Show Up

March 2025 || The message spring whispers (and sometimes shouts).

Most days of the year, I take a quick look at my phone’s photos from that specific date through the years. On my dinosaur of a device, these memories reach back as far as 2016, yet often feel like just yesterday. This practice, meant at first to declutter, has become a curious look back now taking shape in the much overdue construction of albums we can hold in our hands. Imagine that!

March, for various reasons, is heavily weighted with memory — layers of texture and color, light and darkness in many of the last decade of them. And in the digital collection of their goings-on, it’s really no different.

Something I’d noticed this month, this year, with my phone less present in the day-to-day, was how slowly spring appeared to arrive in the physical. I’d spy the buds and blossoms of Marches past, pulled from the cloud in my pocket, and wonder at their absence in the present. I could feel it inside of me though, growing.

Show up, I’d whisper. Please, just show.

Celebrating my little brother’s wedding under a veiled sky in our hometown, this past weekend, spring was everywhere, new and fresh. But also, uncannily, subtly stormy. More than a decade it’d been since I’d ridden the rhythmic rumble of the bridge-tunnel, windows down to smell the nearby ocean. I didn’t know how much I’d missed it until then.

A lot of life has happened in those ten years. So much different, yet so much still the same. That’s the tricky thing about time: the way people and places seem larger than life and one day diminish, maybe even disappear. Others’ smallness quite suddenly becomes significant years later. And there you stand, every age in between, atop a hill that what was once a pile of trash, letting the wind whip through your hair and dry your tears.

It isn’t easy to wait and to hope. Even harder to be disappointed and acknowledge the parts of the winter that never leave even as the leaves slink, green and dewy, from their hard shells. Though there is joy, there is also pain, and life, whether we like it or not, is a lot of holding both — not just in, but up. They’ll find their way to the light.

Show up, spring shouts. Please, just show.

I’d bottle most of this March, I could, and I can’t always say that. Some moments were imperfect, of course, but most were flooded with just enough good to soften the edges:

• A scratch-made cherry pie and vanilla bean ice cream.

• Hikes upon hikes, soundtracked to yellow-rumped warblers with tokens of hickory nut hearts and stones tucked into my pocket.

• Copious amounts of chess played at the dining room table.

• A school break spent reveling in our relative backyard.

• Bouquets of weeds flowers before they’re mown.

• The driveway lined in cherry tree petals like snow.

• A cave walk to the falls and exploring rock gardens and galleries.

• Seeing works of art made by respected hands and then making our own.

• Ina Garten’s shepherd’s pie, poor man’s black velvets, and Irish reels.

• Walking at night under shifting, starry skies.

• Going in back in time, in more ways than one, in heading east.

Eventually, I abandon my daily decluttering down memory lane in favor of simply letting this spring arrive the way she wants to. It’s one thing to recognize patterns that grow familiar over time, and another to expect them in our timing and in the ways we’ve known before.

We meet in the middle, then, both of us coming out of the shortest, longest month of the year, perhaps a little timidly at first, but always, always, brave, in the end.

Show up, we beg. Please, just show.

• As our digital fast approached, I was curious about the idea of using a pocket-sized (A6) notebook the way I might sometimes use my phone: capturing moments, jotting down to-dos, writing down quotes or ideas, making lists and plans. A month in, I cannot begin to tell you the joy and clarity this habit has become! It’s really as simple as finding a small notebook and using it (again and again and again) — but if you’re anything like me and would like to see it in action, there are plenty of helpful videos on YouTube, like this one. (I’m using an A6 Leuchtturm dot grid in a perfectly spring Sage.)

• This has been an excellent reading month for me (go figure!), and my standouts have been my continued (weekly) reading of Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, and Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again. I’m also halfway through Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping and really enjoying it!

• I’ve enjoyed popping in here and there this month to the Big Bear Bald Eagle Live Nest cam. Early this month, eagles Jackie and Shadow welcomed three eaglets over the course of a few days, and getting a peek at the everyday lives of an eagle family has been so sweet. Unfortunately the pair lost one of the eaglets mid-month during a snowstorm, but the two remaining appear to be doing well!

• When I spied Lamy’s new AL-star in Denim, which just so happens to be our wedding colors, I knew it had to be mine! Paired with a sample of De Atramentis Pearlescent Ink in Cyan Blue-Copper, my first shimmer ink, it’s so dreamy!

I wanted to extend a special welcome to a wave of new readers who somehow found their way to my teensy sliver of the internet this month. Welcome to a space, that for this season, tends to be a little quiet as I sort out stilling the digital noise in my life and hunting for margin to show up to my writing life. I’m glad you’re here. ✨

How have you shown up lately? Or in what ways have you been feeling the tug to show up, but maybe haven’t, just yet? What’s stopping you?

I’d love to hear from you. ✍🏻