Welcome home to Behaiya

For a long time my life existed in separate rooms.

There was my work — counselling, mental health, healing.

There was my volunteer life in the Jewish community.

My spiritual life.

There were the quieter parts of me too — gardening, cooking, caring about the natural world, the people I met through that.

None of these things were untrue.

But they lived beside each other rather than together.

Lately something has been changing.

The lines between these parts of my life have started to soften.

Earth care and community care are no longer separate.

Spiritual life and neighborhood life are meeting each other.

Food, healing, culture, and belonging are starting to speak the same language.

Even my work has shifted in ways I couldn’t have predicted.

After stepping back from counselling when I had my first child, the volunteer work I was doing in the Jewish community slowly grew into something new — a role as a community connector.

In that work I see it every day: food security, environmental care, cultural identity, interfaith relationships, mixed heritage families — all weaving together in the same place, among the same people, trying to build something more whole for the future.

I’ve started to realize that the integration happening around me is also happening inside me.

The phrase “a place where me and things go together” has lived with me for a long time.

It comes from a memory I didn’t fully understand until recently.

When I was in my masters program, I used to go to my grandfather’s home on Friday afternoons.

I would sit with my counselling textbooks while he had the opera playing, and a baseball game on mute.

We cooked Shabbat dinner like that — slowly, in intervals.

We would prepare one thing, then sit and rest.

Read. Listen. Watch.

Then return to the kitchen again.

Sometimes I would listen to him practice piano — something he had only begun learning in his sixties, after a lifetime of carrying that dream quietly.

In the evenings, my family would arrive, and the house would fill.

It never felt rushed.It felt like everything had its place.

He used to tell me I reminded him of Audrey Hepburn, which I carried with me

in the way children carry small, luminous things.

Years later, when I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I heard a line that stayed with me:

“a place where me and things go together.”

I didn’t realize then that I had already known that place.

It was there, in those afternoons.

At his table.

In the quiet rhythm of making a life, one small thing at a time.

I think I am trying to find my way back to that feeling now.

Not just in memory, but in the life I am building.

Behaiya was born from that place.

Bet — mind. Hei — body. Aleph — spirit.

A way of living where the different parts of a life are allowed to meet each other.

Where cooking, ancestry, healing, land, and ritual are not separate interests,

but part of the same story.

Here, I want to explore what it means to live that way —

slowly, with attention, and with care for the people and places that shape us.

If this speaks to something in you —

a desire for a life that feels more whole, more rooted, more integrated — I’m so glad you’re here.

This is Behaiya, this is the beginning.