What do you do when the people you're caring for can't give you certainty that you're doing it right?

Lynn Casteel Harper—minister, chaplain, and author of On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear—spent years with people living with dementia. Not trying to fix them or bring them back, but learning to read a different kind of language: silence that isn't empty, presence that doesn't require words, companionship that survives the loss of recognition.

This conversation is about what she learned in that work—about gentleness as a form of power rather than weakness, about staying present when certainty isn't available, and about what happens when you stop trying to eliminate uncertainty and start learning from it instead.

We talk about Hannah Arendt's distinction between power and violence, the Biosphere 2 trees that couldn't grow without wind, why she's writing "ungently" about gentleness, and the question that keeps coming up in these conversations: what are you loyal to that you didn't choose?

If achievement has brought you to questions your current framework can't answer, this might be for you.