Letters to Savi: Devotion

These letters are born from a father’s love for his daughter.

In the mayhem and magic of those first postpartum weeks, I began writing a journal for you, my daughter. It became a place to make sense of becoming your father, to capture the moments we were living through, and to wonder about the conversations we might one day have.

It is early morning in the middle of February, and you are one week old. Pale light drifts through the shutters into a house still cold and quiet from the night before. We are snuggled together in bed. Sleep-deprived and full of new-parent adrenaline, I lie here gazing at you in astonishment. I keep bringing my face close to yours to check that you are still breathing.

In the stillness of that dawn, I begin to wonder about the woman you will become and the life you will live. Over the nights that follow, I start writing down my hopes for you. Not what you will do in life, but how you will be.

These hopes are not expectations, and you do not owe me their fulfilment. I am learning that my role as your father is not to shape you into my unfinished ambitions, but to love you into your own becoming.

These letters are one way I am loving you.

My journaling began as a way to slow time down and stay present during that first year at home with you. But beneath that was a quieter truth: the age gap between us, and the fear that comes with being an older parent. I hope to be here to see you live a long and beautiful life. But I can also feel the shadow of the alternative.

What began as journaling became something more. It gave shape to my love, my fear and my longing, and helped me turn all three into something I could offer you.

During that first year, I would often wonder how we might one day speak about these hopes together. One of my deepest hopes is that, through those conversations, you would come to see that being an adult is not about having life figured out. It is about standing grounded in not knowing, while keeping your heart and mind open to life. It is often in those moments of not knowing that life quietly begins to show us the way.

Over time, these hopes began to take shape as reflection cards and stories. I did not want to give you fixed answers so much as living invitations — small spaces where we might hold the question together. Each card carries something life has tested in me, alongside the places where I am still learning. As I write them for you, I rediscover something in myself.

I hope these letters help you know me more deeply, and offer you a place of reflection, encouragement and support. I offer them as a blessing over your life.

Savi is short for your full name, Savannah. In discovering your name, I found a deeper resonance within it. The word Savi echoes an ancient Sanskrit root associated with the light that awakens the world. In the Vedic tradition, Savitr is the radiance that stirs consciousness and brings wisdom into view.

There is a beautiful idea within this: the sun does not create wisdom, it awakens it.

I think that is what a parent hopes to do — not to fill a child with answers, but to create the light in which they may discover their own. Not as something to perfect, but something we live, forget and return to again.

And perhaps that is why these letters feel as though they are written both to you and beyond you. I am writing to the child that lives within each of us. However old we are, some part of us still needs protection, encouragement and care. How we meet that part of ourselves shapes the person we become, the choices we make and the life we create.