This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.
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.
All of the things are blooming. Have you noticed? June is here. The Cecil Brunner rosebush is magnificent this year--an explosion of flowers so heavy that its top has fallen away from the white wall of the little city cottage where Lucia is made, and is spilling toward the alleyway. There is a lesson here for me, in expectation and fruition...
Sunday, April 9, 2017 - Daily Notes, From the Editor (550 words). Whoa, April is intense. Burgeoning. This thing we call Spring is aptly named. To the untrained eye, new growth appears suddenly, but if you have been paying attention you know: this all started long ago.
Happy New Year! Oh, the plans I had for ending 2016 with a neat bow, a perfect email, and an announcement of a new offering I've been working on for early 2017. Out the window they flew sometime in the last week while I struggled to balance heart work with paid work, dreams with reality. Instead, I woke this morning unfinished. Like I always do...
As someone who makes her living working remotely, it's hard to admit that the only way to truly connect with someone is to look them in the eyes. Over the past two weeks, I have looked more strangers in the eye, many in the throes of some of their deepest struggles, and offered these words: "Buen Camino." The American equivalent? "Happy trails." The literal translation: "Good way."
I reached a breaking point. I had to set down some boundaries to institute discipline around my schedule, and all of a sudden I had free time. It felt very strange to have that free time, and my first instinct was to pick up more projects. Luckily my manager stopped me, saying, "Remember two weeks ago when you were in my office telling me you had no time for anything? Why don't you back off for a bit? I'll tell you if you're not working hard enough."
Last week I discovered an envelope in my post office box, one I had missed for months somehow. It was a thank you note from a writer named Lauren with whom I had brunch last autumn. She had tucked a thin glossy 4x6 photograph into the card, a gesture that felt like magic. Placing snapshots into letters has become so rare in the age of Instagram that it almost seems vintage…
