Every summer morning, we open the back door before the heat of the day settles in. We open it to the sound of the quiet mountain world, when no lawnmowers or weed-whackers whine, when no cars growl to life or rumble across asphalt. The only sounds are birds chirping and maybe a gentle rustle of […]

I am reading Ann Patchett’s newest novel right now, and I wish I didn’t have to work or sleep so I could just read straight through. I’m here writing to keep myself from opening it before work. I don’t want to have to wrench myself away. Patchett is one of those novelists that I’ll read […]

I made a bucket list a while ago. On it was to learn a second language. I’m awed every day by my colleagues around the world who speak multiple languages. I’m inspired by their ability to drop into cultures, drop into countries, drop into conversations. When I added this item to my bucket list, when […]

I’m reading Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, and with each section—Why does typography matter?, hyphens and dashes, letterspacing—I think, ahhh, so that’s why I love the way The New Yorker looks. They are attentive to every tiny detail of publishing. The finished product is gorgeous as a result. Our son gave me a subscription to The […]

I thought I’d read this book before, but after finishing it this week, I’m not sure I have. I thought Fahrenheit 451 was a book about book burning and censorship, which it is, but it’s moreso a book about feeling threatened by ideas. In it, government didn’t insist on banning books. A particular political wing […]

It’s a lot harder than it seems to do nothing; to not distract ourselves. A couple of years ago, I read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I wanted to cultivate my creative self. I was game for all the exercises, and I performed them like the good student I am: morning pages, artist’s dates, […]

Over the past decade, I’ve come to love our home in the mountains. So much so that I thought that despite a lifetime of deep soul connection to the ocean, the coast no longer moved me. In recent years we’ve vacationed as a family to seashores and I’ve thought, meh. It’s fine. That changed this […]

This feels like a silly question to explore. It seems like, if one realizes one wants to begin a prayer practice, it would be obvious to know how to go about it. It turns out, if that one is me, that it’s not so obvious at all. I do not have a faith tradition to […]

When I heard Christopher Nolan was releasing a cinematic adaptation of The Odyssey this summer, I thought, oh yeah, I definitely want to see that. The Odyssey, along with the Iliad, is among our original stories, told orally nearly 3000 years ago, and the first of our written works in the West, about 600 years […]

We stopped in St. Louis on our way home from a family wedding this weekend and spent an overcast afternoon at the Missouri Botanical Garden. If you are into plants and ever find yourself in St. Louis, go. Go to the botanical garden. The beds burst with blooms and lush foliage. There are prairie beds, […]

I’m off work this week. It feels amazing to have time to myself that I don’t have to rush through, that I don’t have to be productive in. Each morning, I get up and blog. I check the writing prompt in my site’s dashboard, and it’s usually enough to get me going. I moved my […]

For whatever reason, reading as a pastime doesn’t seem to elicit side-eye or shame like playing video games or watching TV does. Reading is just as much of an escape from the real world as screens are, and as an avid reader, I often wonder, what am I trying to escape? I wonder if I […]

These past few weeks, as my job has ramped up, and my mind seems to constantly be on work — when I wake in the middle of the night, when I wake in the morning, as I walk, run, swim, eat — I’ve taken to sitting on a cushion on our bedroom floor for ten […]

When I think about the books and stories I appreciate most, the ones that really stick, plot is not typically the key feature. It has happened more than once that I’ve talked up a novel I love to someone, and they pick it up, get bored, and say, “Nothing happens in this book.” This is […]

It can be unnerving to write on the internet, to take what’s inside your mind, your heart, your deepest soul, and put it on the outside for other people to see. Possibly, the scariest part of writing publicly is the extent to which it makes you examine your own life and ask, “What’s interesting here?” […]

We’ve reached the time of year where we can open the windows to let the cool fresh morning in. We’ll need to close up mid-day when we start sweating; the air conditioner feels glorious when that happens. For now, I hear the whir of grasshoppers, the caw of crows, and the chirp of songbirds. When […]

Memory is a funny, fuzzy thing. Most of us can relate to not knowing if our first memories are our own or if they’re based on photographs we’ve seen or stories we’ve heard. Many untold, unphotographed memories are gauzy: I don’t recall specifics, like what year it was, or a teacher’s name, but I do […]