A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
In the morning, she watches me wake. I rub my eyes and yawn while she waits to be taken out of her crib. What did you dream about? I ask her, searching her face for an answer. Her sleep sack is rumpled, worn, but her smile is bright, her eyes wide. I think about how I could use a little more sleep. She thinks about how fascinating the world is.
We go out onto the porch and watch the wind. “What a beautiful breeze we’re having,” I say while she watches headlights cut through the darkness. The sky slowly lightens, and she studies each car or bus that passes by with growing interest. The bees are already hard at work. We watch them gather pollen from each hydrangea in the front yard and carry it elsewhere, to some unknown flower on another part of the street. Maybe they’re traveling to another neighborhood, we muse. Maybe they’re heading back to their home hive in another country. Every living thing is on its own journey.
The December sun streams in from the east, the light climbing higher and higher. It sparkles between branches, dancing through the leaves. She reaches for the light and tries to pinch beams between her pointer finger and thumb. It’s strange, isn’t it, how we can feel the sunlight’s warmth but can’t hold it in our hands? She doesn’t answer me but grasps at the rays flowing onto the porch, millions of tiny dust fragments spinning like ballerinas on a cement-and-stone stage.
—from How it Feels to Find Yourself: Navigating Life’s Changes with Clarity, Purpose, and Heart, my book of illustrated essays
TUESDAY
As it’s gift-giving season, I’d be foolish not to remind you, dear readers, that booksmake the perfect gift!
These will still arrive by 12/25 and are currently on sale in many online retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Target, and Amazon.
For illustrated essays: How it Feels to Find Yourself and My Friend Fear
For those unearthing their bravery: Go Your Own Way, Start Where You Are
For those who need a little less: Create Your Own Calm
For those who want to know themselves more deeply: Made Out of Stars, Start Where You Are
For those who love planning: my 2025 calendar and planner
For those who love paper: art prints, limited edition risographs, and greeting cards
WEDNESDAY
“Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, whysomething is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers — perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke on doubt, in Letters to a Young Poet
THURSDAY
The making of The Glassworker, which I can’t wait to see; my favorite winter animation, based on Raymond Briggs’ original book; on turning writing into a life.
FRIDAY
Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is
—Thanks by W. S. Merwin
See you next week!
xx,
M
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