[November 2025]

Always, I want to begin with seeds. With blossoms. With beauty. Foundations, I can forget. Or maybe it’s more I expect them to sprout from the ground magically of their own accord. Like tender tendrils of new plants pushing through carob-colored rain-soaked soil. I am at home in the fluid, find cement suspect.

Chalk it up to being a poet. Chalk it up to being a Pisces. Chalk it up to the stubborn belief that every binary is false. Chalk it up to the starborn labyrinth that is creative process. Time flows differently here, neither free falls nor follows the laws of physics, all clocks suddenly fallow fields. Gravity, meanwhile, is an astronaut on a mission to float. Space is bright and night at once, a mouthful of stars, a lungful of shine.

And anyway, the wild world around me is frozen – not a time for pouring nor for planting. A time for deep gestation, unseen yet felt. A time for cold, for snow, for turning inward, inward, inward.

Between beginning to draft this piece and now, I’ve become aware that the world lost a friend. A local artist. Who loved winter most of all. Who cared about the earth deeply and once rowed nearly 40 miles in a giant pumpkin to raise awareness about the water shed. Who carved that same element into intricate ice sculptures because he knew how to locate joy within the challenges of impermanence and that was one way he learned to make it manifest. Give us bread, but give us roses, as they say.

I am trying to locate joy within the challenges of impermanence and one place I have learned how to do so is with words.

This sculptor friend and I had a conversation years ago in which I told him about my difficulty sequencing. Sometimes a piece of writing comes through me, a sudden arrival… but very in-the-wrong-order in terms of legibility to others. I have to re-translate a few times to shape it in a properly linear way. Or, linear enough. It was after our chat that I started to think of my novel draft as sculpture. Maybe it could melt and re-form.

I was an artist before I became primarily a writer, though the two processes have never been totally separate in me. Language, letters, colors blend. I printed the whole of it, about 100 pages at that point, taped it to the wall of my tiny apartment. Gathered multi-hued markers, little stickers, scissors. Doodled it up. Cut it apart and put it back together. It isn’t done yet, but it’s closer, and that visual rearranging was pivotal towards what will be its “final” form.

After learning of this friend’s death, I immediately took a long walk along the river. This, too, a part of creative process: movement of body within landscape, effervescence and weight somehow balanced.

I ran into someone there, a person poetry has brought into my life, who was out walking for a similar reason. Interconnected we all are, even in loss. Maybe especially in the raw vulnerability of loss. The water was choppy due to wind, licking a tick tock rhythm on the bank.

Some creature had dropped a half-eaten husk of corn at the edge of the path. I laughed, thinking that I could be the creature. That any of us could be the creature. That we often leave our half-ready offerings because that’s the nature of being human. And if we tip it just the right way, let the kaleidoscope tumble to a certain perspective, this can be enough — to nourish ourselves, to nourish others. Imperfectly, yet authentically. We’ve got the bread. And the roses. What shattered magic we humans are. No single one of us has all the bread or all the roses, but when we pile our shards together on the collective table: wow!

Have not usually felt I am creating my art nor my writing. Always, that it is creating me. That every bit of each creation any of us puts into the world weaves us a community where miracles are possible even amidst the worst of the worst horrors. So grateful, beloveds, for every gift you make and share.

The ache I feel at times, that most of us feel at times, is somewhere between bone and tendon, between rib and skin — unfindable, unfathomable. Yet somehow it is from this fecund place that words find me. Then sentences. Entire stanzas. Paragraphs. Fertile, tumescent with life. Then foundations do sprout, made not of concrete but of roots, sprawling filaments fed during seasons of long nights spent drinking starlight. Here we are, together, weathering the dark of these precious overflowing days.