Introducing Conduit Coaching.
On birthing a business.
Dear reader,
Thank you for your patience with my writing. I’ve been here, conditioning the soil with all that’s decomposed, unconditioning old habits of excessive screen time, output, and all that no longer serves. I’ve been here, the lengthening daylight cracking my seed coat so my true leaves may emerge. I’ve been here, elbow-deep in humus, remembering just how temporary it is to be human.
On the North Olympic Peninsula, the land is once again abuzz and alive with song, floral essences perfuming the warming air while waxy cottonwood leaves shine like a thousand tiny suns. The lilacs will burst any day, which means the swallowtail butterflies will arrive soon, and with them, a months-long cascade of color, fruit, and frolic that will enliven the entire town.
It is time.
My hands folded in prayer, stained with composted Earth and blood, I have an announcement to share with you:
I’m a mother.
Stay with me.
If I were to compare my life to my Facebook feed (most of which is “friends” from my college years), most women my age have a new last name, a profile picture from their wedding day, and by now, are on baby number two. There is likely a family photo in front of their newly purchased home, the dog proudly holding a sonogram picture in its mouth.
I say this with no judgement, only that my life’s path has taken a different shape. And yet—I’ve been deeply engaged in the act of mothering since around the time many of these women started families of their own.
My practice of mothering has looked like becoming the owner and caretaker of a 100-year old precious farmhouse, building edible, medicinal, and native pollinator gardens from scratch, creating and maintaining a two-year old newsletter, and developing community offerings that promote creative expression and well-being.
It’s looked like providing love and care to my friends’ and family’s children, animals, plants, and projects. It’s looked like self-mothering when I was the only one who could meet me where I needed. It’s looked like nurturing communities, movements, ideas, and beloved landscapes. It’s looked like a whole lot of tending, holding, widening, softening, and strengthening.
At some point in recent years, I turned a corner, and the creativity within my cells (yours too!) activated with renewed force. Call it a biological-clock-induced oxytocin surge, call it Saturn return—all I know is I’ve felt so wildly fertile, instinctually procreative, literally unable to stop my brain from riding off into the sunset with idea after idea. I am sparked and seeded by the smallest comment, movement, or moment, wanting to make, make, make or dream, dream, dream. And I swear I’m being honest when I say that the outcome doesn’t matter; it is the process in which I revel, like a honeybee drunk on nectar.
“be careful
i am fertile
a soil thick with promise
a mouth full of petals
you can feel when you are near me
how i may touch you
and you may blossom”
– adrienne marie brown, be careful, i am fertile
Yet there’s one creation that I’ve been carrying inside for years. That’s been quietly gestating, only growing more true despite my wandering, my excuses, my doubt, and my fear. That feels like both a culmination of my entire life’s path and yet a threshold into a new beginning.
I’m so elated to type these words and announce the birth of my business: Conduit Coaching.
The embryo began as an incoherent, unclear, conceptual calling from a voice deep within. It continued to leave me breadcrumbs, and gradually, through years of listening and dedication, guided me toward the work I needed to do, both within and out in the world. Gradually, it began to take form, shapeshifting and unfolding in perfect timing.
They say our children are our best teachers, after all.
If I had to locate its conception, I’d return to the spring of 2021 in Opihikao, Hawai’i, at my Aunt Heidi’s jungle cabin. Just 158 miles from where I was conceived in Kapalua, Maui, it was here that I first read adrienne marie brown’s Emergent Strategy, and it changed my life forever. Her words, passed through her by her teachers, directly spoke to something already stirring within me, and finally gave it language and a framework. I continue to draw upon this book heavily, like an old, loyal friend.
Each Land has its own mind, and it’s no coincidence that the island of Hawai’i is part of this story. Its young, volcanic terrain is some of the most fertile and active in the world, born from a hot spot deep below the seafloor. She is constantly creating and re-shaping herself, charged with a rich, mythic, polytheistic spiritual fabric that’s constantly at work.
You can still see the geothermal steam pouring from vents in the Earth, and I swear, if you are still enough, feel the tectonic plates shifting below ground.
