for two years and more my life has been a county fair midway of wild rides, baby amusements, carnies enticing, stomach wrenching, confusing existence and what i’ve just learned is called ‘brain fog’. covid had nothing on my personal life, and personally covid barely affected me, for which i am very thankful. but oh. i woke up two mondays ago feeling like i knew who i was, whose body i was inhabiting, and also, what joy was, or rather, the possibility of joy. and like the fern unfurling a kind of hope in the spiraling of little daily moments.

when the plan you build for your life, your roadmap, your text, becomes unknowable, written in a palimpsest of other ideas, meaning spirals out of control into unknowing, and if you are me (as i am) you push back in strength because to not do so means to whirlpool into one small dot. somehow the spiral motion caught me up, and like all these fiddleheads around me, the woods i live in, the birds, bugs, leaves, and down the hill the little river all said let go. be here. now. one night I heard a pair of coyotes vocalizing in a way i never heard before: a poem.

beginnings of kami-ito came along as fern shadows, and beetle paths

something pulled at me and stepped aside leaving a trail, you can make some thread, you can wax it or weave it or spin up all the meanings of the marks you’ve made into hidden away message, a palimpsest of how a day is for you, says the paper to me. i made prints mapping the comings of spring, and hid them away, remembering that it’s now ok to remember it all, to learn what it means, to visit the pain of being human.

crow hanging by the workshop door reminds me.

lessons during this personal hell need to be remembered for what they are, survival for now, and flourish eventually. fiddleheads flourish.

so this little handful of days are passing now, days grown long, and warmer, thunder rumbles and birds are singing in loud midday seriousness.

so i can move into summer, feeling like the real is a good thing to be part of. that I can build my heart back into its old grown up self. don’t know yet what that will grow into, unfurling and changing, but i’m working on stuff—books, texts, poems are coming again, trusting the making and i’m trying to remember to leave space for them to grow. i wish you, gentle reader, good making and good reading, enjoying, laughing, loving. be fierce and fair and free. all of that, but if you can be kind. well, that’s a thing, too. a huge thing. friends during this whole thing have meant my world had ground to build on, i’m thanking them here and now.

my hands thank you and hold yours in caring.