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And as I’m working on another piece, it takes longer these days with so many daytime thoughts, work demands, the world swirling unstoppable thoughts. So I’m sharing an essay from a time when I was still in the midst of a cold winter, dreaming of warmer days, and impossible things.

The days are beginning to change so swiftly, it’s that time in the turn of the year that the word melt moves back into the landscape in earnest—the sun higher and so noticeably bringing warmth to the still cold air that the house stays warmer. Last week it was a bit unseasonably cold, hovering in single digits to zero, and the house always has a hard time keeping up at those temps. Now within a week, the house is warm and full of light, despite temps only as high as 28F. My bulldog Gimli, enjoying the quiet of this morning, has slowly chased every angle of sun to bask in as the sunlight journeyed through the house. I learned years ago that a word for this is apricating—not so much becoming an apricot exactly, but the root of both words is the same—basking, of being exposed, open to the sun.

When I worked in Jordan I learned that a name for apricot in Arabic is mishmish (مِشْمِش)—which literally translated is never-never—i.e. impossible—a double not. It means that apricots are somewhat of an impossible fruit—only ripe the moment it’s picked from the tree, becoming a mealy mess if kept for any length of time. The term f’il mish-mish is essentially like saying “in a blue moon”—as in sure, when pigs fly. Sure, and we’ll eat apricots tomorrow. Or also, sure, tomorrow—when the apricots are ripe.

I love the idea of impossible things that exist nonetheless—those scarce glimpses or rare occurrences that when they do appear feel like magic, the impossible. Sweet, ripe apricots that last beyond an hour, the aurora borealis—especially viewings of reds and purples—or a fox at midnight holding your gaze through a window. Two full moons in one month. The flash of ice crystals that creates pillars of light in a cold sun. Ice ferns on windows in extreme cold. The chance to apricate in a sun that finally has heat again despite freezing temps. A flower that only blooms one night of the year en masse, that might be connected to the cycles of the moon, but no one knows for sure.

Across the middle east, apricot paste—thicker and jammier than fruit leather—is everywhere, not impossible and so delicious—the taste of tart fruit in the desert was always welcome to have on hand. It’s called amardine (also qamar al-din), which means “moon of the faith.” One theory for its name is that the paste arrives in the markets with the sight of the new moon in the month of Ramadan, marking the beginning of fasting. Amardine is often soaked and blended with rose water and made into a drink in Ramadan—often the first drink to have after breaking one’s fast, as it’s sweet, tart, cold, and welcome after a day of fasting in the heat.

Fernando Pessoa wrote about the longing for impossible things:

…The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.1

It’s always fascinated me that we can long for something so keenly and yet have never perhaps personally experienced it—and Pessoa, as a Portugese speaker, spoke a language that had a word for this—saudade—a longing for something that does not exist. Other languages also have similar words—fernven in German, and hiraeth in Welsh—a longing or homesickness for somewhere you’ve never been.

There’s a painful landscape in those terms but also such beauty—a capacity to long for something that is invisible, perhaps that will never be fully known. And maybe it also means there are things we can sense that are simply not knowable through the typical ways that we make sense of the world. Maybe we are responding to the space between experiences, the knowing that there can be impossible things—precisely because they are impossible. We may never experience the sweet ripeness of an apricot the minute it is truly ripe, but we can imagine it. The space around it is calling to us, letting us know it could exist. And perhaps having space to imagine it is as much—if not more—a part of it as the thing itself.

The wind has been gusting through the trees today, sounding a bit like its kin, the waves of an invisible ocean breaking. It unsettles the dogs—Asta is even more anxious than usual and comes into my office/study to be reassured we are all safe.

I can feel that sense of unsettling in my own body—not a discomfort but an alertness, a sort of on-edge feeling that demands to be recognized, like the wind. I wonder what it would feel like to have that surge of energy that sets hurricanes in motion—to be invisible and need badly to be heard, felt, named. To call attention to presence with the force of gusts.

Maybe there’s something of that in the impulse to write—invisible, but still—like the wind’s howling, moving through branches that respond in kind, sweeping designs in the snow, branches strewn over the landscape. Tracks of thought/purpose/motion made visible. The seemingly impossible made possible.

Impossible objects are tricks of perception—like the non-orientation of a mobius strip, a Penrose triangle, Escher’s infinities of staircases leading nowhere. Illustrations where the mind quickly tries to fill in the gaps, making lines or objects into an expected sense when there is actually none. I love impossible objects because it’s another clapping reminder of how much work our minds do to create sense of what we experience. When I come across them it always reminds me of all that we don’t see, what possibilities there are if we allow what’s there to be “without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” we’ve been conditioned to recognize (thank you Keats). What might we do or see if we don’t rush to fill in those sensory gaps?

The painting above is one I’ve come to love ever since I first saw it a few years ago. I love that feels a bit like an impossible object—it’s so succinctly perfect. It feels impossible for it to be that simple and precise, to re-create a field of vision: black lines scattered across a field of white. Slight combinations of angles, and suddenly—ineffably—it is a cold, serene, field of ice expanding towards an invisible but inevitable horizon. It feels like it achieves the epitome of present absence. I thrill every time I see it.

In Japanese there is a word, ma (間)—often clumsily and obtusely described in English as negative space, because there is no word like it in English. But describing the space between, left open as negative space removes the expansiveness of the idea entirely. What describes it with more precision is, of course, metaphor, which is how the figures for it in kanji are depicted: the symbols for door and sun—or often, moon. Ma is a door through the crevice of which the moonlight shines through.

In the early eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji (源氏物語)—often considered one of the world’s first novels, written by a woman, Murasaki Shikibu (紫式部)—there is a scene that is filled with this sense of ma:

It was the fifteenth night of the eight month. The light of an enclosed full-moon shone between the ill-fitting planks of the roof and flooded the room. What a queer place to be lying in!, thought Genji, as he gazed around the garret, so different from any room he had ever known before.2

When I learned that amardine means ‘moon of the faith’ that was what immediately came to mind—moonlight through the cracks in a door. The impossible—mishmish—becoming the moon of faith. All of the immense connective space around the celebration of an event, the sunlight, rain, and soil ripening fruit that can only be eaten as soon as it’s picked from the tree. The preparation of fruit the moment it is ripe, distilled into something solid to preserve its sugars, and later prepared by soaking and the addition of rosewater, made into a drink to quench a day of fasting. All of that space around one object. The moonlight that seeps between crevices, a moon of faith—the space and time necessary to create something that has layers of meaning.

Fruit on a tree is something that always seems impossible to me—a magic that those who live in warm climates know almost as a part of every day. It’s something I’ve never experienced as part of my own daily life and I’ve always found it magical. I was reading a friend’s newsletter this weekend, in which she wrote of reverie, and longing for a place that no longer exists from her youth—remembering the mango, lychee, apple, and bayberry trees. And in that space of reading, I thought of times spent among lemon and avocado trees in California years ago. The space around those memories shoring it up, giving it strength. 

Maybe ma is the wind on days like today, when the invisible calls for attention, to imagine impossible things, to notice the light through the cracks, remember impossible things that are possible despite that our immediate experience—or the world—would demand that we believe otherwise. To turn attention towards the open spaces between, the pause, and the force of a gust giving room for memory, imagination, expansiveness. The beauty of the margin, the world in between subject and object.

Sometimes all I want to do is think of apricots, of mishmish, the impossible, the fleeting, the space between two full moons in a month, the unexpected attention of moonlight streaking through cracks in a door. The unexpected, invisible warmth of a high-latitude sun that both the dogs and I could not ignore.

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 …

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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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