It has been a slow and patient labor bringing this business Earthside, and while I’ve been supported by so many, I’ve been doula-ing myself through this transition. And while this is entirely new territory, somehow, like a mother, I feel I was built to do it. An innate capacity. Like something I was born to do.
I come from a long lineage of entrepreneurs—small business owners who built a life and livelihood through offering their skills to their community.
I’d love for you to meet them.
My paternal grandmother, Nellie Gewirtz and grandfather, Julius Zucker, returned from their service in WWII (a secretary and a medic, respectfully) to open a beverage shop and kosher deli in Saratoga Springs, New York.
My great-grandmother on Nellie’s side, Bertha Hamersfeld, began peddling goods at 8-years old in Europe after her parents, also peddlers, passed away young. She is described as being “a fearless entrepreneur” her entire life. Her husband, Lipa Gewirtz, is a legend—having escaped a WWI Russian prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia and train-hopped to safety. He became a cook on an international ship to make enough money to send his family to America. He then tried to become a rabbi upon immigrating to New York, but, unable to find work, he found his way into bootleg whiskey smuggling instead.
He got it from his mother, Chaya, who among running an inn and coffee house, also smuggled goods across the Hungarian border.
My great-grandparents on Julius’ side, Celia Klinger and Hyman Zucker, made hats and suits, met in the factory, then jointly opened a restaurant, the G&Z Dairy Restaurant and Bakery, with Celia’s sister and husband on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Celia would say she worked the hardest out of anyone there, but she didn’t care, because it made her happy.
Her father, my great-great-grandfather, David Klinger, was a dress-maker and lady’s tailor.
My maternal grandmother, Doris Gallahue, worked at her community library for 20 years. Her father, Frank Laub, went from mopping floors to becoming the owner of the largest meat packing distributor in the Tri-State area, supporting family back home in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Mary, was a hat-maker too.
My ancestors—inn-keepers, butchers, tailors, craftspeople, and peddlers—became entrepreneurs not from a desire to amass great wealth, but to provide necessary sustenance to their families and community. I am floored by these generations, who, facing stark barriers against education, land ownership, and access to many civil rights, survived two World Wars and the Great Depression in large part to their fearlessness, doing what they had to do to feed their families, and send their loves ones to safety.
To borrow from
, their businesses “were infused with the very culture and life around them, and became part of their community’s social, spiritual and economic fabric.” I aspire to do business like them.
People have asked me if taking this leap and leaving a secure, by all means stellar job, has been scary. Actually, most just make the assumption that it is. And for a good while, it felt that way.
Then I did something simple: I asked my ancestors for help.
Not a generalized, lazy prayer where I ask for a vague idea of what I want with entitlement and no reciprocity. No, a specific prayer to specific people, based on what I know about their story and spirit.
This meant I had to take the time to learn about them, and lucky for me, I have the incredible fortune of having access to many of their stories. The more I learn about them, the more I feel a deep responsibility to share them, and the more I feel them with me, in the present.1
It is true what they say—I feel them at my back, their loving palms pressed against me, holding me up and guiding me forward. I could ease into this life-altering decision knowing that I’m far from the first in my lineage to make it. That the life I live is teeming with ease and opportunity beyond their wildest dreams. That entrepreneurship, grit, and a whole lot of chutzpah run thick through my veins.
Of course, there are many factors that make this choice a possibility for me within the systemic realities of this country, built atop an ongoing settler-colonial state. There are reasons why I can choose to run a business out of my home on the opposite coast of the country from where my ancestors first arrived.
May my work be an honor to theirs, in a way that’s unique to this time, and this soul. May it always be in service of a liberated, loving, Life-giving future for all beings.
Among those on my altar is my great-grandmother Celia, for whom I am (middle) named. Per Jewish tradition, we give our children the name of an ancestor to keep their soul and memory alive, and inspire the child to embody their namesake’s virtues.
Celia, nick-named Chippie, for a bird chirp. Chippie, whose Hebrew name was Tzipora, meaning “bird.”
I asked them for help too.
The bird was born around 150 million years ago on planet Earth, making them one of humans’ eldest ancestors.
Inhabiting the space between ground and sky, birds taught our minds to expand into imagination and vision. After all, don’t we all look up when we need to retrieve an idea? The human brain literally grew and evolved in a sky full of birds, because of a sky full of birds.
