Announcing that you are back to a platform and committing to posting on said platform regularly is one thing. It’s another thing all together to actually keep to that promise. The predicament at hand? To choose or not to choose a set template for every letter. However, while I make that choice, I refuse to be immobilized so here is what I want to share with you today…

the fifteen things i remember from my visit to the lake yesterday:

1. the waves

2. the sound of children playing marco polo in the distance

3. the reverberation of voices that seemed to fill up the spaces surrounding and enveloping us in a coziness you would not expect from an open setting

4. the warm, black particles of sand shifting on the shore as i dug my toes in and wiggled them around

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5. the smooth rocks (surrounded by seaweed that isn’t seaweed because im in a freshwater lake and not an ocean), unseen but felt underneath my feet as i stood (tried to) in a lake hugged by water and witnessed by pine trees, singing bluejays, swimming ducks with their babies in a row, and families swimming, laughing, enjoying. thriving?

6. placing my phone to the level of my heart, hitting record and thinking you could see what my eyes were seeing. speaking to you, explaining what i saw under the assumption you'd be seeing it too.

7. hitting replay to review what was captured once i was back at the shore and realizing my words had been removed of any visual context. what becomes of the conversation then?

8. my heart is below my eyes and yet its vision was higher still. i had stopped the recording thinking: “i showed them multiple angles except up.” how wrong i was- because

9. all you could see was sky.

10. two kayaks on a date in a secluded area of the shore with no owners in sight. just them, enjoying each others company like young lovers with all their lives left to live

11. conversations with mom in spanish while a little girl floating nearby at the shore with her life vest on glances over wondering, we assume, about the foreign language we are using to communicate. she looked to me like a cute, beached whale if whales were blonde and tiny

12. the sun being almost too bright but being grateful for it nonetheless. i’ll hold onto that when the sun’s time in the sky starts becoming less and less as the passage of time leads us to winter

13. the wind being strong enough to cause waves that manipulated my movements like a stringed puppet. even with my feet planted, it was difficult to stay grounded and the moving water made for an even murkier surface so that i had to look away from it in order to keep pressing on

14. the elderly couple arriving as we were leaving to paddle board (or maybe kayak?) as the sun set. "they're going to go out on the lake now??" "it must be beautiful to watch the sunset out there"

15. driving back home, feeling refreshed, with a vanilla sky in the rearview mirror as the ponderosa pine trees shared their vanilla sent as we passed them by

and to finish us off: one quote i’ve collected in my obsidian vault the past week, that i’d like to share with you now attributed to Giselle Buchanan:

“Consider your less generative periods not as creative blocks but as a time of gathering. Gathering new visions. Gathering ideas. Gathering inspiration. Gathering sustenance. Can we begin to view our quiet moments as the necessary rest before the reaping? Everything happens in it's season.”

love, ella