We Find Ourselves Only By Looking Out at What Looks Back: 100 Days of Self Portraits⁠
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Today is the 1st day of #the100dayproject , and I am ready for an exploration. My past projects have been structured and methodical and very easy to photograph. This year will be messy and I shall embrace it — from different mediums to my attempt to capture the disappearance and shedding of my self. It is both unmooring and invigorating. ⁠
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Monday 16 February, 2026

Am I a good witch or a bad witch?⁠
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Why does the random opening of a book so often feel like the channeling or constellating of conversation and/or thoughts already coursing wildy through? ⁠
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I am in New Mexico visiting in her cozy old rambling house filled with books and colour and art and art supplies and so many words between us that the windows and doors last night were bulging which was fine because it let in the cool desert air which I so desperately needed for my lungs, ⁠
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We tried to watch Bright Star but the abundance of words had us pause and rewind and pause so we drew what was on the screen (every pause miraculous) and chattered on too late into the night. ⁠
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Dear universe,
may this week’s time extend unnaturally⁠…
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PS: the sorting of films on Criterion fed us a yearning section which lead us to the hilarious portmanteau yearnal, I mean, do these exist? Perhaps I’ll bind a yearnal for myself this week. ⁠

Thursday 19 February, 2026

Perhaps a bit of both, but this morning I am feeling a bit bad-witchy.

Already now, I am on the other side of this short trip — there is never enough time, no matter the slowing — which is possible, even with the thread I found.

Yesterday I wandered along the desert’s trails for not long enough. I listened to the too-lilting voices of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Bella Freud, then switched to music which is what I need more, but it was too late. I held on tightly, and the thread snapped, and I fell. When I looked up I saw the faded pastel palette of the desert cemetery and ran to it only to discover I’d been walking in circles, my feet tangled in broken bits of threads. Trying to catch them all, I caught none as the wind swept them away.

Last night a little snow fell and I awoke, startled at having nearly just murdered someone. I held her in my arms and applied pressure to the unintended wound, her heart still pumping when I awoke.

In my dream, my journal was stolen again. And the Hasselblad, in the thief’s haste, was sideways on the ground. It was my current journal. I worried that the book’s disappearance would lead to the disappearance, too, of my winter memories. Though this winter is too cold and I’ve not seen any snowdrops yet, for the ice shell is heavy for them, I still have warm, warm memories from it. Perhaps today, on the snow-melted hillside where I planted thousands of bulbs, maybe. Maybe it will all come back. But the journal hasn’t disappeared. Nothing has.

About the lost memories. I was listening to Michael Pollan talk about his new book, A World Appears, and consciousness, and the “importance of time to the construction of the self.” And I wondered if this is why going back into old journals induces a kind of illness and weariness. The journal doesn’t allow for memories to transform and drift. It stops the potential transformation of so many sheddings.

Except when I uncover things Søren and Silas said. Those are golden memories and I laugh wildly over the journals in the rereading.

It sounds like Spring today.

.

ps: Though this is a public space and sharing, it is a private commitment to myself to show up. It feels so echoey and quiet, but here I am.

The light pouring into my studio this morning is perfect. Morning muted, snow muted, luminous. This is the kind of day I want to or used to want to make photographs in, as an old photographer friend used to say. He was a mysterious round man with a round face and round glasses who always disappeared and reappeared. I’ve not seen him in a long time. The last time was accidental and on Walter’s birthday. The friend was ill and had gone out into the cold night in search of local honey. When he learned it was Walter’s birthday, he gifted the honey to him. We tried to refuse, but he insisted. This was before the pandemic, when being sick in public was normal. When running into a friend on the street was normal. I’d never seen him in anything other than black pants, black shirt, round glasses, and red socks. I went with him once, or more than once, to the sock man in New York City, where he had been buying his red socks for years. And always a camera. What kind of camera? Ah, as I move through the memory, I know it was a Canon, when only moments ago, when I wrote this as a letter, I did not know what kind of camera he carried. He tried to convince me to switch. I am finally convinced, so many years later, but paralyzed with options.

His finger was always on the trigger and the shutter and aperature were always opening and closing. That delicious small sound of an old film camera. Snap. He managed to seat himself at Helmut and June Newton’s dinner table once.

Life so quickly rivers into new realities. Do dark photography dinners with strangers sill exist, or is all bright light and dependent upon our own individualness, our own screens and solitudes?

If I do use the light this morning, it will be for a letter (I did!) The letter from which I am writing this. And for sewing another Dream Journal, and digitally documenting for the obsessive ongoing nature of onlining. I will not yet make a photograph with my old camera, my old friend, who always accompanied me. Who bruised me with its weight, whose shutter clunk was the sound of me being. Making a photograph requires so much more than what I’ve been doing with my image capturers for a long time now. This obsessive documenting of everything. WhoTF cares? For now, I take a photograph of the camera seeing.

I long for something accidental and unexpected — something riskier.

I don’t know what I am, or what I ever was. I never did have a name for it. There are just so many ways to see the world. Inevitably, the unexpected will be nudged.

“Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we remember to remember…”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle the light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”

-Carl Gustav Jung

Water Log, 23 December 2025. My mom would have been 75 years old today, but she isn’t. And she never will be. Today’s water log is tears and snow. Fragments of what was make us all dots and dashes. None of us are rivers. Or perhaps we all are, collectively. We need that, I think: The Rivering. It comes with the remembering.

My mom died three days before her 70th birthday, so when this time of year comes around I remember her death — the snowy chaos of it — her sisters, her mom, her partner To(e), and others: the police, my brother. She died the day before the darkest day — though it felt darkest for weeks. I closed her eyelids and they opened again — it took many closings for them to stay.

She was my closest person — until she wasn’t.

This year feels like the first remembering.

We celebrated with a feast Pip would loved — shrimp cocktail, (gluten-free buckwheat) pasta with artichoke hearts, olives, and clams. (virgin) Bloody Mary’s with celery trees in each one, and (gluten-free maple-slightly-sweetened) carrot cake with spiced dates in ghee* on top.

Pip would have wanted all the vodka and all the sugar, but alas, the times have changed.

After dinner we walked for miles and chattered and I cried some more. We saw the garish, obscene Christmas lights — plastics and inflatables, with their awful buzz and stench. I condemn this house year after year. It replicates like an illness — the land fuller and fuller of random baubles. The neighbor’s houses too, a sick competition.

Someday I’ll let them be. Perhaps next year.

spiced dates in ghee* - a gift from Jeanne Oliver that arrived in the post yesterday, perfect timing!

Yesterday, upon arriving in the parking lot of a small business I had intended to visit, I felt exhausted — like I couldn’t walk in and mutter hello. The weight of the day left me wordless. We pulled out of the parking lot, me and Pearl, and I noticed a new-to-us trail sign and pulled into the snow-covered lot where a few other trucks sat. It was warm, despite the snow. Uncoated, we began our slippy hike.

The trail was unseeable — I followed footprints with rope in the sole and the sudden big-footed and barefooted tracks of a hopscotcher. Two lefts, two rights, then one of each side by side and wide — a big stopping.

As I began to feel more confident with my smooth-soled footfalls, my pocketed hands felt the pen and journal tucked away, and my thoughts drifted to letters. So many letters sent and unsent, the accumulation of both, and the fear and over-thinking of not getting them right. About five years ago in December, just after my mom died, (and just after we found Pearl), I received a letter in the mail from a writer and stranger with whom I was embarking upon a project. It was bewildering — the handwritten name in the upper left-hand corner, the signature. And the warmth. I wrote a lot of letters in response but sent none.

Pearl and I walked until I was lured by what looked like an untrodden path and she was suddenly overcome with the zoomies. I could barely contain her. We walked wobbly on the slippy snow until she found deer tracks to follow — the comfort of someone else. It was then I realised we were lost. Of course she’d known!

Is that when it started? The writing and the not sending? Writing to a writer and the feeling of not good enough? Oh, the ruminating!

I’ve been bumbling about, leaning into this unhealthy uncertainty.

In our lostness, we were hooked by clawed and grasping thorns of multi-flora rose and snagged by the red brambled arches popping out of the snow. Blast these ever-greens and ever-reds. Though not all that’s green in winter is unwanted. Last night I dug out vibrant sprigs of rosemary and added them to our dinner.

I sent a letter this week that upon reflecting I cringed at sending. It is so easy to text, to type, to go. To worry briefly but the worry in the deep sea of digital screen stuff is a thing to be swallowed. But paper — oh the agony of being stupid on paper! and smudgy.

Comfort found in footsteps. She isn’t a forest dog anymore. We’re found, Mama. I’ve found us. And then I realized they were our footprints. We’d been here before. And now we are chasing a Heffalump! A Heffalump!

New letter please.

In my letter box I found a stack of written and unsent letters. And a stack of letters unresponded too. I stuff the started letters into an envelope and put a few stamps on it. As for the unresponded to, that will take time.

Why the paralysis when there is potential for magic and heart beating off trail?

No one is upset to receive a letter I think, and if they are, they are forgetting.
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I am nothing without pretend. ⁠
⁠I’m the only one I can be sure.⁠
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Sending lots of letters today — as they are, and as they will be.

ps: I did end up visiting Ugmonk — and what a pleasure it was to chatter away into the early winter nightfall.

In the morning

warm in just a sweater and thin pants I traverse the stepping stones from house to studio with hoarfrost fairies dancing about sparkling and spirited                                 

Last night

the nearly full moon illuminated my early walk but this morning the world is inky black Did the early birds sing?

I’ve been writing in this journal since the 20th of November and it had a cover, briefly, but the book didn’t open well. The gutter/hinges, were too tight with all of the layers so I cut it apart to rebuild and the thing that may be the real problem is my struggling with a word. I want water. Please help. Send your favourite water words my way. Send them on the wind, write them down, call me, tell me, tuck them into raindrops and hoarfrost, or put them here, in the comments.

Please.

Yesterday I joined in our second annual Tiny Tinned Treasures adventure. Here are some photographs of my desk and things I made on the call. Thank you to everyone who joined us!

PS: A peak Peg and Awl’s new Sendak Nutshell. We first made this for silly fun for an artist who makes miniature paintings. But after some time with it, I grew to love the Nutshell — it is perfect for the limited things I’ve been using!

