Hello!

Today, we're launching a new feature called Second Harvesters. From time to time we'll feature one of the extraordinary people in the Second Harvest community. These are people that are literally diving into their second chapter with both feet. The first story we want to share is Libby DeLana's. Libby is a dear friend that has faced so many of life's challenges with grace and joy.

Here's her story...

“She walks toward life.”

Sometimes transformation doesn’t arrive in fireworks. It's just a heartbeat. Feet on earth, breath in lungs, water on skin. In Libby DeLana’s life, transformation was a daily walk. First step after step, then year after year. Then, it looked like a plunge into icy ocean that shattered old assumptions. It looked like saying goodbye — to an agency she co-founded, to a long-time partnership — and hello to new rhythms of presence, practice, and creative expression.

Libby spent more than thirty years as an executive creative director in advertising, shaping ideas for global brands and leading high-performing teams. She was Director of Design at MullenLowe for fifteen years, then co-founder of the agency Mechanica. Libby knows a thing or two about a life built on deadlines and breakneck schedules. At the height of this success she could have coasted on reputation alone. Instead, she asked herself a harder question: What nurtures me?

The Walk That Began Everything

In 2011, Libby made a vow that would come to define her: she would walk every single day. No matter the weather or mood, she laced up her shoes and stepped outside. Regardless of where she was, in cities, along coastlines, through forests, and around neighborhoods, she walked. Over more than a decade, she has walked more than the circumference of the Earth. Her Instagram account, @parkhere, has become a living diary of presence and awareness.

This wasn’t a fitness fad. It was a relationship to experience: a place to think, to feel, to notice the world unfolding. On these walks, Libby rediscovered her voice, her curiosity, her unhurried self. The walk became her creative partner, her therapist, her remembrance of what it means to be embodied. Each day, she learned not just how to move through space, but how to see with attention.

A Cold Wake Up Call

In the darkest winter of the pandemic, something unexpected happened. In the middle of a walk, on a beach, Libby took off her layers and ran into the icy ocean. What was meant as a moment of release became a revelation — a reminder of how deeply she could feel, how alive she could be, how much she could trust her courage.

That plunge didn’t just shock her body. It rewrote the stories she told herself about fear, age, identity, and comfort. She learned that discomfort could be a teacher, not an enemy. Her forthcoming book Cold Joy turns this teaching into a guide for others: practices that help us meet uncomfortableness with empathy, focus, and curiosity.

Leaving, Not Losing

During the periods of deepest change, stepping away from Mechanica, navigating a divorce, and reimagining her identity beyond traditional success, Libby rediscovered stillness. What remained wasn’t less life; it was life with more room to breathe, reflect, and create.

She turned to writing, with Do Walk and Cold Joy, as invitations for others to encounter their own lives more fully. She co-hosts the This Morning Walk podcast with NYT bestselling author Alex Elle, where conversations unfold with the same pace she honors in her own days. They align with programs built on embodied learning, thoughtful pace, and the belief that meaningful change begins with small daily choices.

One Life, Many Chapters

At 60 years old, Libby literally models a life that is evolving. She embraces modeling opportunities not as vanity, but as an affirmation of natural aging and authentic presence. She offers cold dips, long walks, and reflection not as mastery, but as ongoing conversation with the world.

Her journey reminds us that transformation is less about overhaul and more about commitment: to showing up, to slowing down, to listening to what life whispers when we stop running toward the next thing. She teaches that we don’t find ourselves by arriving somewhere new. We find out who we are by stepping towards ourselves, again and again, with intention and compassion.

This is the kind of transformation we celebrate — lives reshaped from the inside out.

You can follow Libby's journey as she shares her daily dips and wanderings on Instagram (@parkhere, @thismorningwalk @thiscoldjoy ) and cohosts the This Morning Walk podcast. Her work has appeared in NPR, the BBC, Good Life Project, Oprah Daily, and The Isolation Journal. She calls both Massachusetts and the Bay Area home. Libby’s first book is DO/Walk (Do Books). Her second, Cold Joy, from Chronicle Books.

If you know someone who is shaping their next chapter to be their best chapter, please email or text us with your intros. Thanks!

Richard & Devon.