easing in

a crescent moon sunset, shot outside a hospital.

I left this space — both physical and digital — early and in a hurry. Not two days after returning home to my little Harlem studio, I got a phone call, blew out the candles, stuffed three clean shirts and a phone charger in a bag, and drove straight back to New England. I spent the next two weeks keeping nightly vigils by an ICU bedside — learning the quiet sleeplessness of the nurses on the graveyard shift, watching over a tenuous and angry flit in and out of consciousness, witnessing a profound reckoning with mortality and the limits of our fragile bodies.

Every time I think I have learned an intimacy with death, I come back to its bedside and begin again. By night, I meditated on a cold tile floor and memorized the various volumes of each beeping IV drip. In between daytime insomnia, I studied pathophysiology, pharmacology, Medicare coverage, generational trauma and resilience. Sometimes, in those dark hours before sunrise brought the next wave of scrubbed clinicians, I found myself wondering if this is what I was built for — this kind of intensive care.

A month later, we are recovering, catching our breath and our sleep, building strength, remembering routines and rituals, making new ones — easing back to this side of the veil, for now. For many of us, so much of the last year disappeared into grieving our limits, that point at which we can extend ourselves no further, when we pick up and keep going anyway. This year, blinking into the January sunshine, back in my neighborhood, I am reminding myself that rest can be a medicine. Not a surrender heralded by ambulances and resuscitation — but rather a gentle retirement, a return to homeostasis. This season, I am inviting in stillness, quiet solitude, abundant softness.

Happy New Year, loves.

until next time.