What do you do when grief drops you into the deep end and you can’t find the shore? Laing Rikkers spent decades as a managing director, co-founder, and executive in corporate America — buttoned up, high-performing, and by her own admission, keeping a little hippie inside her just dying to get out. Then her sister died suddenly in 2019, the pandemic hit, and everything she thought she knew about resilience got tested in the most personal way possible. What followed was a long, tender walk back to herself — through nature, morning pages, botanical poetry, and the hard work of choosing joy when staying broken would have been easier. The result was Morning Leaves (Red Hen Press) — now in its second edition — and a reinvention of how Laing shows up in the world.