Dear Somebody: A thousand years.

The Biggest Dream, originally published in Issue #38 of Chickpea Magazine

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

I’m sitting under the Dallas sun when I hear about the blood. The bleeds are two fish making their way through the currents of your brain and I wonder what they are looking for. What do they hope to find? Do they realize the disruptions they are causing?

I’m sitting in the DFW airport when it occurs to me that the fish inside your brain are still swimming, that possibly they’ve been swimming for a very long time. It occurs to me that sharks are a type of fish: stealthy, silent. Their bodies are made out of cartilage; they are unburdened by the weight of bone. Sharks sneak up on us when we finally set our anxiety aside, just long enough for a dip in the salty waters. Just long enough to enjoy life for a few minutes. I feel torn. I’m stuck between my own anger and the reality of knowing that no sharks singled you out. They were just hungry. You were just there.

I’m sitting in the ICU when I first see that the waves in your brain are large. Only a large object could cause such a disturbance, ripples that wash over your memory, your judgment, your speech. The brain is categorized into eight separate lobes and there is water, I mean, blood—everywhere. 

These are some big fish, I think to myself, trying to reach you through your closed eyes. I’ve spent years trying to catch the big fish, and here you caught two all on your own without even trying. I wonder if you’ve ever been whale watching; I don’t think you have. Maybe once in Hawaii? I begged you to take me fishing when I was a kid, but I don’t think we ever did…right? Right? I want you to wake up so I can confirm this information, but your eyes remain closed no matter how loud I scream.

I’m sitting in the hospital room next to you when you tell me the year is 1926. I don’t blink; I ask you to try again. You want to ask where my sister is, but you can’t retrieve her name. She’s coming soon, I tell you, and your face softens. What’s my name? I ask, and you hesitate. You don’t answer. I don’t blink; I don’t ask you to try again. I know you recognize who I am and the warmth of you washes over me. You’re still you, and I feel comforted by your presence, just like I did when I was a kid. Even though you don’t know my name. Even though everything has changed. 

I’m pulling a sheet over the chair next to your bed when you speak to me unprompted. I think I’m going to get better, you say, and my heart breaks over the light in you. Some people swallow a little of the sun and it stays with them forever; you did, and I know that. The sunlight beams out of your face brightly even though everything is cracked. It’s a light that always plays, even when it’s a bad hand, even when it’s easier to blame, to argue, to just plain quit. 

You lay down in bed and I lay down in the chair next to you. It is so loud in this room filled with patients and nurses and lights and flashes and I am filled to the nose with overwhelm and questions. How strong is each ripple moving through your brain? Will the water hurt or heal all that it touches? After everything evaporates, what will remain?

You are confused, displaced. I’m right here, I reassure you. It’s time for sleep. I think about how many times my small children have fought against the night, apprehensive about what happens after they close their eyes. I think about how many times I’ve waited until they’ve fallen asleep before backing out of their room slowly, sometimes on my knees. I think about how life is a ripple, a wheel that keeps turning. Time waits for no one.

It’s been one thousand years since I relied on parental presence to feel safe enough to close my eyes; for you, it’s been even longer. You’re my dad, and for the first time in a thousand years, I fall asleep holding your hand. And you fall asleep holding mine. 

TUESDAY

Pops in March (sketchbook, 2026)

Pops in March (sketchbook, 2026)

Pops in March (sketchbook, 2026)

I’m no good at capturing likeness, but for once, I don’t let it bother me. I just focus on the moment, the drawing, the memory. Everything changes in time.

WEDNESDAY

I’ve cited this passage in my newsletter before, and I’ve no doubt I will do so again; it is one that I return to repeatedly as the years roll on by:

“Care is like ephemeral art—an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture of mac and cheese and baby wipes and no tears shampoo and socks that never match and chore charts that never work and all that just gets blown away with the winds of time. And like art that isn’t static, isn’t permanent, can’t be put up on a wall and admired in a museum—care is devalued. We stumble on it sometimes in the wild and it takes our breath away, a momentary glimpse of the tenderness with which we hold and protect and nourish and delight in our loved ones; just like one of Goldsworthy’s mandala’s, there’s a divine structure to it, a feeling of inevitability. It’s as ordinary as dirt and as sacred as the kind found at Chimayo. It’s here, there, and everywhere, so kind of nowhere.

Caring for someone you love is, of course, a reward on to itself, the deepest of them, but it need not be labor that happens in such embattled circumstances. It could be absorbed and still revered, invisible and still funded, ephemeral and still prized. It could be held as the center of our existence, rather than the thing we rush through to get to our “real work.” We could see and honor the seasons—caring for children, caring for elders—and the variable capacities—the neurodivergent and disabled and chronically and temporarily ill.

