I LOVE to write and you can follow what I’m exploring here on my journal and over on Substack.
Since June 2025, I’ve been journaling daily for two months, and I’ve come to cherish the clarity it brings.
There’s something about the quiet of the morning, reflecting on the day before, that helps me see what life’s teaching me.
My journal’s a space where I explore how those small, sacred moments shape my thoughts and ideas, along with the mundane details of my life too!
I’ve recently started sharing on Substack, where I’m aiming to write with a bit more structure as I connect with the community there. I hope what I share, both here and on Substack, resonates with you in some way.
Rekindling Connection: Combatting Screen Time in Relationships
What do you do when you've discovered that your relationship with your partner is deteriorating because you spend too much time online or watching television?
My husband and I have developed some bad habits regarding spending quality time together.
He sits in his favorite chair watching Youtube videos, and I spend a lot of time watching television series in the other room that's about 4 feet away.
We are technically in the same vicinity, but we are immersed in different screens.
We decided this habit of sharing space but not sharing time together has to stop.
We have some good friends that eat together every night at their table and often play games with each other at night.
They have a wide variety of card games, as well as dominoes.
About once a month, we all get together depending on our schedules and play a game together and always enjoy it.
But why don't we do it when it is just the two of us?
This afternoon, I went to Michael's and bought two paint-by-number sets--mountains for him and a desert scene for me.
Shayne went into the storage room and got a long card table and we set it up next to our dining room table so we can paint together.
He's not artistically trained at all. But anyone can do a paint-by-number and I think we will enjoy listening to some chill music and seeing what happens.
We have set up a portion of our living room as an area where we can do some fun activities together, as well as eat dinner at the table, too.
He found a pack of cards, and we played a few hours of Gin Rummy tonight at the dining room table.
We laughed and talked about our childhood, and really connected.
We've been together for 30 years, and it's surprising how time apart can creep into a relationship even though you live together.
We got up this morning and had a nice, long walk together. We found a bench in the woods where we like to walk, and laid down on our backs and watched the sky and trees. We had a lovely 30 minutes on that bench just hanging out.
Next week, we are going to do what we can to start fishing in the river next to our home, too.
Relationships take work. Even the ones where you think the work has already been done.
It's never really done, is it?
Random fact about me: I'm a devoted neighborhood bird watcher.
Unlock Meaning Through Daily Writing
Writing daily allows me a framework to categorize what is the most meaningful moment I've experienced in the last 24 hours.
Some days, I have to dig deep to find the moment, or series of moments. Because of that, I am finding that I'm making different decisions daily than I used to so that I have an opportunity to find more meaning in my life.
For me, writing daily and clicking Publish gives me a routine to be accountable to myself to notice my life, share what I learn and hopefully after a year, I'll have enough daily material to creatively find a way to publish a book.
I don't have children to pass down what I've learned so that it can live through them. Writing is my way of being motherly to myself, as well as to those that care to read my words, and travel with me through my experiences.
My grandmother passed down a wise saying to me that probably saved my life.
She told me, "Jealousy is insanity on an installment plan," when she was talking about her abusive marriage to my grandfather.
I was once in an abusive relationship, and one afternoon when he went too far, I heard my grandmother's words echo in my head, and I left him in that moment.
Her experience saved me years of heartache and fear. Her words gave me the courage to skip my own version of someone else's fuck around and find out mentality when it came to my life.
Shared stories are often life-changing, and I don't have anyone to pass down to about what I've learned about surviving and thriving.
I used to write on my blog years ago, but for some reason, I stopped.
I think a lot of it had to do with privacy fears, but the yearning to express myself in all the ways God gifted me with became too strong to ignore.
So what do I enjoy most about writing?
Taking my whispers of insights and thoughts and giving them a stable form that lives beyond what happens in my mind.
Capturing my day to day experiences so that I can learn from myself later, and craft something else from those initial impressions into more...maybe a painting, an article or even a piece of jewelry. Who knows?
Writing gives me a chance to see my thoughts and how I think, what needs to be improved and what needs to be tossed away.
It's a way to turn what can't be seen into something that can be shared, discussed, expressed and remembered by others.
Whenever I encounter someone that is not a reader, or has a problem with long-form writing, I share with them the power of the written word.
We can read minds...that's what reading and writing is.
It's a way to connect to others without being in physical proximity, and it surpasses time.
Someone's past moment transcends time and becomes a part of your present moment.
It's a miracle and one that I intend to continue exploring for myself, and maybe for you, too.
Random fact about me: I sleep with an eye mask and it's made a huge difference in clocking my 8 hours.
Nostalgia and Wisdom: Lessons from Sweet Memories
It's funny how the things we have a lifelong aversion to, return to us as our teacher.
This morning, I set out for my 2 mile walk along an Arkansas county highway that is near my late mother's and stepfather's home.
As I was mid-way into my walk, the early morning humid air carried the scent of ripening muscadines.
A muscadine is a wild grape that grows around here, and as a child, I was repulsed by the smell.
My mother used to make muscadine jelly, and my job was to go out and pick them before the snakes and birds got them.
