I’ve since learned how to find the nest more easily, noticing each day the gentle swing of a young maple with outsized leaves sometimes half obscuring, other times half revealing the white-rimmed eye of the robin sitting in her nest.

As I wrote the above, I watched the robin fly up to the nest and as I scanned again I saw three young bald heads stretch above the rim of the nest, eager to be fed. It’s the first time I saw the young new life and it feels like magic.

Robins make a new nest for each brood, sometimes having two to three in a season. Made of moss, stems, twig. Some birds use hair and spider silk for flexibility, fitting to the shape and form of the mother as she cares for the eggs, and then the new hearts beating, new wings taking shape. I love to think that the creations of other bodies—spider, moss fronds, leaves, branch—all become what lines a nest, working in tandem with the body of the robin, and later the bodies of her children. How interdependent the work of life is.

Like many, i’ve been craving a more analogue life of late—wanting things that are slow, take time, tangible. I struggle with how much of daily life is intangible, digital. How with so much information we become inured to the power of words well-crafted. How easy it is to gloss over, toggle between, and to distract—which in some meanings, is rooted in an etymology that means to pull apart to the point of madness.

I keep thinking about the making of that nest, and that the robin may make two more by summer’s end. Beginning again to find new material, forming once again to support her own body as well of those to come. Creating with moss, hair, spider silk, and time. Each brood having its own nest, shaped to new bodies. The time it takes, the materials gathered, following the intuition of one’s own body. And then to repeat, continue.

It’s easy to forget that time is circular—a nest of pattern and rhythms slowly forming to our own bodies and lives as we see each season turn. The return of leaves to a tree that while completely new looks the same as the image I took last year at this time feels reassuring and uncanny at the same time—as if part of us may also return to the same place, meet the ghost of who we were a year ago. Or did the past year with all its worries, disasters, pain, joys, changes, really happen?

We’ve lived in this house for nearly a year now, still finding its own rhythms and patterns. A year of barely needing a coat, a year of learning what blooms and lives in the yard surrounding the house. A year to adjust to summer heat, and also the warm summer nights full of stargazing. To learn which birds arrive in spring and which stay year-round. To re-learn how to grow vegetables and what to plant in which month. A year of adjustment, of finding new ways to be, work, write.

The young robins will fledge from the nest in the hawthorn in only two weeks. Days have past and already they look outsized in their nest as they stretch towards their mother’s return with food, mouths open wide, wings beginning to take shape. I’m almost envious of their growth, how quickly they adapt to their new bodies. Adapting, for me, always seems to be slow, weighty with time.

A book I’ve been reading lies open and a quote I underlined feels like a quiet summoning:

Time has never been considered in China as an abstract parameter or as an ‘empty’ time period. The word for time, che, means rather a circumstance favorable or unfavorable for action.1

Maybe the weight of adapting, the slowness I feel in the new is a reminder that some moments are for action and some are not. I wonder on what day, in what hour, in what knowing those tiny bodies with new wings will feel the circumstance favorable for the action of leaping into air. As if to embody as a prophecy the very old saying time flies.

In some traditions time is a deity—for the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, the hours were daimones, gods who watch over, inspire, interact with mortals and the material world. There’s something about that idea, of hours as smaller gods that appeals to me— of time as more than the linear sense we’ve been conditioned to, with the hours reduced down to minutes so readily. Hours not as something to kill or empty, save or guard. Hours as offerings given, the intangible material with which to make a nest, circling and forming to need. Or helping to know when it is time to fly, build a new nest. Perhaps the hours as daimones are to remind us in a digital age to step outside the reductive idea of minutes and seconds, and see how the hours return, repeat, guide. To know that some are favorable for action and some are not.

It’s not a coincidence that both sundials and clocks when first made reflected that inherent sense of the circularity of time—how analog clocks and watchfaces preserve this ancient sense of time, while digital clocks harass and particularize each hour into a seemingly unending line of seconds, minutes passing. As if the work of the hours, things that take time—craft, adaptation, experience, creation—can simply be reduced to parts. Or worse, flattened into something that can be shortcut.

I think we also have that unconscious awareness of circular time in the way that we fall into or create routines, rituals. The assurance of doing something the same way is a practice of return. We create and practice routines, rituals to be in conversation with the hours and the world—to learn when to act and when to not.

To notice the return of new leaves each spring despite a world that always feels to be at the end of its line. To watch a robin build a nest and know it will create another each returning summer.

