Category: Illuminations
What your Favorite Flower Says About You
I hadn’t stepped foot outside in weeks. Freshly post-partum, I’d been nestled in bed since my daughter’s birth. Since that time we’d already seen several snows, and at least one night when our pipes froze solid, but today the sun was shining. Today, the first daffodils were blooming, and every fiber of my body was yearning…
How to (finally) Write your Book
For a long stretch, the urge to write felt like waking up every morning to a cat curled on my chest—warm, insistent, weighty, undeterred. Yet every time I sat down, I found myself at a loss of how to actually write a book. It took me nearly ten years to figure it out— but in the process I…
When your Identity Shifts
I woke up and the walls were glowing like canvas under floodlight. Before I even opened my eyes, I knew— it had snowed that night. In the swoop of a single day the whole landscape had changed. The hemlocks drooped as if dressed in heavy silks. Boulders slept under downy cloaks. The creek stood out…
A Reading for 2022
A great plain stretches as far as your eye can see. It is vast, rippling like the coat of a golden-colored horse, and full of open possibility. Fly up and you can peer far into the distance— farther than you’ve ever seen. Float down, and you will see more intricacy. Nestled in the grass, delicate…
When Mystery Comes to Visit
Lately the only thing that feels knowable is the unknown. In the last year and a half all of us have ridden these waves intimately. Up and down, deep and within, and far out to sea. Just when you think the swells might end, it seems the great ocean of the unknown dishes us…
Who are the Mysterious Sheela-na-gigs?
I ran my hands along the old stones of the church. Lichen-lined and crumbling, the walls emanated a sense of deep peace. I moved in a slow circle around the perimeter of the ruins—a place of pilgrimage for thousands of years— until I found her. Perched above the curve of an open window and…
Dealing with Summertime Sadness
Summer has its own darkness. Thunderstorms, closed canopies, forests cast in shadow. Twilight woodlands where mushrooms bloom. For all its long hours of light, summer is a very literally dark time in my house. Built in the middle of a forested grove, every year my home becomes a deeply shaded cave during the summer…
Creating Your Golden Era
Some eras just seem to glow in our memory. Those times that feel luminescent in retrospect— lit from within by happiness, peace or well-being. Seasons when everything seemed to flow effortlessly and life felt full of possibilities. In our memory, these golden eras can feel like a gift from the gods— happening only once…