Upon rising Leah said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so still!”
Indeed. I doubt I ever have been. This was weird.

But the session has disappeared, like the image of the skeletal trees in the luminous light of dawn this morning en route to Silas’s school disappeared. My life has become a desperate attempt to catch everything. Is it putting a name to the inkiness — aphantasia? Or the genetics — double APOe4 — that may bring on an even darker inkiness? Or is it winter. Or time?

The way things come together and move apart and the combinations of these comings and goings, every encounter, every word combination, every child, every apple — every random thing. They let me know that anything is possible. And nothing, too. I want to be there for all of it. But sometimes in the alling there is a noneing. Chase two rabbits, catch none.

I put the windows down on my way home, and the music up. I let the cold air energize my warm body. I look forward to my next session with stillness.

Folktale Week’s unexpected joining.

I just returned from a two-mile search for my new, lost, pen, following the route Pearl and I took last night. It is 34 degrees outside and the ground was still sparkling. Despite the cold, I didn’t put on a coat — my body is warm enough, though my right hand is swollen and numb. I write in my journal, but the writing looks like someone else’s. I didn’t find my pen. This ritual of losing things is a friendly reminder that nothing is permanent.

On my walk I thought of journaling, and how I am embracing the questions and sharing of this thing that I do, and that I’ve always done. In the early days of Instagram, Instagram attempted to nudge me into journaling. The journal posts had the greatest response, and instagram bought a photograph I shot and shared of my journals for their office and to use on the platform for Sections or Categories — just before Discovery. I asked if they would tag me instead of paying me the $2000 they offered. They said no to the tagging and sent a check. A week later tagging was their system. Of course it was. Where might I be now if they had tagged me? More importantly — where would I be if I embraced the nudge to share more about journaling and bookbinding then? Was I being contrarian, or just not ready?

I don’t know, but here I am, many years later embracing that old nudge. Would I be a different person today if I’d followed that path? Perhaps I am writing from a simulated life — the one were I didn’t chase that carrot. This one, here, now.

I wonder where that other simulated life is. The one where I embraced the journaling that I’ll never stopped doing. Is she happy?
Did it take her on a good and wild ride?
Will I know?

I don’t know. But I think that anything is possible.

I forgot yesterday was Thursday, my Substack day. So here I am this morning, a little stressy about this lost pen, scribbling today’s thoughts. Is there another simulation where I remembered yesterday’s Substack? What, then, did I write about?

My, how this can go on, like the old Hole in a Bucket song my mom and I sang for days until she said, “no more!”

Things I Love, 2025

Anyway, I have begun a new everydaying, starting here:

Things I Love, 2022

My first, Things I Love. A left-handed gift guide. I still love most of these treasures. (But I cannot find the notebook!)

A little AMA

”Good evening to my fellow northeast friend. I’ve been so inspired by journaling again. Thank you for that!! I even made up a few simple journals this weekend using your tutorials. Question—with journaling being so personal and you being so prolific with it, how do you censor the books? Are they off limits in your home despite them being out and about? Wondering how to preserve what’s mine (I write in my head all day-and now on paper) but for mostly me to see. Thanks so much!

My husband often says, “The solution to pollution is dilution.”

I think of this often in relation to my journaling. There is just. so. much of it. I don’t imagine anyone getting through to the gritty parts. And then, there is so much in the universe, even if someone were to find a juicy page, would they remember?

I leave my books out. They’ve been read. And they may have even been hurtful a time or two, but the struggle to hide seems daunting. After this question, I may out up a please do not read sign.

As for sharing online: I try to blur lines that I don’t want read, or put my hand or an object over the pages. I am more careful here, but just by a little.

I’ve been filling my journals too fast these days. I worry I’ll be found dead and suffocated someday in my studio, with no space left for oxygen, and no path to the sink for water. Maybe it’s the too-thick pen nib. No. It’s a restlessness. Or the knowing that I’ll dig something up. That’s what it is — an excavation. I write until a line feels like the beginning of a lost thread, or the corner of a buried treasure box. And then I scratch around a bit — I don’t know why.

Sometimes there are multiple threads, like today:

1. I exhaled, sank to the bottom, and swirled algae around my wrists and ankles like a new bottom-feeder-pond-cleaner.

2. Ari refused my car-stitched book blocks — “they are too loose”, she said dismissively.

3. I am reminded of Walter’s favourite picture book, Frederick, by Leo Lionni.

So now what?

I am outside. My clothes match the fallen leaves. Partridge Pea is holding on to some final flowers. Seed pods and fungi invite a closer look. Echinacea is having one last hurrah — its twisted petals extending outward from their summer fresh middle. Mountain mint, from afar, appears to be flourishing like a field of poppies in Oz, their bobbing heads outstretched.

We need some book blocks stitched for Peg and Awl orders so I did some over the weekend. Ari refused my car-stitched bindings — “they are too loose”, she said dismissively. I taught you bookbinding, you can’t refuse me! I thought but didn’t say. I walk off feeling scolded and wonder what will become of my loosley bound pages. Something, of course.