And so, as with my familial kin, I’ve asked them to help me find my way.
There’s the arctic tern, which has the longest migration of any animal, flying from the North to South Pole and back again within a single year. The tern, which knows what’s happening across the entire length of the world.
There’s the sandhill crane, which somatically knows to leave its individual nesting site and come together half a million strong along a small stretch of river in Nebraska each year.
There’s the owl, which has the best vision in the entire animal kingdom. The owl, which can spot its prey with the equivalency of you or I spotting a mouse a mile away by the light of a single match.
Surely these creatures could help me learn how to take flight. How to lift my wings and trust. How to risk security in a time of massive upheaval, to soar amidst so much despair.
“There is nothing escapist about flight…to fly is to open the mind to the starry sky. To open our vision beyond the immediate tangles of life to the sky.
For in a world of strife and ruin, you also fly. Despite the gripping binds that hold you, you also fly. Despite the voice that says you cannot or should not or do not deserve it or aren't allowed or are too privileged or aren't privileged enough. Despite this, you also fly.
There is that in us, which longs to fly. What do we do with such longings? Do we allow ourselves to fly or do we feel instead something like the world is in disarray, so maybe I should stop flying? … There is pain in the world, so maybe I should stop flying. I feel guilty when I enjoy myself, so maybe I should stop flying.
Exactly the opposite. There is pain in the world—I must take flight to see. To see what to do, Spirit…how can we possibly see our way out of the mess that we're in if we don't gain perspective, if we don't let ourselves soar.”
– Joshua Michael Schrei, On The Imperative of Mystic Flight
And so, the answer on how to fly was in front of me all along—swirling, swooping, migrating and returning, breeding and building a nest within me. Turns out I just needed to incubate. I’m still a seabird or a songbird.
I will never forget the day I learned that birds have hollow bones. That this natural engineering actually makes their bones stronger. Their bones contain air sacks that connect to their respiratory system, meaning their skeleton can store oxygen to support their muscles during flight. Meaning neshamah, the sacred breath of Life, the Wind Within One, lives throughout their entire body.2
A hollow bone, strengthened by the space left for the sacred. Living, flying conduits, in symbol and in structure. This is what I am, what I am always becoming, and what I humbly offer.
Per tradition, I named this business in part for her—my namesake, my Tziporra, my beautiful, soaring bird, who still weaves her challah through my hands.
Per today, I named this business Conduit Coaching because we are channels for what longs to move through us, in constant co-creation and co-evolution with a wildly alive world.
My role is to facilitate processes and spaces for you to connect with that longing, and shape your life, business, or organization around it.
How? Through personalized coaching for individuals; consulting for solopreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits, and coalitions; facilitating seasonal group circles; and hosting workshops and gatherings.
The open sign is on, and we’re thrilled to welcome you.
There’s so much more I want to share with you. And yet—that’s not why we’re here.
This Substack will not turn into a marketing email, and I long for my marketing emails to never feel that way anyhow.
This means I will not migrate this email list and would rather start from scratch, slowly, with you opting-in, instead of making you opt-out.
So, to respect your attention and intention here, I have an ask—will you come with me on this new adventure?
With the love of generations behind and ahead, with the love of all who are present today,
Your friend, in flight,
Izzy
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• Email: izabellazucker@gmail.com
It is a privilege to have access to information about biological ancestors. Many of my ancestors' stories remain hidden, and making peace with this void comes with its own gifts. More and more, I turn to non-biological ancestors within the broader web of Life and to chosen teachers for their wisdom, just as I would someone in my family tree. Please know there are so many elders ready to hold you.
The “Wind Within One” is derived from a Diné teaching, and the Navajo word, nilch’i hwii’siziinii. It refers to the part of the larger Holy Wind, nilch’i, that circulates within each individual.
The concept of being a hollow bone is often uplifted by Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June), an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages.
I love how you intertwined motherhood into your story.
Mothering is more than giving birth to a human. It’s as you said, giving birth to ideas, concepts and watching them grow. I’m on this journey with you.💚
Just reading this had an incredible grounding effect for me. I love envisioning you pulling on all of the wisdom and resources that got you here to share with the next person— so beautiful