I wish we had policy and professional expectations that mirrored our better angels, which show up again and again and again. Meanwhile, the winds will keep blowing away our beautiful care. That’s okay. That’s as it should be. Most of what is wildly worthwhile is achingly impermanent.”

—from Courtney Martin’s The Art of Care Mostly Disappears

THURSDAY

Some folks’ lives roll easy as a breeze, drifting through a summer night; but most folks’ lives, oh, they stumble, Lord, they fall; some folks’ lives never roll at all. 

FRIDAY

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

—The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider

• Dear Somebody: Tiny joys. (April 4, 2025)

Of all the things you can put in front of your eyes, I’m grateful that my little letter is one of them. 

If you’d like to support me, please buy my books. My art prints and line of greeting cards make excellent gifts for yourself or a friend. You can also hire me for your next project—I’d love to work together. 

xx,
M

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To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: New beginnings.

A completed exercise from LEARN TO LET GO: A JOURNAL FOR NEW BEGINNINGS (2026)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

This year, I didn’t do any sort of round-up: no list of achievements to close out 2025, no more/less lists to begin 2026, no resolutions, no catalog of what went right or wrong. This is a break from my usual tradition: I love taking inventory, assessing which path led to where, considering how to build a different future than the one hurtling straight towards me. 

Despite all of the good reflection does, I feel tired of, and from, looking back. I want to look forward, I only want the light of what can be…to be. 

A few days ago I received Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine in the mail. I love writing and illustrating for this magazine, and year after year, I feel lucky that I get to. When I opened the pages, a smile rang in me. This illustration is one of my favorite drawings I made last year, to accompany an essay I wrote titled More Than Machine: Guidance for Creative Resistance. It might not be the best thing I made, but it is the most meaningful because it is proof of self-doubt and personal growth. It is a sharp claw towards hard change; it is finding a light in dark times. I am deeply connected to it, and by making it, I processed tough experiences and saw myself more clearly. 

“More Than Machine” for Issue #68 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

I love that art can help us chronicle, understand, and heal. For me, it is a medicine I take as often as I can. It requires no skill or prescription, and asks nothing of us other than our willingness to take a look inside. For this, I am grateful. 

TUESDAY

This week, through Nicole Cardoza’s newsletter REIMAGINED, I learned that in 1980, Stevie Wonder wrote Happy Birthday to promote the establishing of Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. The song became the anthem of the movement led by Coretta Scott King, and Wonder joined her at rallies across the nation. 

WEDNESDAY

Sometimes I forget the magic of it all. 

My mind is on the pink soccer jersey we’re searching for. While T tries them on, I keep the girls occupied, pushing the red Target cart down the shiny white aisles. No, we have enough toys, I say; No, we have enough clothes, I say; No, no no. The girls are whiny. I am, too. 

We turn the corner and there it is: the new Wellbeing Reads display, and there I am—or a little part of me, at least—on the bottom left row. I beam, wishing I looked more human. The girls squeal and pick up copies, they attempt to take selfies. T arrives a few minutes later—nothing having fit correctly—and takes photos of a wintering me, and then a few more with the girls. 

Me kneeling in front of Target’s WELLBEING READS display, holding a copy of LEARN TO LET GO (2026)

The Ladies in front of Target’s WELLBEING READS display; N holding a copy of LEARN TO LET GO (2026)

I sit at my desk for hours on end, painting or writing or throwing drafts in the trash. The days turn into weeks, then months. The years peel by. A book comes into the world years after I’ve first sat down to write it, years after I’ve learned enough to put the words to paper. A book comes out into the world and slowly, caught up in the details of everyday life, I forget the magic of it all. 

A book comes out into the world, and months later, as I shop with my small family, we run right into it—and I remember, once again, how magical it is to make something that someone else can hold. To make something that my own children can hold, and read, and one day write in. 

One of my completed exercises from LEARN TO LET GO (2026)

I’m working through my own copy of LEARN TO LET GO at the moment. I haven’t worked through one of my own journals in a very long time, and I’m eager to plant new seeds for change in the pages of this book. 

One of the reasons I make these journals is because there is no end point for personal growth. It is with humility that I complete the exercises that I long ago wrote, seeing how far I have come—and how much further I still have to go. 

“Helped are those who are content to be themselves,” Alice Walker said. “They will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.”

Each day, when I open a new page, I’m reminded by the magic of it all. 

THURSDAY

Ruth Franklin writes about Paul Simon and the horrifying state of our country; my very favorite New Year’s poem; Judit Orosz makes paper poetry; I’ll Try Anything by The Strokes; Denny’s in Japan. 

