letter includes references to divorce dynamics, relational trauma, and emotional abuse. Please read gently.