I stitch in my lap, in the car, on an aero plane. I didn’t learn to bind books to become a crafts person, but to create a container for my endless loose thoughts. I cannot be bound. It is fitting that my bindings boing. I return to my studio to investigate the rows of broken in page-filled journals lined up like soldiers on my shelves. Most were made by me, some by Ari. Her books are bound better than mine will ever be. I know that.

I don’t work like a crafts person. I change my surroundings, my tools, my intentions. I have no goal, no purpose. I float. Sometimes I feel bad for myself to be so untethered — always a stranger or a visitor. But mostly I know that the combination is the magic of Peg and Awl, in life. Every business, every project needs a wanderer. Who else to sniff out new things? To push beyond what works and embark on some new adventure? But they could survive in the wild, I reason. And I could not. I am reminded of Walter’s favourite picture book, Frederick, by Leo Lionni.

“What about your supplies, Frederick?”

When I grow weary of the bursts spent catching and comprehending sparks and migrating down endless paths, I jump into the pond. I’ve taken to swimming everyday for energy and a rekindling. It is solved by swimming, I think. Sometimes it is late before I jump in — by then I am only doing it because missing a day will lead to missing more days. The continuity contains me. Now, one late night swim with no algae gathering by day, means a furrier green pond the next. The ecosystem needs creatures other than myself. It needs crafts-creatures, skilled in their area of expertise. I exhale, sink to the bottom, and strange water-creature that I am, swirl the algae around my wrists and my ankles and toss it onto the boulders edging my new wonderland. I’ve really got to collect those stinking piles. On the rocks, the once gorgeous green algae has become slimy and ugly. I leave the piles, for now, to collect flies.

The swimming and the sparks are always so good. Last night, I felt the tugging of what won’t be. This morning is calm. There is a bursting in me, always. I heard it will be less so after the swimming. That when the swimming stops there could be a big collapse.

A withering.

Let it not be so. ⁠

Today I am thinking about the undoing. How, when I think too much or want a thing too much, I see it the same way over and over again — tired of the repeating, but unable to reimagine. To get unstuck, I make small notebooks. To get unstuck, I take a walk. To get unstuck, I swim.

Not saying the results are great, but the doing is. The newness and the getting out of my way.

So when the swimming stops
if the swimming stops
it will stop, because you’ll be leaving the pond twice in October
so it will stop
and then it will be cold and you don’t know how you’ll feel
maybe I’ll just jump in and jump out
yeah, maybe that — or maybe nothing at all

So when the swimming stops, I have to find a new form, a new way to feel the pulsing. That’s all. That’s all it ever is, really.

We can swim in all kinds of stuff.

Notebook Talk (inspired by conversation with my writing group this week)

There are too many blank books that remain blank in this world. I suggested making small, easy-to-make notebooks. (tutorial links below)

Each new shape envelopes a new project. Or each new project embraces the new shape. This symbiosis helps form something new — try it!

Bind your own new perspective:

I’ve been soggy for days, perhaps all summer. Not a heavy soggy, but light.

I’ve been a storm.

Yesterday I swam in a downpour, climbed a dead tree in the rain, sat at a soccer field in a drizzle, and at night took a long walk in the smirr. My wool underwear is draped around the bathroom from my daily swims — from the days when I wear something.

Mostly, it is easier to wear nothing and not have the soddenness hanging about.

With all this water and my spirits soaring, I think my dad was right so many years ago — I must be some kind of water creature. I love the rain. I love storms. I love, love, love our pond and would sleep in it if I wouldn’t drown.

Maybe I wouldn’t drown.

(Now to transform this energy into something useful)

I’ve been inspired by a 235-year-old fallen White Oak who lies unflatteringly exposed in the field, her insides laid bare, draped in dead mile-a-minute with bark flaking and limbs uncomfortably strewn — even for the dead. Seeable bugs are few; their exoskeletons peppered about, and sawdust, and fungus also dying, draped in webs of long gone critters. All manner of poo was atop her, nestled into crevaces. We scrunched down to investigate with sticks – owl pellets, fox scat, and who knows whose other dried excrement. It too had been long abandoned: crunchy, airy, styrofoam-like — even in the rain.

It was quiet yesterday, except for us. Though we were too. Insects were flapping, grubs were annoyed at our lifting of their stumps. Go. Go away.

Go, go, go
Go away, go away, go away
Go, go, go
Go away, go away

Anna's Oak Group Exhibition Opening

• Friday, October 17, 2025

• 6:00 PM 8:00 PM

• Warwick Furnace Farm LLC810 Warwick Furnace Road Glenmoore, Penna, 19343United States (map)

postscript:

I learned the word OTROVERT this morning and I feel explosive with recognition. I ordered The Gift of Not Belonging and have Peatlands coming. I’m slowly back and forthing through The Waste Land. Please show me the way to more time.

I often hear people express apprehension when starting a new journal — fancy and unfancy alike. In the midst of conversation with an apprehensive Journal-Starter who asked an abundance of questions to which I responded with snapshots of my journals’ insides, he had an idea: I could start his journal before sending it out — and I did!

I was immediately flooded with excitement and unease (and I briefly became the apprehensive journaler once again). I couldn’t say no.

After a few days, I gathered my favourite art supplies and morning energy — and filled the front page. I scribbled words I love, using ink I love, and an old pen I love (that I sent off with the book, rust and all). I also drew the dog I love and added a smudge of pink pastel to her face and tummy.

