The last few weeks have not arranged themselves into anything resembling a chapter. They've behaved more like footnotes — small detours, side errands, a thunderstorm or two thrown in to keep me from getting too comfortable with my own schedule. I've stopped trying to make the days line up. They prefer their own order, and they're usually right.
Most mornings divide themselves between poems, websites, branding work, and whatever stray idea wanders in before the coffee is ready. One hour I'm adjusting a logo by a few pixels nobody will ever notice. The next I'm staring at a blank page, trying to coax a poem into showing itself. Some days the words arrive like old friends who let themselves in the back door. Other days they behave like distant relatives who claim they couldn't find the address.
I've been spending time with my sister. She is one of the reasons I came to New Mexico in 2023. Out of a family of six, it is just the two of us now, and that arithmetic changes how you hold a Tuesday afternoon. Family stops being an abstract noun. It becomes a thing you carry carefully, with both hands, the way you'd carry a cup of coffee across a crowded room.
The weather has been giving its usual summer performance. Thunderheads come marching across the horizon with the confidence of stage actors who know the house is full. I've always loved a storm. There's something old and honest about thunder moving through the mountains — a sound that was here long before any of us thought to name it. When one approaches, I step outside. I tell God I'd like to see His best work. He hasn't let me down yet.
Pipes continues to supervise. She greets each morning as if grass and birds and sticks have just been invented overnight, and she's the first to be informed. Nothing in her world has actually changed, but she insists on being amazed by it anyway. I've started to think this is less a quirk of dogs and more a small instruction. The world doesn't have to be new. You only have to look at it as though it might be.
The Wealth of Ordinary Days
I used to think that joy would come with trumpets sounding from the sky, some grand event, some distant drum, some reason larger than the why.
Read the full poem →A few weeks back I went to the Pride celebration in Madrid. Calling it a parade is generous; if you blinked you'd miss half of it, and the other half would wave at you on the way past. But it was warm in the way small-town gatherings tend to be — everyone knowing someone who knows someone, dogs in bandanas, a sound system held together with optimism. I left thinking that the events with the most heart are usually the ones with the least spectacle. The good things rarely come with a marquee.
Lately I keep circling the idea of borrowed things. Borrowed seasons. Borrowed years. Borrowed friendships. Borrowed loves. The poems landing on my desk seem to be tugging at the same thread. Maybe age does that. You begin to suspect that permanence was never the assignment. The walk was the point. The conversation. The shared meal. The person sitting across from you while neither of you understands yet how much you'll want this hour back someday.
I have also become a quiet evangelist for sunsets. They are, I think, among the most underrated miracles on the daily schedule. No ticket. No reservation. Just show up and face west. Some evenings I put down whatever I'm pretending is urgent and watch the hills go gold for ten minutes. The older I get, the more I notice that beauty tends to arrive while we're busy looking somewhere else — and stays just long enough to be missed if we don't turn our heads.
The truth is, these have been good weeks. Not because anything large happened. The opposite, really. They were good because they were full of small, common things — work that asked something of me, family who needed me close, friends who answered the phone, storms that did not disappoint, a dog who finds every morning miraculous, and a few quiet moments where I remembered to be grateful before the moment passed.
I think that may be the whole arrangement. A life doesn't get built out of the days that make headlines. It gets built out of enough ordinary days, stacked carefully, that one afternoon you look back and realize the pile has become something you'd call extraordinary — though only in private, and only to yourself.
Yours, in ink and embers,
