One

 Today I smudged my room with juniper I'd harvested and dried myself several weeks ago, from a young tree which had lost its roots and fallen in a wind storm.

It is a rainy day, and this week I am leaning into grief for something I won't specify but which, for all its brevity, tore something of me on its way out of my life. 

I recently re-read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which is the only book that was able to hold my attention in the last several weeks. I enjoyed it more as an audiobook, I think, but it is still a beautiful novel about friend-love, which is a thing we humans don't dedicate nearly enough art to but should. I have moved on to Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson, a title that snagged me from the first. It makes me want to seek out the lonely island of its setting where women rule, a modern place that feels ancient. I want to bind myself to rocks and wind by root and vine and feather. I want to swim naked in the ocean from a beach where no one wanders. It is a novel about art, but it also transforms, perhaps unintentionally, the reality of my aloneness into something sacred, rather than something to be feared. 

I spotted a garden I'd never seen before on a walk I've taken many times. A reminder that there is always something new to see if you open your eyes and take the time.

This is my new blog. Hard to return to the days of writing this for its own sake, for the sake of putting words down and remembering small things like burning your own smudge, when Instagram has made many of us feel the pressure to "create content." This is not content. These are my musings. If you come back to read more, so be it. If you don't, at least I have somewhere to post the photos that I'm always itching to take simply because the beauty of something struck me.