Tears In The Sand and Other Healing Synchronicities

The other day I was photographing a family session, and in the middle of the usual small talk, the mom mentioned that she’s a therapist. Not just any therapist — she specializes in surrogacy counseling.

I froze for a second. Because if you know my story, you know I had a surrogate. You know that she developed an infection, went into labor too early, and delivered my twin babies before they had a real chance at life. They didn’t survive.

Hearing this woman say she works in that same world cracked something open in me. I told her my story, the short version. And she told me that she’s walked alongside families through every imaginable outcome — the miracles, the heartbreaks, the unthinkable. She’s sat with parents in those raw edges where life and loss collide.

It hit me how rare it is to meet someone with that kind of perspective. Someone who doesn’t just know surrogacy in theory, but who has witnessed the way grief and hope weave themselves together. Someone who might have been a lifeline for me in those early days when I was lost and desperate for any handhold.

But I didn’t find her then. I stumbled my way through the long, messy path of grief. And eventually, I found sound healing.

In those early days, though, something else began happening. Little miracles started showing up. I noticed 11:11 on the clock, every day, twice a day. I saw a perfect double rainbow outside the hospital the day we left without our babies. Signs and synchronicities started stringing themselves across my life like breadcrumbs.

One day, when I was deepest in my grief, my friend Nancy picked me up and took me to the beach in Malibu. It was February, cold and windy, but if you stayed still in the sunlight it was warm enough to soften your bones. My back had been aching constantly — I think from the weight of my broken heart — so I stretched out in the sand, folded my arms across my face, and let myself cry quietly. I didn’t want Nancy to hear me.

And then I felt it — the tiniest, softest tongue brushing my tear-stained cheek. I lifted my head and saw a little puppy, small and perfect, licking the salt from my tears. A little girl had brought the puppy to the beach, and somehow it found its way to me at the exact moment I needed it. I stopped crying. I smiled. I felt love arrive in the gentlest form possible.

Moments like that became my lifeline. The rainbow. The puppy. The warmth of the sun. My friend who showed up when I couldn’t carry myself. The universe was stitching me back together, one unexpected kindness at a time.

That’s what I want my sound healing to be for other people. A soft, surprising kind of love that arrives when you’re not sure you can go on. The way a puppy once found me in the sand. The way the bowls now find the people who are meant to sit with them.

Different tools. Same thread.