I won’t make a habit of starting the journals of others, but I really enjoyed this! As always when presented with something new — I learned something. If you know me at all, you know I so love unexpected adventures.

I’ve been making and filling books for much of my life, we have blank books available through our website, and we’ve made tutorials to share how we make books. Journals aren’t just for writers and sketchbooks aren’t for artists — they’re blank books for everyone! I fill them up in a variety of ways, and when I’m stuck, I pull from a well of ideas that I’ve never shared or listed so deliberately.

Simple Ways to Start (and Keep Going):

1. Abundance! Make your own books. Make a lot of books. If you buy them — don’t be precious! Know there will be more. Mistakes can be patched or cut out or scribbled upon. Mistakes must be made! Books can be burned! (but maybe, don’t)

2. Inspiration from Others: Read, go to the movies, have conversations with those close and with strangers! Write a quote from a book you’ve read or a fragment you’ve overheard. Eavesdrop at a café or a park. There is always magic floating around.
   

3. Draw: Draw something in front of you — a fruit, a bug, a dog, faces from an old photograph — you don’t have to make it up. (but you can!)
   

4. Document: Write about yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
   

5. Walk (or Move): A few steps outside and you will discover the universe is endlessly divining worthy moments. Solvitur ambulando — It is solved by walking.
   

6. Distill and Abstract: Make it a poem! If you feel too in the weeds detailing a day (I get stuck here) reduce the excess by distilling it into a poem. Try a Haiku!
   

7. Make Time: Set time aside each day — 5 minutes or an hour, it doesn’t matter, as long as you are consistent. I start my days this way and look forward to it every single morning. On the few days that I miss — I’m a monster! (And whilst on time, Date your entry, your future self will thank you!)
   

   *Tell your people! Make a sign. Lock your door or run for the woods. Interruptions turn me into more of a monster.
   

8. Let Someone Else: Let your kids start your journal, or your animals. Spill coffee, splatter ink. Ask a stranger! Any mark made will lead to the next!
   

9. Notice the Space: Find shapes in the margins or cut holes in the page and see what it frames on the page before and after.
   

10. Find Otherness! Try your non-dominant hand, draw with your eyes closed, walk and write!
    

11. Feelings: Sometimes my tears add texture to my pages or smudge the ink. Other times my angry pens gouge the paper. But mostly I am happy to be alive and for all of the in-betweens. Everything shows up on the page!
    

12. I Remember: Start with a memory ala Joe Brainard, or start a dream! (I find I remember future dreams more when I get in the habit of writing them down.)
    

13. Be Present: Don’t worry about what your journal should or will be — just make your marks and you will find your way!
    

14. Everything belongs: Use tape, glue, and glitter! Stuff things between the pages. Add letters from others, tickets, flattened bits from the natural world. Anything Goes
    

15. Trust: I often put things down before I’ve thought them through—as a more instinctual response to life and experiences. We overthink when we try to turn it into something, while it’s just an entry on a page, just let it go!
    

16. Experiment: Try a variety of tools and art supplies. Join me here next week to explore some of my favourite mark-making treasures, tools, and colours!

I included something on the second page of the journal, and the last, too, Maybe I went too far. Maybe’ he’ll ask for a replacement. Or a refund. Maybe h’e’ll love it!

I tucked a scrap in behind the thing on the second page. The space around the cut-out. The dogs that looked like foxes, the colour tests.

I love synchronicity. Humans. The sparks in random encounters.

What’s In My Journal by William Stafford

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Thing, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space for knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can’t find them. Someone’s terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

I share examples of all of these ideas throughout my Substack ramblings — I hope you find inspiration from them!

I welcome your ideas and prompts too! I think we all would.

After a long night and a low sleep score — 63 — I awoke strangely uplifted, so full of joy after hours (and oysters) with Claire. I even found pleasure in watching her so thoroughly enjoy a massive waffle cone enveloping a double scoop of ice cream that matched her outfit, fittingly. I can still kind of see* her, something that has been happening more and more. This is happiness.

We went back to the Peg and Awl shop and spent hours rearranging and making it feel shoppable. I learned so much, but as she grew more buoyant, I began to sink, my sleep schedule now aligned with the sun. I used to be an I’ll-sleep-when-I’m-dead person, but that, genetics, and the slow crawl of other things have given me a sense of doom I didn’t realize was developing.

I had already signed up for yoga, so I hopped on my bike before I could open the app and tap cancel. The morning was deliciously autumnal. Charlie Cunningham in one ear, my hair untied and flapping beneath my oversized and quite serious helmet, my new grey and quite tight yoga clothes on — I didn’t even look in a mirror before leaving — something I may come to regret.

Leah starts every yoga class with a thought. This morning, after trying to convince her daughters to eat more fruit and finding the mango they wanted unripe, she shared something she’d just learned: if you put an unripe mango with ripe bananas, it ripens faster. Then she said:

Ever notice how being close to the right energy helps you grow?

