On the Cover

Soul sisters: Greta Belanger deJong and Kate Edwards

By Kate Edwards

Greta and I have certainly been soul sisters since before time began, but in terms of this particular lifetime, we actually did manage to find our way to be born on the very same block. After about six months during which I’m quite certain that our infant selves said hello, my parents took me off to other shores until we returned to my birthplace when I was just 14. Greta and I then discovered how kindred our spirits truly are as we wandered the streets one summer morning at dawn, wrapped in sleeping bags after a slumber party during which we’d talked our way through the night. Then came years of wild adventures: hitchhiking cross country, dancing together whenever we had the chance, consulting Ouija boards, exploring Eastern wisdom traditions, and soaking our hair in peanut oil for a week while camping on the Texas shore, just to name a very few. That was only the beginning.

Greta Belanger deJong (by Kate Edwards)

Finally, a man stole her away to live her life with all of you in Utah, but even spending decades apart has never dampened our twin soul connection. Our conversations always start up wherever they last left off, and I confess that I still think of her as only being ‘gone from home’, certain to return one of these days. Still, whatever is true about that, what I do know for sure is that there is no one else even remotely like her on the planet. She is truly unique, fascinating, eclectic, wildly inquisitive, loving, challenging, heartfelt, deeply talented, ingenious and inventive in the most unusual and quirky of ways. What is also true is that I could not have lived my life without her, and there is simply no way to capture in words how much this woman means to me.

What I most love about Catalyst is that it has given all of us 400 opportunities to see this woman shine, and now we get to witness what she will do next. How exciting is that!

This article was originally published on December 1, 2020.