Up: [[Journeys]] Created: 2025-01-12 I burned out and retired early from a life of teaching, writing, and workshop facilitation. If you want the whole story, I had a 5 minute video made called [Joining the Club of the Living Dead](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsiLS64nq4U) I’d written and traditionally published a lot of books. When I got over the worst of the burnout, my thoughts went immediately to writing another book but the only thing I knew was that it wouldn’t be about education. I decided to explore some options by writing a blog. I had been playing around with some magnetic poetry tiles. I glanced at the magnet board one day and noticed that the words ‘profound’ and ‘journey’ had ended up side by side. That gave me not only the name of my blog, but confirmation of my theme. I was 55 when I retired (I’m 65 now if you’re reading this before September 2025), so I’m in life’s third and final act. I had spent close to half a century completely devoted to my [[Calling]]. That had ended and I had no idea what was next. I just knew that I wanted and needed the journey to be profound, meaning rich with deep insights into myself and some areas of interest that I’d never had time to pursue. I wrote a blog post every week for three years, but I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable, to share any of the confusion and uncertainty I was feeling. My posts were, for the most part, heavily researched, well-written little factoids, aka soulless. I took the site down a few years ago. ![[Karen Headshot.jpeg|400]]