That morning, the soil beneath my feet smelled nourished and wet, marked by the grand indifference of rain. It was a deep black, and the pine branches a brilliant green. There was a filmy veil of soft dull mist obscuring the deep black earth but not entirely, as the coppered leaves lay in wait for […]
I love the quiet ferocity of the sea. There is something magical and yet menacing in the wet, briny air, silver at dawn, and deep blue at noon. I am drawn to it, an unpredictable living thing, calm and welcoming, with open arms to embrace its audience one moment, and explosive and quick-tempered the next, […]
I could feel the familiar catch in my throat, and the sting of tears in my eyes as the noise of the room grew in uncomfortable tension. I was steadfast, optimistic, and overprepared for what the morning meeting would hold – or so I believed. But there were veiled ambushes and pointed statements, and the […]
“How can we seek a compassion that can stand in awe of what ‘people’ have to carry, rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it?” It was a Sunday morning, and I was, as is typical of most Sunday mornings, harried and rushed. By the time I wrestled open the heavy doors of […]
I love the early morning, that momentary gap, where the borders of day and night are ill-defined. The momentum of life is stilled, and the air is uncluttered with conversation. There is a quiet sense of something lost, and yet I know that in the deepest dark before dawn, God is preparing for the arrival […]
Resting on the roots of an old oak, I leaned back against its knotted trunk to consider the passing of time. I felt, in those moments of nostalgia, a small resurgence of my five-year-old self…a quiet little warrior of a girl, reminding me of who I was before time told me otherwise. My children, no […]
I see you. I watch your eyes widen, and your lips purse as a pronounced red blush spreads across your face. You can’t just walk away as that would be rude, and you don’t have anything further to ask because there is, quite frankly, nothing more to say. And so you shift uncomfortably from right […]
I am an introvert. I sought for many years to define the marked restlessness of a soul driven by the desire to communicate in a wildly expansive and profound way and the equal craving for sanctuary and introspection. While I have come to embrace this personality preference, it tends to lend itself to a complexity […]
I am the new girl. And while this is not a novel circumstance, everything in me wants to scamper back to where I came from, to the place where I was safely sheltered in the concrete corners of urban streets cradled gently in the hammock of amiable familiarity and immaculate anonymity. I have been uprooted and […]
I am afraid of snakes but it isn’t quite that elementary. Were my consternation solely focused on elongated limbless reptiles, life would be far less complicated. Sadly, however, there are spiders, in whom every unknown terror in the world is fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror, and menacing sea creatures who roam the depths of ocean […]