FRIDAY

I remember all the different kinds of years.
Angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.
I remember feeling like that
walking up the mountain along the dirt path
to my broken house on the island.
And long years of waiting in Massachusetts.
The winter walking and hot summer walking.
I finally fell in love with all of it:
dirt, night, rock and far views.
It’s strange that my heart is as full
now as my desire was then. 

—Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing by Linda Gregg

• Dear Somebody: Should I Be Doing More? (January 24, 2025)

Of all the things you can put in front of your eyes, I’m grateful that my little letter is one of them. 

If you’d like to support me, please buy my books. My art prints and line of greeting cards make excellent gifts for yourself or a friend. You can also hire me for your next project—I’d love to work together. 

xx,
M

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To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: The many lives inside us.

The Wedding Sari for Issue 65 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Paul Simon at Stifel Theatre in Saint Louis (2025)

For the first time since 2019, T and I go to a show. The last time I saw a musician play life was six years ago, in Nashville—before the pandemic, before lockdown, before two children and graduate school and all of the rest. I was a different person then, carrying different dreams and hopes and worries. 

I’m rarely in a crowded room anymore. I barely remember what it’s like to be part of a collective movement—to be collectively moved, to collectively move alongside hundreds of other people who are listening to the same music that I am. I’m so used to making art alone, within the privacy of my own studio that I often forget what it’s like to witness someone making their own right in front of me; a special kind of bravery.

We settle into our seats at Stifel Theatre and watch Paul Simon walk onto the stage. It is strange to see the person who created the soundtrack to my life. No other musician has taken me from childhood to having children of my own, no other musician who has a song for every moment I remember most. He plays his latest record and I’m flooded with my own past: the many Novembers spent deep in conversation on park benches; the hundreds of letters we wrote; the long drives to Atlantic City, salt water taffy and ankles in the sea; the friendships I believed would follow me to the end of my life; the friendships that haven’t lasted long enough to see me to my forties. 

Paul plays and I remember exactly where I was when the Twin Towers fell; watching the dawn chase the night over the Atlantic; years of loneliness and years of being known; running to catch the SEPTA train to Philadelphia; the many New York City winters bleeding me; the gold bracelets I gave to my loved ones on my wedding day, and the one I’ve worn on my right wrist, each day, for the past six years. He plays and I listen to the many people he has been. He plays and I remember myself. After all of these years, after changes upon changes, I am more or less the same. 

Ben Kweller at Off Broadway in Saint Louis (2025)

The next day, we see Ben Kweller in a small, crowded space that transports me to my teenage years. It’s a stark opposite to the evening before: the sound is too loud and the floors too sticky. Hundreds of us smushed together, faces full of earnest eagerness, waiting for a 43-year old man play the songs we love most. It’s a stark opposite to the evening before: we jump and we dance and I don’t look backwards once. I’m having fun, something that the seriousness of me doesn’t say or feel that often but that I want more of. That’s what good art does: it wakes the sleeping parts of you. 

Ben plays Thirteen and I think of what love used to be, he plays Family Tree and I think of Dorian, the sweetness of a young child finding his way; he plays On My Way and I’m out of my head now, finally in this room, with the music in me. He plays Lizzy and I’ve got T’s hand in mine. We’ll keep love alive, even on Texas time. 

TUESDAY

The Wedding Sari for Issue 65 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

The Wedding Sari for Issue 65 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

“The more intricate and ornate a panetar is, the more status the bride’s family was believed to have. The panetar symbolizes marital bliss and prosperity; historically, it also promises fertility—a blessing seen not only for the bride herself, but for the family she was marrying into.

At the time, it felt romantic to wear a garment previously worn by two people I loved, on their wedding days, on my own. As much as it connected me to my mother and her sister, my aunt, it also connected me to a longer tradition of compromise and, hopefully, continued compassion between me, my chosen partner, and the family we formed. Now, years later, my wedding panetar means something different to me. It doesn’t resemble prosperity or fertility or wealth, but choice. I consider what marriage meant for my mother and my aunt—and, because of their choices, compromises, and triumphs, what it is now allowed to mean for me. Like any piece of art, each sari is created, painstakingly, by a specific set of hands, guided by certain techniques and traditions, for a specific purpose. However, it’s story and meaning is created by the person who wears it.”

—An excerpt from my latest essay, The Wedding Sari, for Issue #65 of Uppercase Magazine

WEDNESDAY

I can’t believe I haven’t shared Dear Bookstore with you yet! This picture book about the importance of bookstores was written by my dear friend Emily Arrow and illustrated by my friend Geneviève Godbout. 

