Living In-Between Earth and Sky

My 2026 word: Process

My 2026 tarot card: the Empress

This is my year of getting lost in the messy, creative process. This is my year of no distractions, only completions.

Beginnings: Where I'm Going (Part 2)

What gifts did 2025 provide for you (in all its mysterious ways)? What pivotal moments or emotional imprints stood out to you, that changed you in profound or subtle ways?

When you go chasing myths, sometimes you find them. Like finding constellations in the night sky. Your mind connecting dots, stories from elsewhere coming into focus. Told and retold and passed down through time and space. Origins always questionable. But sometimes when the pieces are too disjointed, you end up stitching them together to create something entirely your own.

Dancing through stories of starships, death rituals, and forbidden libraries across the Torajan dreamscape.

Nights become longer than days, and the late summer rains bleed into autumn keeping the air damp and sticky. When the rain stops and clouds clear, somehow the stars feel closer. My new apartment presses against the mountain range to the west keeping it cool and breezy, blowing away the day's humidity. Autumn has always been my favorite time of year--my birthday, Halloween, Samhain. The season of harvest, the season of change. The season to cast spells and burn sigils. The season to conjure magic and experience its unfolding. 

As we sit here at the far edge of earth's tilt and pause, do you surrender to the lightness or to the heaviness of summer? 

I'm grateful for a lot these days in this ever madding world. And one of those things is books. Not only having the time and space to write them, but also read them. I've more than enough posts on writing and books and how they have impacted my life, so for the first time, I will write about some of my favorites, ones that I am grateful exist and what they mean to me. These are not reviews or summaries, but something more. They are about what gives the stories pulse and beauty and how they (though fiction) speak a truth that could not be told in any other way. 

Gratitude and Books

When I stop moving through the world and life as though it's an illusion, it becomes more vibrant, more real. I see it as a creation I can work with and immerse in. I stop making every experience something other than what it is. I stop projecting meaning onto everything and simply live. 

Sikkim is filled with temple secrets, sprawling tea gardens, and waterfalls that flow down mountains and over roads. It oozes untamed lands, mysterious rituals, and unspoken words hidden in the folds of everything. This land swallowed me and showed me what it means for a place to be woven with mystery, for a place to haunt you long after you leave. But that is not where this story begins. Full Post: Traversing Landscapes & Stories

Something akin to telepathy, books bring you inside the mind of another, far removed from where you stand, transmitting thoughts and insights and channeled worlds directly to you here, now. I can I travel deeper and further than anywhere I could reach on earth--through time and space, the world over, and into dimensions and realities that I otherwise would not have access. 

I lose myself in these worlds of words, and then I rip them apart. I analyze the structure, the voice, the craft, and the whys and the hows. Whereas writing, for me, is an intuitive act that sprouts from elsewhere, reading (including my own work) is an act of purposeful exploration, pulling back veils and uncovering the hidden layers between the written words. 

Back in December, I had decided to shelf my first novel. I had worked on it, on and off, for the better part of a decade and spent about two years trying to find an agent to represent it. It was strange, experimental, and ambitious. Over the years, I'd gotten all kinds of contradictory advice from all kinds of people from all walks of life on how to improve it. All I gained from that experience was confusion and frustration. I had other projects to focus on that weren't quite as polarizing. I knew I needed to let this one go. And so I did. I surrendered it fully. 

What strange trajectories life can take. 

I remember thinking this lying in my bunk at the Ashram, staring up at the world map pinned to the crumbling wall next to me. I'd been in India for less than a week, and I had already found a rhythm to my days and nights, enveloped in comfort--more comfort than I'd felt in a long time. Ever, in fact. Comfort. A word as foreign to me as everything I was now surrounded by. I had walked away from one life to live a completely different one. I'd done this before so the concept wasn't new to me, but India was. And, I was noticing, so was comfort.

At first it was challenging--the constant movement, disrupted sleep, the unfamiliar yet familiar sights and sounds. The vast distances between point A and point B. The unanticipated caution, kind attention, and eventually comfort. I became accustomed to all these things and grew to enjoy them to the point I didn't want to leave, not quite yet anyway. Hindsight or perhaps intuitive foresight is something else isn't it.