Sounds very intense. I hope you find peace and comfort in the days ahead.

The Irish believe in the sacredness in liminal spaces. Wanting sleep. Wanting wakefulness. A trailer that doesn’t go. The cloth as witness.

This one makes so much sense for a person building soil, smelling the earth, growing food. I could see a whole series. The soil series.

Is she smoking by any chance?

So much to love in this post. It could be sort of a masthead for your blog (or a link prominent on the side?) because it explains so much about your approach, including your focus on place settings. Even though I struggle somewhat constantly with notions of cultural appropriation, as I read this I had this thought: maybe at times aesthetics are innate and instinctual. For you to “arrive” at a Japanese sensibility in this view becomes more a question of listening to your own deep impulses and less about ripping off another’s culture, in other words. Who knows. I love that you identify feeling entitled as an American trait. I’d add ‘white’ American. Relative to being a white author with black characters, I was lucky enough to have a black poet tell me a few years ago that “these voices are coming through all kinds of people.” Permission of a kind. My favorite line in this post: “Their acute appreciation of the power of the seasonal round always strikes a feeling of melancholy gratitude in me for the ephemeral, reliable gifts of earth.” So beautifully put!

i wish we could read the poem, too. but maybe it is enough to imagine you, out on the roof at night, a pirate in her own house, looking to the heavens for clues about her future. I hope the task goes well and isn't too, too oppressive!

Just beautiful, as usual. I'm surprised at how warm the dark colors feel. But it makes sense. The cave in the winter!

and there's our destructo-in-chief plowing through a national butterfly sanctuary to build his wall

Magical storyteller indeed. The memoir paragraphs that poked themselves into this post are so engaging and evocative. Thank you for opening that up to us.

How closely tied to the lives of the next generations hope is. You’ve crystallized this for me tonight.

Waiting for lightening is inherently a tense time. Or exciting? I can almost smell the ground.

I signed up for newsletter (I think?) but haven’t anywhere expressed interest in the class. I’m in! Yes. The 19th going on calendar as sign up day.

The waggle and flow of air shows up in your piece. Funny that “air” is a small word but “sky” is a big one. But you’re right.

The flow of lines and dots is very dynamic. I wonder if healing always is. Flowing.

Congrats, Dana!! Both my boys are March babies. I think it's a wonderful month to give birth. The words are lovely... the color sweet and gentle.

I like how the visual vocabulary keeps growing. It never fails to suprise me, somehow -- which is my own mini-ramble!~

“they follow a design that they have made, morning till dark. Their hooves like stitching”. I love that.

Sounds like a lovely tradition! Do you know why the cliffs are eroding? The usual stuff or related to climate change?

When a tree narrowly missed our house last year it had actually banged a hole in the roof right above our bed. Didn’t know for MONTHS. So the notion of a split roof, especially awaiting a storm, is disquieting.

From the New Yorker (also made me think of you): Oliver lived a profoundly simple life: she went on long walks through the woods and along the shoreline nearly every day, foraging for both greens and poetic material. She kept her eyes peeled, always, for animals, which she thought about with great intensity and intimacy, and which often appear in her work not so much as separate species but as kindred spirits.

Could they have felt the earthquakes in Northern California?

Did you go to Findhorn? I read about it back in the day and wanted to go, knew people who did. Cabbages like basketballs grown in Sand.

I find comfort in those dynamic downward-streaking black stripes. Zoom! Right off the cloth to who knows where. Maybe into the woods with Soul-o?

Agree with Jaime about the satisfying reading of posts. This one made me tired. Just to read.

I saw smoke. How a mast might go from solid to vaporous. The image of you enjoying sunrise in your slippers is precious.