This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.

Hello friends,

The air is soft with early morning birdsong as I write with a half-cup of coffee nestled in my lap. I'm sitting on the big madrone tree at Seward Park again, feeling appreciative just to be breathing.

The clouds burst a moment ago with a spring rain shower. I only know because I can hear drops hitting the broad maple leaves that form a protective canopy over my journaling session. I am safe here…

Mid-February is here and I am exhaling. Over and over, as if by doing this enough times slowly I can release every micron of tension-residue from every cell in my body. The days are getting lighter, and it (mostly) feels like it's working.

A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.

I’m here as a kind of halfway house­—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.

One of my saving graces this year has been an enormous Madrone that fell in the park near my home. Surrounded by old growth, I go there Saturday mornings to sit on the three-foot-thick trunk and breathe. Stretching the muscles of my screen-weary eyes I look up, left, down, right. Birds whisper, the scent of cedar cleanses, and once a coyote spirited by. We looked at each other for a long moment, suspended. The year has been strange.

When I last wrote to you it was January and now it's May and the peonies are blooming. So much has happened. My world has changed, our world has changed.

Hello sweet friends, I'm writing to you from a Saturday afternoon in mid-January, where the light is ever so perceptibly beginning to return. I noticed it two days ago. Morning light came a little sooner and evening arrived a little later. The thin snow melted and something stirred inside me--like a seed roused beneath the soil…

The holidays are coming and I know the more I can fill my cup with rest now, the better prepared I will be to surf all the emotions with grace and love and maybe even ease. I'm keeping a late-autumn rest rhythm that is simple. Eight steps:

I took a solo retreat last weekend to focus on writing. It's been a couple of years since I did this, and to be perfectly honest it was a mixed bag.

Walking alone can be a meditative practice. Walking with children leads to interiority by a different path. My love for walking hearkens back to my days as a pilgrim, when I traversed Spain and, later, France on the Camino de Santiago. On pilgrimage, you follow the path, absorbing the folds of the land in your bones as the body wears out, and mind-chatter stills to a plain - flat, expansive, rounding at the edges. 

We do not belong only to ourselves, we belong also to our culture, and in a culture that demands we use our bodies less and less, walking is more and more - a revolutionary act.

By Sarah Childers. I come from one of the quietest places on earth. There is a difference between quiet and silence. Quiet feels like being held. It is the contented squeak of something small and furred sleeping curled into itself. Silence is the unsaid, bound and gagged.

The morning after Inauguration Day we waited in a crowd along Jackson Street to join the Seattle Womxn’s March. Behind us, a tofu factory. Across the street, an art school. Above us, blue sky and later, after we had passed, a pair of eagles. 

My hair, as far as I’m concerned, is supposed to be blue. It was always supposed to be blue...

Wednesday morning, mere hours after the presidential election was decided, in the calm, quiet of my baby’s room, as I nursed him back to sleep, I wept silently. I wept for the loss of a dream, I wept for the nation, and I wept for my daughters. I faced for perhaps the first time in my life, the fact that for some, women’s rights are not human rights. I started to think about “women’s work.”

The teacup drops from my hand unprovoked. It simply falls to the tearoom’s wooden floor and wobble-rolls under my chair.  The cup is empty; there’s no splash or mess, only the noise of the cup’s landing that may have been a firework for the look the woman across the room gives me. Cocooned on the couch, the woman pulls the plush white robe she must have brought from home closer around her neck and returns to her journal.