PERSONAL GROWTH by Lorin Beller The dream that was already drawn On spiritual leadership, trusting what keeps calling, and how my daughter’s childhood drawing predicted our ranch When I was twelve-years-old, my family lived on 120 acres in Upstate New York. We had five horses, open trails, and the kind of quiet that lets a child think. Because my siblings were on a different school schedule, the barn and the land became my world. Every day, I rode alone to the same open field — to a wide circle I had worn into the earth around a large tree. An hour, sometimes more. That was my place. My quiet place. My little slice of heaven. I didn’t have a name for what I was doing then. I only knew that it restored me. One evening, a family friend who had been walking our property came in for dinner and said, “I have a peculiar question. There’s a spot down by one of the trails — an opening with a perfect circle worn into it. Where did that come from?” I knew immediately. “That’s where I ride. I created that circle.” He paused and smiled. “Oh… that’s a Magic Circle.” To me — it truly was. Spirituality is the ability to listen — to what’s true, to what keeps calling, to what shows up again and again. Leadership is the courage to act on what you hear. Fast forward to 2017. That year arrived at the end of a four-year divorce — one that was not quiet, not clean, and not kind. I became a single mother in the truest sense: making impossible decisions, advocating relentlessly, and holding my daughter’s life together while my own felt shaky. Strength became my default, even when it cost me joy. My daughter was in fifth grade. Every day at lunch, instead of running on the playground, she and a friend would sit together and draw their dream worlds. She was eleven-years-old and quietly struggling — shuttling between two homes, carrying far more than she had words for. Like so many children, she had learned how to be brave on the outside while hurting on the inside. Drawing became her Magic Circle. A place to rest. To imagine. To feel safe. Not long after, she was misdiagnosed with an eating disorder and spent months in a behavioral health hospital. I was labeled “the crazy mom” because I refused to accept a diagnosis that didn’t match what I was witnessing in my own child. I was barred from the hospital for two weeks as a behavioral incentive for her to eat. I cannot overstate what those two weeks did to me. The truth finally emerged: she had a large pituitary brain tumor. Within twenty minutes of receiving the correct medication — replacing the hormones her body had been missing — her spark came back. Her eyes changed. Her laughter returned. I watched my child come back to herself. It is a moment I will never forget. That season left me battle-weary, but it also sharpened something in me: the ability to trust my intuition, to see clearly, and to stand firm even when standing alone. I had been taught, in the most visceral way, that what we sense matters — and that secondguessing it has a cost. Years later, my daughter graduated high school and came to me with a confession: college didn’t feel right. She had a vision instead. She wanted to work on a horse ranch, earn her certification in equine behavior, and build an equine-human partnership business. She was ready to step into something that was hers. I was imagining a tiny beach house in San Diego. She was imagining land. We were standing at the edge of a new chapter, 102 enterprising Women
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