Somehow another month has slipped by, and honestly I dont know if I am amazed or just freaked out with how time moves the way it does. November was…a lot. We opened the month with a Día de los Muertos cleanup, taking the time to reflect on grief. Looking back it feels like it was preparation for a month that carried its own layers of loss, challenge, and a lot of emotion.
If you’ve been here for a while, you know about Creative Tides. It was Valentine’s weekend of 2020 when it launched. A social-impact events business with a simple and meaningful vision: to pace closely alongside people in their planning, to create beautiful and intentional moments, and to create profit to generate impact through The Giving Gifts. The hope was that impact could stretch beyond one day, that meaning could go long beyond the day after the event was over.
And then the world shut down. The 24 weddings booked in two weeks were refunded. It was a rough beginning. Over the last five years, Creative Tides shifted, reshaped, and grew in unexpected ways. In the last two years, Megan, truly one of the sweetest humans, took on weddings in San Diego. Getting to walk with her, watch her love people well, and see the model of a business feeding a nonprofit come to life has been such a gift.
So many of you were part of that story…cheering, buying candles, showing up at pop-ups, trusting us with your weddings, some of you got to experience Megan firsthand. Creative Tides lived because people believed.
Which makes this next part challenging to say: going into 2026, I’ve decided to place Creative Tides on pause. It’s bittersweet, and it feels like the best step right now. In making that decision, I’ve been looking back with so much gratitude at the vision, the growth, the risks, the lessons and somehow, that reflection has made me hopeful for what might be next.
If you know me, you know I’ve never really done anything by “the book”. From starting Creative Tides and The Giving Gifts, to moving out of the U.S., to my education and upbringing, nothing about my life has been all that traditional. I’ve learned a lot the hard way an every shift has carved out deeper compassion, more consideration, more understanding and for that, I’m thankful.
If I’m honest, November was a reflective month. Pausing Creative Tides has opened up a flood of questions:
Why am I doing what I do?
What is The Giving Gifts becoming?
Why Ensenada?
What about Shellebrate?
What about the book I’m writing?
How long?
Does it matter?
They’re big questions and uncomfortably they don’t really have immediate answers.
So I’m reminding myself:
May I not forget how far I’ve come.
May I honor the small ways I’ve grown.
May I remember that every shift, every step, every pivot is progress.
As we move into a week centered around thankfulness, I just want to share a few thoughtsI have been holding. Gratitude doesn’t have to wait for clarity. Thankfulness doesn’t need everything to make sense or feel complete. I think the beauty of gratitude is the way it shows up right in the middle of the messiness, the questions, the things we don’t share about, the things we’re still trying to understand.
So may we give ourselves permission to be grateful in the complexity, in the in-between, in the falling apart, in the sickness, in the heath, in the financial insecurities, in the freedoms, in the becoming and the unbecoming and the re-becoming.
