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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

The Call to Pilgrimage

Last week the fall winds arrived. They came in a great gust on the equinox, turning the leaves upside down and silver. By nightfall the humidity of summer had dropped away, and the first truly cold evening of the season made the stars sharpen. Every year the winds of autumn usher in the same…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

Why it’s Okay to Feel Everything

As beautiful as spring is, it doesn’t arrive gently. The transition from late winter into early spring is one of seesawing extremes. Freezing nights and warm afternoons; buckets of rain and the hard snap of ice. Lately, the changing moodiness of early spring seems to match the ebb and swell within me. Like most…

Continue reading