According to folklore, and depending on whether the reader readily believes any of it, the smoke from a Palo Santo stick is said to smell especially acrid to those who have the most to cleanse. When I first started using Palo Santo, I found the scent of the smoke challenging, but not disagreeable. Over the years it’s wavered, but mostly I enjoy it now.

Last night there was a sourness in the smoke of the new batch I lit. As much for the newness, as for what has been weighing on the mind of late, I’m afraid. To offset the world, I find it best to up my meditation time. Gradually, just a few extra minutes a day, until we make it out of the winter wilderness.

The Palo Santo always smells sweeter in the spring.

The soul feels better then too.

Light has been changing.

Days grow a little longer, one by one.

Sometimes there is color in the sky.

Sometimes there is color in the sun.

Sometimes it bleeds gray, drained of hue, drained of shade.

It’s hard to find much hope when we’re still in January.

Still, I follow the light. It shifts, it slides, it changes ever-so-slightly.

When the sky begins getting that Maxwell Parish glow, and the clouds look painted when the sun hits them in the afternoon, I know spring is on the way. Maybe not arriving tomorrow, maybe not next month, but not long thereafter.

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

There isn’t much more to say about the past week in this country – a country I no longer recognize, as much as I am unsurprised by where we are. Most of these silly posts were programmed in advance of recent days, but there are a few that address it because our silence is our complicity. People may not like political posts, but when politics become a question of morality, it is our obligation to speak up. Now, a look back at the previous week, when just a few days ago things felt only slightly less awful…

Backlit and blurred – a time before an image… I do not remember it.

Holy mackerel!

Hitting all the red lights.

Pre-populating these winter thrills.

Sounds of the seasons.

Do you know the muffin man?

Mind your busy-ness.

Pie of humility.

Longing for these underwear-clad days.

Caught in the knit.

The law of the cellular land.

As the rolls rise.

The sanctity of ritual.

Locating the sliver of extra light.

A wintry silver lining.

A post of pause upon the murder of yet another American citizen by ICE.

Hey MAGA, didn’t many of you vote for Trump to protect your 2nd Amendment rights? Well, the government just shot and killed a man for legally carrying. They took his gun, THEN they shot him, point blank, multiple times. It’s on video and we can clearly see what happened. They are treading on YOU.

Two days before that murder, these seven House Democrats voted to continue funding ICE. I fear many more FAFO moments are in store for our struggling country.

Sitting down to a cup of peppermint herbal tea, still scalding hot and sweetened with just a spoonful of honey, I would normally send out a volley of texts with the photo you see here, captioned simply, “This is cafe culture.” A silly and foolish way of staying in touch with friends.

Today, it feels pointless and stupid and too sad to do such a thing, as our own government just ruthlessly murdered yet another American citizen on our own soil. Watch the video and see for yourself; don’t listen to the media or the White House at this sad point.

You wouldn’t know it here in the sanctuary of a cafe. The staff still serves its coffee and tea and food stuffs. Clients still find their friends and sit down amid laughter and bonhomie. Talk of football, snowstorms, and the typical winter banter spills out from other tables. Because really, it’s just another Goddamned day in America, and this is what we supposedly voted into office. Well, not me, and not most people I know, but too many to stop what some of us knew was coming. Here we are.

And so I pause.

I read. I sip tea. I meditate.

Selfish self-preservation, because no one seems to care.

Ladies, gents, and all who defy such limiting labels, I give you the silver lining of what is to come.

Enjoy.

Relax.

Take it easy.

Luxuriate.

Revel in the insect-free zone of the year.

It’s not important what I write.

It’s not important what I wear.

It’s not important what I even do.

What’s important is that I’m here, sitting in the cafe, honoring ritual and tradition and carving out a new set of habits to see me through the winter.

These words are mostly hollow and empty – vapid vessels that give my hand something to do in pushing pen across paper – and it’s good, it feels good. There is joy enough in physically writing, in finding the flow of letters, slowed in my head for having to write them all out. Writing, in its physical hand-wrought form, is becoming a lost art, and a favored indulgence.

At one of my early jobs with the state as a Keyboard Specialist (now called Office Assistant) I remember the head Secretary (now called Administrative Assistant – we have come so far!) being given something to type out, and the person doling out the assignment asked somewhat sheepishly if she would mind typing it out.

“No, it’s been a while since I got to do straight typing, and I kind of missed it,” the Secretary said.

I understood exactly what she was saying, how good it felt sometimes to execute a routine, especially one at which you excel and do well. Going through such physical practices can be soothing, almost meditative in a way.

There’s a similar feeling I get as I write out these words on lined paper. It is structure, it is order, it is ritual – all at a time when those things move further from comfortable reach. Most of all, it is a process – and I’ve always loved the process and the practice more than the result and finished product.

The little pockets of time in which humans sometimes have to wait have always fascinated me – and I usually attempt to make them mean something more than the killing of time. What an awful phrase and concept – killing time. I’ve always hated the expression, as time is one thing I’ve genuinely valued, perhaps more than anything else.

In the end time always, and only, wins.

When given a time window – for furniture delivery or furnace repair or that hour for letting a batch of cinnamon rolls to rise – how do you prefer to spend the minutes? While I say I’m going to read or write something, more often than not I simple pause and let my brain roam wildly, recalling all those other suspended hours of waiting – the day I waited for a new bed in Boston, watching th sun slowly pass over the hardwood floors – or the morning I spent in the waiting room while Andy had his most recent medical procedure. Losing myself in thoughts is how I spent those moments, and a little philosophical exercising is good for the mind.

I happened upon two knitting clubs in the span of three days, surely a sign that I need to get back into the yarn game. The first was at a yarn store, the second at my usual cafe. The yarn store group seems a bit more serious – the members sat quietly and intently at their work, the leader guiding them with a general stitch comment, while the cafe group seemed looser, with food and drinks and more talking.

My knitting journey will likely not be part of a group, and will actually not be knitting at all, but crocheting, as I can barely handle one hook, much less two needles. The loose and gentle plan is to improve and practice technique with the basic granny square and grow from there. My first project – this blanket that took literally forty years to complete – was too long and too ambitious to be a good starting point. In the end, I conquered it, but I’m not going to do it again; I don’t have the years left. So granny squares it shall be for now. Baby steps, baby stiches… they pass the days of winter.