The smell of a ripe muscadine is singular. It is so sweet and musty that people either love them or hate them.
I'm a hater, usually.
But today, that first whiff of muscadines in the summer hit me like a freight train as memories of my childhood flooded my mind.
As I was walking through the smell and memories, it occurred to me that even back then, my body reacted to too much sweetness violently.
Today, I've gone about 4 years without consuming sugar. I believe that the Guttate psoriasis I struggle with is bacterial and yeast driven.
I'm just one of those people that has to take in sweetness through my other senses than that of taste, or take it in through natural means, like an occasional piece of good fruit like an apple.
What nourishes can also overwhelm, and what delights us, in excess, can make us sick.
I believe life asks us to discern the right dose of anything that we allow into our being.
Sweetness in any form is best if handled with respect, and I have come to believe that our life is our medicine.
It's always teaching and course-correcting if we are awake to its gentle nudges.
If I consume too much sugar, it makes my skin itch, and crowds out what can be beneficial for the other micro-organisms that hitch a ride with me on this journey.
The little gluttons in the bacteria world that consume too much sugar can cause a lot of dysbiosis in our guts!
I think it can also be said that too much sugary sweetness from others can also make our skin crawl, if they are doing it because they are people-pleasers, or fear conflict, when sometimes, a little conflict is warranted when something needs to be corrected.
True relationship with others, and ourselves, requires a balance of sweetness with honesty, depth, and some bitterness, too.
A diet of only sugar, whether from food or from people, is not sustainable, and that's where I come to a cross-roads with any nostalgic experiences that happens as I get older.
I don't want to ever live in the past. I don't want to sugar-coat my past experiences, either, when I'm remembering how things were.
That's a land I can never return to, so I try not to bitch too much about how my now is not like my then.
Like my walk this morning, I'm reminded that when I walk through my past due to a smell or other sensory prompt, to take the sweetness with a dose of bitterness, too, and not just focus on what was good.
Nostalgia can result in an endless loop of wishing you were living in the land of what used to be, instead of transforming those memories into the wisdom that can help you NOW.
As I was walking, I breathed in the sweet smells-- and as I moved forward, I released what wasn't beneficial to me now, and breathed in the new insight that counts as earned wisdom.
A morning walk is becoming one of my essentials in life. You can learn so much as you travel across a landscape.
Random fact about me: One of my favorite animals is the donkey. I don't know why, but I love them and wish I wasn't allergic to farm animals otherwise I would have one.
Life Lessons from the Great Sand Dunes
Yesterday, we stopped by the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Reserve on our way to Amarillo, Texas on the first leg of our trip back home.
The dunes are massive. They are a living geometry of wind, gravity and time. I felt like I was standing in a sine wave, watching the slowed down effects of how we experience our lives in a purely physical way.
With any sine wave, you have peaks and valleys, and the experiences we have in our lives if you were to look at it like a sine wave mirror what I saw out there in the desert.
The valleys we have to walk through hold the seed for the next peak.
But sometimes, when you are in the valley, the view is so limited you feel as if you'll never be able to ascend again.
There is a certain comfort in realizing that this is not how life works.
When the wave touches the floor of the movement, there is only one place to go next, and that is the slow ascension back to the top where the view is more expansive, and the lesson from the seed planted in the valley is realized.
It takes time for all of this to take form. Walking among the dunes, it felt like the exclamation point to my experience over the last 10 days walking through such varied and dynamic landscapes.
So my final thought is this--don't worry so much about your life.
We have our lows so that they can support our next high. And the cycle repeats over and over again over the course of time it takes for us to live this life.
Have faith in the geometry of life...I don't think it lies. In fact, I know that it doesn't.
Random fact about me: My first concert ever was with my mother. We went to see Roy Clark and Buck Owens from the show "Hee Haw".
Goodbye Colorado
I've had a wonderful week in Colorado, and I'm sad to put it in my rear-view mirror, but it's time to get back to my life in Virginia.
The perspective that different landscapes offer me emotionally is why I travel, and I feel more at home with myself now that I've had my fix of big, open country where wild is out your backdoor.
I found out more about my own need for being outdoors and near water, and fly fishing will be happening in my near future. Virginia has some great trout fishing waters, and I intend to begin exploring them as soon as possible.
Yesterday, we spent our day looking at old gold mines on Gold Creek, and I panned for gold in the Gold Creek Campground and on the Quartz river.
I found no gold, though. But lots of pretty rocks!
We then traveled over to Pitkin, a small, modern day mining ghost town that is trying to find a new identity as a four wheeling and motorbike destination.
We drove on some epic forest service roads, enjoying the mountain air and animals that showed their faces for us, and spent a lot of time in lawn chairs just staring at the scenery as the river gurgled past us. What a treat to take half a day and just stare into landscape, letting your mind drift with the clouds.
Here are a couple of videos I made to remember those small moments that call for a pause. I hope they invite you to take a minute wherever you are, and notice the majesty of the small moment.
Random fact about me: I drink a variety of sparkling waters daily, with Nixie being my favorite.