Photo, my own.
“It is “a crisp, frosty November night, with the lights dry and bright against the hard black edges of the dark” and “the rain, with the wet black, tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist.””
I love November, the way it mutes October’s color wheel in a mauve, watercolor wash. November holds the starkness of winter at bay so that autumn may enjoy a graceful exit. It’s a liminal month, a time of edges, borders, and becomings. Being my birthday month, I decided it is also an auspicious time to launch my personal website.
Like November, I am betwixt and between—working in nonprofit branding and marketing, while pursuing creative writing and an advanced degree in liberal arts. Following weekdays of linear thinking and business lexicon, I long for the intimate, self-contained universe of reading and writing. On evenings and weekends, I often submerge myself in books, lingering over pages written by others while reaching for the right words for my own work.
In this interior mode, I tend to notice things more—patterns and light, nuance and emotion—little vignettes and stories hidden in plain view. I welcome these fleeting moments of grace and try like hell to capture them in my journal, or sometimes visually with my iPhone. Come Monday morning, I put reading and writing aside to greet colleagues in a meeting, or a well-framed spreadsheet, markedly different from the sea of language from which I emerged.
Yet, everything is ultimately connected: whoever thinks the liberal arts have no bearing in contemporary society has not stopped to consider the world in which they walk. I suppose this is why I gravitate to the interiority of reading and writing as a practice of continual discovery. I prefer a compass with a wandering needle, questions without clear, easy answers. Give me “both/and,” gray areas, and meander any day over binary thinking. Rebecca Solnit writes beautifully about writerly wandering in a recent essay.
My website highlights a modest portfolio of personal essays and reviews written these past two years, most of them pondering connections between everyday life and memory, time, philosophy, art, and the natural world. I have a well of other ideas calling for my attention, and hope to publish more. My Journal is a forum for brief, serendipitous excursions into places, people, and topics that interest me. Some may find their way into future writings; some may simply exist for their own sake.
To essay (essai in French) is to try. It’s where I find myself these days: trying to braid threads of wonder and awe, ache and delight, writing to remind myself I am not alone in wandering. I hope you will join me here from time to time. Most of the really interesting things in life occur at the edges and borders. Like the month of November.