When we moved into this house last spring a junco had built a nest atop the front door light, watching from time to time with alarm as we kept opening the door. She tired of so much activity and boxes that she gave up, and hopefully made a new nest somewhere more private and calm. After many months, we decided to collect it, and noted the mix of materials—dried summer grass, stripped bark, moss, wiry white dog hair. A local amalgam of material to make a small but soft and strong nest. Now layered with new memories of beginning life in a new place.

Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space of how what we fill a space with creates something new, a new type of reality:

Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order.2

I wonder about the nest of a bird, the intimacy created there. The very new reality of being it holds. Its community of order.

The junco nest now sits on my shelf, alongside the other elements from around this home I’ve collected and keep on my desk—an owl feather, found on a forest walk, an acorn from a campus walk when we first moved our son into college, a robin’s egg found on the trail a few weeks ago. They mix with feathers and a few other items collected from Alaska and elsewhere, all layers of time and memory that combine and make this house slowly begin to feel more familiar.

Feather, seed, shell. Leaf, branch, cone. And I realize I unknowingly followed the birds’ lead.

I love to read ’s newsletter each morning, and she reminded her readers today of the real history behind mother’s day—created by a woman who was tired of the wars men impose on women. Mother’s day was the idea of Julia Ward Howe, as a pathway to suffrage, uniting women, in hope to change the world in the abolition of war and inequality. So in honor of Howe’s original vision and brilliance, and the fantastic work Cox Richardson gives us in making sense of the threads that led to modern politics, reposting some of the story of Howe I wrote a few years ago—hoping more women in history can be remembered and honored, rather than erased.

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Green—to grow, the color of living plants. When the Artemis II crew was bobbing in the ocean after careening from weightlessness to intense gravity, causing flame around them as they flew through the atmosphere, the ground crew asked how the crew fared during their return to earth. The commander responded “doing great, we’re all green.” The ground crew had to explain that they weren’t sick green, but w…

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I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what I love to read in a newsletter this past year, what makes me excited to open a favorite writer’s. And what I love to write and share with others.

As many of you know, I moved to the Pacific Northwest a little over a year ago, which brought many transitions, adjustments, and re-thinks in the ways I try to live a creative life, alongside the necessities of making a living. Working full-time and continuing to write through these changes has been a tricky one to sort through at times.

And I realized I needed a re-boot, a way to reset and find a more expansive frame for the things I love to write about and gain meaning from—place, memory, what has led us to where we are, and in what direction we move towards.

Why the Anchorage?

Having once lived in a place called Anchorage, I’ve thought a lot about the meaning of that name—of how places of anchorage allow for a safe harbor, a protection from storms.

The word anchor is traced to a mix of styles that si…

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Having once lived in a place called Anchorage, I’ve thought a lot about the meaning of that name—of how places of anchorage allow for a safe harbor, a protection from storms.

The word anchor is traced to a mix of styles that situate its roots in Greek, Latin, and Old English, meaning crooked, curved. When I read the etymology I felt the word already offering more than I had expected: I thought of the curved and crooked paths life takes. Of how an anchor can be a weight, but also grants the power of refusal—to be able to stop in the middle of tides and currents, offering the capacity of removal from the flow of time, speed, winds—the power to claim a stasis that would otherwise be impossible. Anchors can steady us in rapid currents, that give gravity when we most need its pull.

Anchors latch on to different parts of us in ways we can’t see, in ways that we didn’t know existed. Scarless holds that beckon for return, that leave parts of its iron in the soft flesh of our feelings, identitie…

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Daffodils have followed, bright crowds of yolks on blades of newly green that whisper wordsworth in my mind—they know they are indeed worthy of words.

The meaning of spring is still a calibration in my mind, after so many years living at a high latitude. Temperate is not a part of spring in the north. March means the cold is still strong but the light becomes relentless, daylight savings a horror—the week prior, the light and dark were finally, nearly equal and we could wake in daylight after months, but still enjoy the quiet of a night accompanied by darkness. March meant the jar of having to once again wake in the dark, but the light reaching past 8pm, reflected snowlight becoming more and more stark as ploughed banks aged into spring ice, thawed and frozen in repeating cycles each night. Spring in the far north is a draining of color—announced b…

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It was not yet a full moon that Thursday, but it was two days away. I thought of a quote from Othello I had written down in my commonplace book:

It is the very error of the moon. / She comes more near the earth/ than she was wont. And makes men mad.—William Shakespeare, Othello

