Connection: Find the Grounding Within Ourselves
What We Are Exploring This Month
Exploring how connection grounds the nervous system, turns empathy into action, and reminds us that even ordinary people can create meaningful change.
Connection: The Grounding Within Ourselves
As you know, my books often explore the nervous system — understanding our emotions, sitting with difficult moments, offering ourselves a kind pause, and finding a way through.
I had plans for future stories:
a wildebeest and zebra navigating friendship and survival together, a terrapin struggling to let go of old scutes, and a bird who feels safest staying inside her egg. (After all, what if the world outside isn’t better than the comfort of what we already know?)
I still look forward to writing those books.
But life interrupted my plans in the most unexpected way.
It started with a decision to support a Ukrainian educator with conversational English throughENGin. As a very normal person without great power or means, I thought maybe I could do one small thing.
ENGin connected me with Tetiana, who quickly became a friend.
We talked like most friends do — about our children, food we love to cook (and eat), education, projects, frustrations, and hopes for students. But alongside those ordinary conversations were realities I could barely comprehend: deciding when students needed to move underground to learn, recognizing the difference between drones and missiles by sound, and attending funerals — sometimes for a student’s father, sometimes for a former student.
Listening to her realities of living in a cruel war sent my nervous system spinning. At times, I felt my head might explode.
I remember thinking:
“You cannot fix this, Kelley. The only thing you can do is be with her.”
Be with her as she cared for frightened students and exhausted staff members.
Be with her as she worried about her mother’s health, her adult children, and especially her granddaughter Sophia.
Be with her in the overwhelming fear that children could simply disappear into war.
And over and over, I asked myself:
“What can a normal person do?”
I am an over-functioner when stress rises beyond what I can contain; my reactive self still has a ways to go (lots of deep breaths). So eventually, somewhere in the middle of all those conversations, I blurted out:
“What if we write a book for kids?”
Maybe it could be a story about traveling to Ukraine — a place many of us can no longer safely visit. Maybe it could be about curiosity, connection, and adventure. Maybe we could use the proceeds to support students and educators. Even if it only raised enough money for pencils, at least it would be something.
That pause became a shift.
As Tetiana and I worked on Seeds of the Sun, I realized something unexpected: my nervous system was settling.
The empathy was becoming actionable empathy.
At the time I was not thinking about my nervous system, but I could feel something changing in me. Without even realizing it, I had not stepped away from emotional regulation work at all. I had simply walked into another part of it — the part where connection itself becomes grounding.
Research now confirms what many of us intuitively feel:
Human beings are wired for co-regulation. Calm, safe connection helps synchronize heart rate, breathing, and emotional state.
Genuine connection can deactivate neural pathways associated with fear and defensiveness.
Social connection activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the body’s “rest, heal, and repair” response.
Long-term connection supports cognitive, emotional, and even immune health.
In other words:
connection helps us stay human.
What began as simply “being with” someone eventually became action. And eventually, that connection spread beyond us. Students in Michigan and Ukraine began asking each other questions, sharing stories, and discovering how much they had in common.
If you want to see that journey unfold, I recently created a YouTube playlist sharing the Seeds of the Sun: How Connection Grew — from classroom conversations between students in Michigan and Ukraine to cultural events, podcasts, and community support.
And if you skip to the end, you’ll see that hopes for pencils and blankets has grown into:
10 computers
a 3D printer used for learning and drone repair parts
ongoing conversations about a router and mesh network to support education during war
The wildebeest, zebra, terrapin, and little bird waiting inside the egg will still have their stories someday.
But this journey reminded me that emotional regulation is not always about calming ourselves in isolation. Sometimes it is about staying connected enough to move from overwhelm into meaningful action.
The research — or perhaps the “me-search” — keeps teaching me that if we allow flexibility in our lives, connection may lead us somewhere we never expected.
And sometimes that journey changes us.
A Summer Reading Invitation
In celebration of this project and the communities who helped support it, I wanted to try something simple this summer:
If you purchase one of my books, let me know which local library, classroom, or Little Free Library you would like to support — and I will donate a copy as well to support summer reading.
I’ll even include a special note inside the donated copy.
Because stories create connection.
And connection matters.
Thank you,
Kelley
Watch the Playlist: I gathered parts of this journey into a YouTube playlist.
Listen to the Podcast: Children don’t begin with division — they begin with curiosity. Available on Spotify made possible through the Human Restoration Project. You can hear some of Tetiana’s students answering questions from 6th graders in Muskegon, MI: