Sabrina Giacalone

Tag: healing

  • 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.