Over the years, I’ve gone to lots of conferences and met lots of people. We exchange pleasantries and business cards, then go back to our lives. But in 1995 I met a woman named Alice Crichton at a spirituality conference and began a very special friendship that would last the rest of her life.

Alice was born in Indiana and worked as a nurse during World War II. She was stationed at Crom Castle in Northern Ireland, which acted as a hospital during the war. The castle had been owned by the Crichton family since the early 1600s and it was there that she met her husband, Michael.

The castle was also the venue for the spirituality conference I attended almost 20 years ago. When I met Alice, I felt an instant connection to her and after the conference ended, letters flew back and forth from my home in Georgia and hers in England.

In the fall of 1996, Alice and I met in Glastonbury, England and that visit really cemented the relationship. From then on, I’d fly over every six months or so and spend a week with Alice in her little English village called Selborne.

Alice was 40 years older than me, but we were like two girlfriends. We visited crop circles. We went to sacred cathedrals. We even went to Stonehenge, where she told me stories about going there and hanging out long before it was a tourist attraction.

When it was time for dinner, Alice would shut all the drapes in the house—her way of saying the day was over. She’d change, we’d have a cocktail and then sit down to a three-course dinner with sterling silver and china. It was such a wonderfully civilized ritual.

In many ways, Alice was like a spiritual godmother to me. She introduced me to the concept of sacred geometry—a system of design based in patterns, shapes and forms that occur in nature. This was long before we even dreamed of Serenbe, but years later, when Steve first broached the subject of building a town in our backyard, the first thing out of my mouth was that it had to be based on sacred geometry.

During that process, we brought in Phil Tabb, a land planner with experience in sacred geometry. He showed us a slideshow on the many ways that design plays out in different places all over the world. At one point he flashed up a slide of a house. I gasped and said, “Stop! Where did you get that picture?” Phil said, “Oh, this is one of my favorite villages in England.” And I said, “Are you kidding me? That’s Selborne!” It was four houses down from Alice’s place. Of all the thousands of villages he could’ve studied in England, Phil studied Selborne.

It all came full circle and felt like such a sign, so we named Serenbe’s first neighborhood Selborne. It was my way of honoring Alice and the memories we made in England.

Though she came to visit me once, Alice died on January 2, 2000—four years before we broke ground on Selborne. She was determined to see in the new millennium and make sure the world would be okay. When she knew it was, she let go.