It’s such a gorgeous and sweet love letter to bookstores, the third place they’ve become for so many of us, and the community they foster. Please shout about it, purchase a copy, and request it at your library. 

THURSDAY

“Imagination—not intellect—has saved my life. It has saved the lives of the people, animals, and lands to which I belong, those I hold most beloved. Imagination, I believe, is the way we dream into the future—futures that can’t be defined by any paperwork or bullet or algorithm or machine. Imagination brings us into abolitionist practices, into the pu’uhonua (places or people of refuge) we’ve yet to meet. As scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio reminds in her work: there is no ‘ōlelo word for rights, only kuleana—our responsibility.

Making nonsense of the story, of our collective stories, is a weapon. I was a child magician, and what I’ve learned from sleight of hand is that the eyes will follow an arc or shape made, from beginning to end. But if the hand moves in a straighter line, our eyes look back to the beginning, to the source of that movement. This is the objective—to keep our eyes fixed forward, bracing and bracing for what’s next, instead of allowing the space to look back, or around, to what we know. Our work, then, becomes mending the stories. Tying those strings back together.”

—T. Kira Māhealani Madden on Listening to the Past, from 100 Days of Creative Resistance

FRIDAY

I hear the drizzle of the rain
Like a memory it falls
Soft and warm continuing
Tapping on my roof and walls

And from the shelter of my mind
Through the window of my eyes
I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets
To England, where my heart lies

My mind’s distracted and diffused
My thoughts are many miles away
They lie with you when you’re asleep
And kiss you when you start your day

And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme

And so you see, I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you

And as I watch the drops of rain
Weave their weary paths and die
I know that I am like the rain
There but for the grace of you go I

—Kathy’s Song by Paul Simon

See you next week!

xx,

M

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To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: A baby sister's tiny feet.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

When N comes home from school each day, she runs towards me screaming. Mama!she yells, though we are only a few inches apart. I’m here to see my sister.

She walks over to the couch where I sit cradling F, who is either smiling or sleeping or spitting up, and pulls off the knit blanket that covers her. She pokes around to find F’s hands and then her feet, peering closely. They are so tiny, she says, and lifts each hand before dropping it flippantly, reaching for the feet next. She handles her baby sister carelessly, as though each hand and foot exists independently, as though they aren’t all four attached to their respective limbs, and as if the limbs aren’t attached to a body, also living and breathing, or at least trying to. 

They are so tiny, N says, lifting the left hand, examining more closely now, marveling at each set of fingernails—perfectly shaped, a smudge of moon on each finger. Fingernails that patiently wait, existing only to do their job: to keep each little finger protected, safe. 

They are so tiny, she says, investigating F’s small toes, ensuring that a proper set of five belongs to each foot. She runs her fingers over the heels—first the left one, then the right—heels that are more small buttons than they are heels, heels that could fit in your pocket if you needed, if you wanted them to. She puts a sock back on each doll’s foot and sighs. She has satisfied her daily inspection. It is time to move on.

Mom, she says seriously, in a voice that becomes more and more like a teenager’s each day. But, Mom. Did you remember to make my snack?

TUESDAY

“When our two sons were going to Hebrew school, preparing for their Bar Mitzvahs, one of them asked the Rabbi, “What if I’m not sure that I believe in god?” To which the Rabbi replied, “It’s unimportant that you believe in god. What matters is that you search for god, look for the sacred, and learn to recognize what is holy.” And with those simple words, my kids were not only liberated from their fear of trying to maintain a lifelong devotion to a single, abstract, static “belief,” but they were also given permission to put their faith into their own actions and efforts to be kind. Free to marvel at the strangeness of it all and stand unafraid of their “not-knowing.” To focus on the undeniable beauty as it unfolds in front of them. To watch and wait for wisdom.”

—from Jeff Tweedy’s newsletter, along with his cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s America(no, I do not listen to anything besides Paul Simon)

WEDNESDAY

Thank you for your warm words, comments, re-shares, and pre-orders for my forthcoming journal, Go Your Own Way. 

This is the fourth (!) journal I’ve made and it amazes me to know that soon, it will stop being a book that I made and instead become a place where you see yourself a little more clearly. Maybe it will be a place where you rediscover a part of yourself you hid away a long time ago, and you can’t remember why. Maybe you’ll resurface in these pages. Maybe you’ll swim to shore.

All books, I think, have the possibility of doubling as a mirror: in them—or maybe because of them—you see yourself as you are. I hope this book will fulfill that purpose for some of you, too.

If you’d like, you can pre-order Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence. It comes out October 24th!

THURSDAY

I opened my mail this week to find a boxful of my new 2024 planners and calendars! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

—The Mower by Philip Larkin

xx,

M

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