And We’ll All be Here Forever

I’ve put off writing about this for a while, now, but my time for that has grown short. Two weeks ago, my husband and I found out he’s been hired by the church he has been interviewing with since the summer. It’s located in central New York, some five or so hours from our home…

Help Us

My friends, in my last post I mentioned that one of the hardest things of this summer has been the news that my beloved ballet studio is closing. The horrific flooding in Vermont destroyed our summer performance season, leaving the company with no money to pay the farms who support us, to pay our own…

Summer Grieving

This was supposed to be a good summer. My last summer in Vermont. It was supposed to be idyllic. It was supposed to be fireflies and stargazing, camping and hikes, dancing in the fields, sunsets and long evenings, warm skies and wildflowers. It was supposed to be gentle. It was supposed to be beautiful. It…

Howl

If you had asked me, in January of 2022, what I believed in, I would have told you. If you had asked me how I saw the world, I would have had an answer. If you had asked me to tell you my values, I would have had a list. I could have written them…

Hokusai Says

The following is one of the pieces I wrote last year and never posted. I began it in September of 2022, a quarter of the way through this deployment and right after finishing the Quarry Project (if you’re curious about what that was, I encourage you to check out these posts. I’ve written about it…

It’s Been A Long Year

Hi friends. It’s been a while. A long while. I’m hoping to get back into this space a bit more regularly, though. I miss it, and writing here has always been good for me. Goodness knows I can use all the help I can get to be a healthy human, these days – so I…

1/16/2022

For the first time in a very long time, words start to feel like a good idea again. It’s been over a year since I left this space, hanging in the midst of chaos, and walked away without looking back. My last writing came during the aftermath of the January 6th, 2021, insurrection, a flying…

Insurrection

The past year has been marked by its nonexistence. It has been a year of nothingness – a year of canceled plans and solitude. A year of reschedulings and puttings-off, of avoidance and isolation and exhaustion. A year of pitchers poured out, of glasses half empty, of deep shadows and that particular lonely gaping in…

Black Locust

I sit on the fraying, overstuffed couch beneath the living room window of my summer eyrie. This has become my favorite place to be–lying on my back with a book open across my knees, my feet up on the back of the sofa. The evening flowing in with the breeze, shifting slowly from warm to…

Hosanna

Everything feels fragile. The air feels fragile. The earth feels fragile. My body feels fragile. I’m not sure if I’m hungry, or tired, or anxious, or cold. I’m certain the ground is still below my feet, but I’m not certain if the sky is still above me or if it has come down to hover…

Na-vaer

Readers of this blog will likely be aware of what an integral part of my life, and especially my childhood and college years, the works of J. R. R. Tolkien are. It’s been a while since I’ve ravenously sped my way through the War of the Ring in a few weeks, or sat rapt in…

Nine

My Grammarly app is telling me the tone of this piece is “Sad,” so, oops about that. This wasn’t intended to be a new year post–it just happens to be January 1st (barely), and this just happens to have been the topic on my mind for the past several months, and I just happened to…