On my back on my mat I began to feel last night’s lack of sleep as I took in this thought in a kind of dream state. I scribbled words in my journal as poses allowed.

clarity, creatine, buoyancy
ripening fruits
little feelings of positivity toward self
plants to plant, lion’s mane
endless possibility
Everywhere Astonishments
fragments of things thought
may be enough
somedays

Today my sleep score is 90, and more words trickle in. I fill pages of my journal and I begin to reflect on those little feelings. One was this: On the mat, lying on my back, my new tight grey yoga stuff on, a little belly pushing between the tank top and pants, this thought arose:

You look cute, like a glow worm or a caterpillar — not a sausage today.

Also in this cloud puff of a thought — there is so much life yet to live! I saw a little European town I’d someday like to live in, a long bike ride to somewhere, and unfamiliar creatures I’d get to know. All of these things in that cloud at once! I am so good at appreciating the little things as they surround me in the present, but I am not very good at future thoughts. For many years I’ve had this heavy feeling that life is short. I don’t know where it came from. Perhaps the lack of health surrounding me, family illnesses. Or maybe it was when, in my twenties, I noticed I was confusing words like there and their. But in these past few weeks, these warmths and more have been washing over me, and they feel incredible. And they feel kind.

After yoga and the bike ride home, I got straight to gardening. I was listening to the carnival that is Asaf Avidan as I hopped happily along the boulders lining the perimeter of the pond to fetch plants and tools. Back in the bog I hunkered down in a kind of goddess pose pressing plants into the rocks, my wet bare foot pressing on the shovel to displace rocks that yesterday tore my fingernails apart in the repetition. I didn’t change out of my yoga clothes, so the bottom half of me was darker grey from sinking into the bog. I anticipated the pond guys filming and was buoyant with the layers of days.

Through Asaf, I heard Pearl’s wild barking and I looked up: a drone hovered above me. Suddenly aware — I yanked my tank top down, pulled my pants up, and chewed my gum maniacally. I hope they filmed me blissfully unaware too — I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

The pond is quiet again, the plants settling in. Above me, the Dawn Redwood looms. I think of Leah’s mango — it is magical how things change just by being near the right company.

*see
Î am trying to find my post about aphantasia, but haven’t found it yet… I will add link when i do!

Some old images from Everywhere Astonishments which I am suddenly thrilled to jump into again. The message from the glow worm!

When I go anywhere, I put the destination into maps and it directs me to there whilst slowly sucking my brains out. I get to focus on anything then, except where I am and where I am going. Gone are the days of unfurling an ill-fitting map in the front seat and having an idea of where I am in the world.

I am always lost.

Now that this is sinking in, I think I should give myself more time to find places that I shouldn’t have to look for, and to notice things that I seem to not notice.

These last few weeks I’ve been wobbly. Wobbly in the too hot heat, wobbly from music that crawls in and disrupts, wobbly — both lost and in the rightest place.

This song hovers:

Your body is a ghost town
Ground fog climbing up your skin
You can’t feel anything
You can’t feel anything else

You’ve got a wreck(leh,eh)less mind
High speed, eyes closed, in the middle of the road
You can’t see anything
You can’t see anything else…

There’s just that hum

I press repeat for days. I obsess like this until a song positively devours me.

I am untethered.

Perhaps the vagueness allows this way of thinking to shape shift and form fit. Or — there is efficiency in the subconscious. Something will take root.

Our overgrown lawn of stiltgrass was allowing ticks to flourish so I hopped onto the mower and mowed, with headphones over earbuds listening to the song and singing — even lawn mowing with poetry is magic.

I wanted to ride off into the night.

You wish you'd be shaking like you used to
But your core is so still
You wish you'd be shaking like you used to (Mmm)

We live in a managed reality. There is a teetering in this want for unrest and stillness. I appreciate being home this summer, and habits made strange or beautiful by impulse and repetition.

This morning is cool and so many insects make so many noises that I’ve begun to tease apart. Much has happened this summer.

You wish you'd be shaking like you used to
But your core…

If I don’t write it, will it disappear?

*Simple Bookbinding Tutorial

**Lyrics from Core by Black Sea Dahu.

Maybe the guy — if it was a guy — took the keys to the house because I haven’t seen them since that night and so the door remains locked. I had to lock it from the outside; it wouldn’t lock from the inside. I can almost hear Walter’s voice, dry and amused:, “Margaux, if you knew how things worked…” The metal plate flapped in the wind. I tried with brute force and quickly realized a broken lock would be of no help tonight. I found the key — miraculously on the first try — and locked the door for the tenth or so time in seven years. Then, barefoot and trembling in the rain, I walked carefully across the porch joists, covered in melting waterproofing tape, to the other door, the one I hadn’t yet locked.

I had been walking and finishing my book; the epilogue swelled in the rain. As I closed the book I saw a slow red car with batman shaped break lights crawling down the street. I suspected I might be blocking his driveway and quickened my pace. But he didn’t turn — he continued to glide slowly past the other houses, tell-tale lights a-glow. He made a right in the same direction I was headed. I imagined shouting the names of the people who live in the vulture house at the turn if this slow driver is up to no good. But it is too peopled here for real trouble, I propose, and return to reading. When I finish, I begin to have an energetic out-loud conversation with myself. The car vanished from my thoughts.