2. On Friday my son texts that he’s going to a protest that night. On Saturday I check in to ask how it was, and find a text from him saying that there were drones flying overhead, and that he and his friends, among other protestors, were tear-gassed. I text anxious questions and he assures me he’s ok, they had goggles with them and knew to wash their clothes immediately. Flap your arms lol. He assures me that he didn’t feel anything more after the burning stopped. I feel the familiar flood of agon…

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Memory seems personal, but it accumulates collectively, through centuries. —Gillian Osborne1

I lived in Norway for two years in the late 1990s, in a house that was built around the turn of the twentieth century—perhaps a little bit earlier. A large, three-story house with several outbuildings situated alongside the road that parallels the coastline of the Trondheim fjord. 

We rented the upper half of the second floor, becoming the first people to live in the house for some years. My husband’s graduate advisor had taken a job in Norway and bought the place—a place that we were told by many in town that only Americans would want to buy. The house had stood vacant for a few years, but had housed refugees from Bosnia before us, who were fleeing to Norway seeking assylum.

The house had a lovely view, with large windows on two sides overlooking the garden and the water. Through open windows, you could hear the sound of the water at high tide breaking on the rip rap of the road shoulder, lapping…

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As I think of that unforgettable, yet rather unas…

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The other night I unrolled one poem excerpt when I couldn’t sleep and like so many serendipitous occurrences, found the prescription I didn’t know I needed:

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

                                 ...you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is as beautiful, it touches you
as if you had a friend

and the sunlight were a present
he had sent you from some place distant
as this morning—to cheer you…

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Living in northern places for so long led me to appreciate the darkness more—the slowing down it asks of the land and our bodies, of space to light a candle and marvel at the light of one single flame. I began this essay after wondering through another winter why we don’t also hibernate—and it turns out, people have hibernated in the past, allowing our bodies to slow, time to slow. Summer was a time of frantic work; winter was a time of slowness, boredom, and grace.

So sharing this dive into snow and hibernation again the day after St. Lucia day—once t…

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In ways I find myself feeling that way when I say something too blunt, direct. How to move among those who may not hear the same howl beneath the surface. Howling is a call to know you’re not alone—to literally call out and be answered. It’s not a silent prayer or a lone cry. But too often we cry alone in the dark not expecting to hear an answer. But worse is to not howl at all. The need to call out, to hear a response in nightdark…

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The cold has returned in earnest here, dipping into the teens, reacquainting itself with the increasing darkness. Silhouettes of the mountains, like stage fronts, grow darker and sharper as the sun climbs to a shallow position in the sky, bleeding rose as it pulls itself along the sharp summits.

The cold used to be a thing I dreaded. Now I begin to look forward to it, finding comfort in the need for warmth, to be bundled while I walk and notice things, like the patterns of ice that outline a leaf in the hoarfrost of the day. The nearby pond becomes more and more…

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Later in the week, I bought a small bottle of iron gall ink—made in the way ink had been made for centuries, from Roman times if not earlier up until the nineteenth century when new materials and technologies made it less common.

I thought about those cooled, drowsy wasps after I bought the ink. Of how ink had for so long be…

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The term for this candle-lighting celebration is called wayzgoose or waygoose, for reasons that no one really seems to understand. The etymology is specious at best. Most likely it was some slang that was known by printers and scribes, working in their words on the page in the shadowy light in terms now lost to us. Sounding like the way of the goose, I wonder if it had something to do with migration and departure.

This is the first fall in two decades that I have not been in Anchorage…

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In other years, living in Anchorage, that shift of light towards August would be a harbinger of fall—typically the birch would start to turn yellow two weeks later, rains would come, and the air would start to have a stronger chill. Here I thought about what it foretells—more heat, still warm nights, the smell of dry grass and blackberries heating in the sun. There is yet much more summer to come here.

I’ve been walking in the woods for small walks with the dog, taking time to admire the green canopy. How a small breeze shifts the light filtering through young maples. Swallowtail butterflies, appear…

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In 1620, when Mary Wroth (1587—1653), became one of the first English women to publish a novel with her name attached, she was roundly condemned for it. With a plot that many deemed too transparent to her own scandalous life as part of the Sidney family and proximity to the English court, one member of parliament accused her of being a “hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster.” Another critic accused her of libel, claiming she “thincks she dances in a net”—implying that she audaciously believed she was free to be public and didn’t realize she was entangling herself in more public scandal.

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