This is a season filled with tissue paper and birthday candles and sprinkled frosting. It is the season of my baby’s birthday, though she isn’t a baby anymore. Such a gift: her sparkly, float-into-the-room-in-tulle, glitter-tattoo-of-a-butterfly approach to life. She is a dessert-first, you-can-never-wear-too-many-beads sort of kid. I learn so much from...

So it’s almost the end of summer. Not meteorological summer — not yet — though the mornings are not bright as early as they were a few weeks ago, and nights are growing dim rather quickly. But the end of summer, as in the weeks that my big kid is not in school. Though only 1/4 of our household is actually on the school calendar these days, it still...

I’ve long been intrigued by the 333 project. The 333 project: 33 items of clothing, for three months (underwear, bras, significant item of jewelry, and pajamas excluded). Such a nice formula for cutting out what isn’t necessary, for focus, for streamlining, for simplifying. And I like formulas. Especially for difficult things. Inspired by a recent, brief...

I’m leading a little class on journaling that begins this week, a class called “Journaling as a Creative Practice.” I wrote the title — though like most everything I’ve written, I’m questioning if I got it right, wondering what I meant and wishing it was in pencil so I could erase it or in a notebook so I could rip out the page and try on a nice, new clean...

So one of the challenges of making a change — in my case, most recently, transitioning to freelance work — is that everything, well, changes. Every little thing, that is. The past couple of weeks have been exhausting, not so much because of a new schedule or the new projects or some sort of longer-than-usual to do list, but because so many of the little...