Back home, invigorated, and start taking out the trash. Alone for the week, I’d begun cleaning out cabinets and drawers; the bags were heavy with the weight of things no longer needed. I love a good lightening and solitude. As I hoisted the bags across the porch, I saw it again: the red car, the lights, inching slowly down our street in front of our lone house. My hands trembled as I checked my phone. My walk was an hour and twenty-three minutes. Has he been circling for forty-five? I left the trash on the porch and slipped inside, suddenly aware of it’s fishbowlness with so many windows and no curtains or working shutters. Pearl was curled up on the sofa like a pill bug, burdened by the impending storm and all its noises.

I tried to lock the door from the inside. It didn’t work.

I imagined a face at the glass—wide eyes peering in, first at one window, then all of the windows. The house was stifling. I locked every old window, the wobbly glass turning each pane into a funhouse mirror for imagined intruders. My heart thudded.

I texted a neighbor, the ex-cop. “This is probably nothing, but I was walking and… Messaging you just in case.” Within minutes a text, “Did it go left or right?”

After more circling, “I don’t see a red car.” The rain intensified. I called him and we chatted about chases and writing until my heartbeat slowed a bit. I called Claire to bring it back to normal. If Katie wasn’t in Japan, and if I called her, we’d be talking about serial killers — no doubt. I was grateful for Claire’s calm — though she’d just come in from looking for, and finding, a neighbor’s lost dog in the storm. We talked about creatures and work and oysters, and I grew sleepy.

In the morning, I felt foolish. Or something like it.

I hadn’t put my phone on airplane mode — just in case. Buzzes came in through the night offering the thinnest veil of sleep.

And the storm smacked the sky, each thunderclap a colossal belly flop. The night would not settle.
And the door is still locked.
And the keys are missing.

ps: Thank you for your concern in advance dear Reader — we’ve finally changed the lock on the door!

Our studio tour is next month and I am not sure yet what I’ll show. When yesterday I went into the barn, I found a window where the wall I was planning to use was. How did that happen? Walter quickly cut a piece of plywood to fill the space for me. He is all problem solving and heart.

Now to fill it. I channeled my map making kid and my every year’s desire to share a land transformation story at the Five Acre Wood. But if you visit, you will not find a garden — there is no garden here. But I shall give to you a tiny window — nothing fancy, made from trash. And if you look through it, you will find magic, as do I.

Dear Katie —

It can be good, the bad timing. I shall scribble to you instead. So much wants out but the talking makes a hurried writer of me. You were in my dream again, another clanky old ski lift over a hilly park — this time in Philadelphia. I dropped something important from that great height. This morning I listened to eighty-three year old Joan Baez on On Being. She has a book of poems entitled, “When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” In the author’s note, she describes a book that is "filled with unschooled techniques, undisciplined phrasing, haphazard thoughts, and much channeling from sources residing within me and sources unknown.”

Yesterday, in my writing group, we talked about how adding un to something - rather than negate the thing, sets it free. It becomes a freedom for the unlearned, the ungardener, the unvoice, and invites the feelinged wanter to put marks into the world.

I am a feelinged wanter, and so are you.

That is poetry, I think. All of these years I said I didn’t understand it, weighed down by rules I didn’t know. Weren’t the first poets, the first anythings the same, without rules?

I’ve always been a small thinker. But many littles make a lot.

Here, a poem from this week:

My Dog

When it is warm inside, 
Strong sun through closed windows, and
Pearl is on her flea market quilt,
I am transported to childhood,
To my warm wallpapered room,
Sunny yellow, green, orange
To a time before words 

Love,
Margaux

Things come together. They always do. Yedda is feathering her eggs in the nest in preparation for her outing with Toots.

Another little window. Another sunny spot on my map.

Without a frame, what?

Things need containers. Books make a great frame. So does a blank page. I often have too many, but when I don’t, I haven’t enough. The frame of a show is most effective for me. It has a date and a time and a place. Three frames before I’ve even begun!

We open our studio in West Chester, Pennsylvania for The County Studio Tour

SATURDAY, MAY 17, 2025
10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2025
11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

2023 Studio Tour here!

Now begins the stitching.

And the collecting of frames.

I have so many tucked away in strange places. Yesterday I found two small circles with sun-faded faces. A few days before, two small rectangles framing gorgeous silhouettes of strangers — Alma and Doris. I wonder if I’ve brushed shoulders with their descendants? I took Alma out of her old, old frame - It is likely she lived in it longer than she lived in life.

The silhouette is black, flocked, delicate.

This undoing is a part of the doing for me. As I tried to clean the soiled rough cut class I thought of so many frames I’ve undone. The cuts and slices and stories crumbling. Dusty, filthy.

Little Windows

Small wobbly-glassed panes
My eyes, their eyes, and
Things left behind,
     Open, close, open close
     Little Windows

Through trees, through wind, 
Smudges, smears, cracks
Airy petals, dainty wings
     Open, close, open close
     Little Windows

Overcast grey, when all is crisp, 
Aperture wide, things that are
Are things that aren’t
     Open, close, open close
     Little Windows

Even the thread, the one long strand
Is made from so many sheep
Whose eyes then and now
     See through so many 
     Little windows

3 April 2025

Hello, Hello, It's Day 33 of This and Week 3 of That!

I love being a beginner.

I love knowing that there is so much yet to learn and the possibilities are endless. And just when I get good at a thing, I grow a bit weary and look for something new again. Look feels too active here. I slowly slip away from the obsession, flop around a bit, and then find something new.

After so many years — I see the pattern clearly.

There was a time maybe, when this hopping felt like failure. That all of these new beginnings are a lack of consistency. That could have been yesterday. It comes and it goes. It now feels like neuroplasticity — a marvel! And I see how all of these seemingly disparate things actually hold each other up, and me too. Nothing is lost.

Also, started sending poems again which inspired me to pair a kind of poem with a Tetrapak print and envelopes and stamps. And yesterday, in Drawing Workout, we met Mantraste whose work is so so good — even more so as he talked about it and the bails he never helped his father lift. He also publishes books and said this about one of them:

“It’s just a fast book. I make it, print it in two weeks, and sell it.”

Dang. I am ready.

Also, here are today’s flowers, Day No. 33 of #the100dayproject based on the sketches for Week No. 3 of Drawing Workout

Pray tell, which do you prefer? Beginner or other?

I didn’t say what caused the stink and the digging last March. Here’s what we found: A dead and melting rat on the radiator shaped like a banana — the middle body lower then the head and the tail as it melted into the hot metal fins. That was the stench. Almost too much to share back then, but since we’ve named this two-room merge The Rat Room, it’s time I ‘fess up. And it wasn’t just that one, sad, sinking, stinking rat —there were rat mummies and rat poo. There was a rat’s nest made of things gathered, plastic paperish things from wrappings or plant trappings or whatever it is humans destroy things with that last forever. And there were skulls and bones and bits, but overall, not so much.

And what are these fragments to me anyway?
And what is much?

I am still looking through my old journals, but realize the tidy sections I’ve made here will never suffice. I am like a gigantic privy full of fragments and I won’t ever be the one to puzzle them together. I will instead, braid them. I will give them a new form in which they were never intended. I am nearly finished looking through the first journal that I started sharing from last week and I’ve begun digging into the next, and I’ve come to see it is still poetry time. The journal is full of guttural sounds and mostly bad lyrics to songs performed in front of other humans.

I went to bed singing this old song about the journal thief and an adventure with my mom, blended into one something, see?

My veins like vines decorate my arms, I follow with calloused fingertips
”Hug the tree-lined fences”, I say, “Hide, we gotta get away”
She limps out in oncoming light and we play finger guns at traffic soldiers
Is this what it takes to wake me up, goofy disguises, should I start all over?

A minor thing a broken string. Nothing effects me
Stolen words my stolen mind. All grown up I didn’t get angry this time 

I had to walk ‘long the water to get to the aeroplane to get back home again
He said, “I’ll call for you a cab” I said, “No thanks, I’d rather take the walk”
And when I got to the Beastie’s edge the water monster, relentlessly toppled me
Each time I stood back up again, I didn’t know in which direction it sent me

A minor thing a broken string. Nothing effects me
Stolen words my stolen mind. All grown up I didn’t get angry this time

It is all a scavenger hunt and a piecing together of fragments because everything is sherds or shards and cracks and light and incomplete pages and sentences and thoughts and messy rooms and changing beings who remain the same in part. It all feels like so much this morning as I lament things missed and long for and things not done.

I messaged one of the few humans I get to miss in this world and she wrote back quickly and included photographs and said she is in Barcelona. Barcelona! We just returned from there! I may not hear from her for months now, or years even, though I begged. I can only imagine us running into one another there, I mean, we just fucking missed each other. By days.

”When did you arrive?”

Silence.

And thus, more fragments.

I was heartbroken when Walter took out the pocket doors and the built-in cabinets, as they were the parts of the house I first fell in love with. But they were practically floating on cairns of field stone and brick from the last restoration project done in the 1970s or so. In the transformation, we will make the house more useful. Whose life was it that I wanted to preserve anyway? I, the braider, shall take pleasure in this new space - both in the process which included digging up the old dirt floor and once again hauling rocks, to hanging up art. Already, I’ve started to gather treasures for the walls and ideas for new making. What would I be without these fragments that are all seeds?

ABOUT THE BOOK:

I made this one at an acquaintance’s house in Westport, Ireland. It was a glass house, as I remember it, by the sea and it had been raining for days. I bound the book to Luka Bloom and used my thighs as a book press. I got the paper and old leather in Amsterdam after the thief stole my journal.

The leather is old. It was taken off of furniture made a century ago. This was the first I made with old leather. My second journal. I learned how to make it from the Cat Journal I bought in Venice. This new one came undone in the same way! But this one is much bigger and with nicer paper. It is so full of tiny words and will take me forever to pick through.

I wrapped the book board with rice paper that I rolled in my fingers until soft. Then I put the old leather on top of the front and back covers - I didn’t wrap it around as it was too fragile. I cut an X out of book board and glued it to the spine piece. When I glued the leather on I spent some time pressing it around the X. The darker leather was new scrap. I also cut out strips of board to mimic, loosely, the stitching you see in other bindings, like this Tome that we make at Peg and Awl. I glued a premade headband in that was so long it came undone a thousand times. The book swelled with glued-in things. I put a tie on to hold it together.