I see the beginnings of three peony bushes, too. The ferns in my backyard have started to return; their stems the most curious and whimsical thing, as they curl and spike in that impossibly electric green.

The third week of the month, the trees seem to green overnight. I’ve always wondered how they do that — how they all seem to know, all at once. The light shifts with them, casting dappled patterns along the sidewalk, flickering through new fragile leaves. I ache with joy, recognizing how much I had missed this.

And during the last week, the small tree in my front yard blooms a deep pink. I’ve tracked cherry blossoms wherever I’ve lived, anticipating their brief bloom. In New York, it felt like an event. Something to catch before it disappeared. And now, to think I have one in my very own yard! It feels like my own personal treasure. Like something I had once chased has quietly come to me.

I have drinks with a friend at Nico’s. It’s warm and the sun is at our backs. The light cuts across her face as she’s hunched over my phone, scouring a text exchange. She squeals and yelps and her hand squeezes mine. She delights alongside me about my date soon to come, recognizing the significance for what it is. I walk home as the night turns black. I sit in my porch listening to the birds and cars passing, journal in hand. The glow of my phone startles me. I see the beginnings of, “I’m so sorry to do this but…” and know my date has cancelled.

I hadn’t realized just how much I wanted it. How much I had let myself balloon in anticipation. I feel myself deflate in slow motion, the long hiss of something giving out. I feel the energy pool and fall hot from my eyes. With nowhere to go and no one for it to meet, it collapses back into my own hands.

Within a few days, my writing class is cancelled due to low enrollment and the running group I joined in March announces its end. It begins to feel like more things fall through than hold.

Last month I wrote that I was within the patient work of seeing what grows. It seems, this month, that I bump up against the limits of that patience, where what I’ve been tending doesn’t feel like it quite takes.

I find that I am restless and agitated, moving with an unnecessary urgency. I spend the month searching for the source of this, trying to name that buzzing energy that swells and swells and seems to have nowhere to go.

I start by going to acupuncture. I tell the practitioner that I’m not sleeping — that my body feels charged, like something that crashes out and then startles awake deep in the night, alert all over again, unable to settle back down.

She has me lie on my back, heat laps coloring my stomach and feet in a furious red. White noise scrapes in the background, trying to convince I’m near the ocean when I’m very much in the basement of a clinic.

With instructions to relax, I can only stare at the eight needles carefully placed along my stomach. They agitate me, the one near my sternum making me especially anxious. I fight the urge to pluck them out one by one.

Relax, relax, relax, I tell myself. I try closing my eyes and focusing on my breath. Relentlessly, my eyes slip back open and I’m fussing over that one needle by my sternum. I’d like to flail and watch all the needles go flying. It’s only in the last minutes that my body reluctantly gives over. I slip into that thin place between waking and sleep and finally feel my body exhale.

I don’t start writing this essay until the final days of the month. I’ve been circling it, returning to it, abandoning it. It feels like trying to name something that won’t hold still. It shifts and slips and refuses to take shape. It’s like reaching for something just beyond my grasp, my hands closing on air.

I think April has felt like generating so much effort, and then having nowhere for it to go. I think I expected the life I am building to meet me at my pace. I am trying and reaching and expanding. I am showing up. And still, there are moments where that effort has nowhere to land.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

I continue to run every week. Each time I reach the small foot bridge along the lake, I pick up my pace, hurling one heavy leg in front of the other. I feel my chest expand further, I inhale deep, huff out hard. I feel the wind at my back urging me forward. I cross my invisible finish line. My chest heaves and every part of me satisfyingly aches. I fling myself into the grass and wait as the energy burns out.

I realize a hard truth: I can participate fully and I still can’t totally control how my life fills out. My best efforts don’t guarantee an outcome. Some of what I plant will not take. Some of it will take longer than I want it to. And some of it, I suspect, is growing in ways I cannot see.

One afternoon, I stop at Wooden Ship. I sip a beer outside, Joey in my lap. I journal, trying to quiet my busy mind.

In the restroom, there’s a mural that stretches across the entire wall. Scrawled across the mirror in blue, loopy letters is, “I am hoping that whatever you are reaching towards bends a little closer to you.”

It’s not an answer, but it feels like a small kindness. And I let it be that.

The days grow long and the snow disappears. Time springs forward and the days yawn wide, markedly brighter and warmer. There are days when it snows and the temperatures dip, but they’re fewer and fewer. The light turns pale and soft. Like butter yellow. The birdsong is loud and rings like music. I open my three-season porch and buy a small vintage sofa for it. I open the windows and have my morning coffee there.

Spring touches an old bruise in me. The first spring I spent in New York was when the world shut down. The thrilling early days of building a life there collapsed so fast and so completely. Any sort of rhythm halted before it could really begin. What followed were several springs where the city bloomed, while my own movements ran counter to it — cautious, deliberate, risk-averse.

I began associating spring with feeling stalled. As a result, I feel a sort of restlessness each turn. Even all these years later, as temperatures warm and days stretch long, as activity begins to swell and the city busies, I often feel just slightly out of step with it all. The ghost of those days haunts me, my body remembering in a way my mind doesn’t.

However, this year, it feels like I’m more ready to sync into step with it. I sprawl out in my backyard, welcoming the warm sun on my skin. I have my breakfast outside, taking note of what’s beginning to bloom in my yard. Joey and I take long, ambling walks and watch as the lake continues to thaw.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how spring experiments its way into being. It’s a fragile and subtle persistence. It’s a clumsy and shaky emergence. Plants don’t wait until the sure end of winter. They test the air. They bloom anyway.

I notice that I, too, am testing the air.

I start the month taking an evening yoga class at Mia. The room is filled and mats cover all corners of the floor. We stretch deep and long and slow. It feels entirely good, like we collectively loosen our grip after a harrowing winter. I take notice of how often I’ve been stepping into rooms like this.

I continue to see my neighbors weekly. We watch Hamnet and go on walks around the lake. We gather on their front porch with shared friends. We eat dinner at a brewery as the sun sets. I’m so happy that I get to keep saying yes.

I attend choir each Sunday. We have a potluck and the dishes are plenty. There are soups and casseroles and salads, breads and bars and desserts. The tables run long and people are packed in shoulder to shoulder. I see it for the wonder it is in real time.

Each rehearsal I lament the approaching end. We have our concert and I cry as we sing. The church is completely filled, and then some. I see my friends earnestly waving at me. The space is teeming in joy and it is a feast to behold.

I see one of my favorite bands, The Lone Bellow, in concert. I last saw them over ten years ago, when I was in my early 20s and living in North Carolina. It feels like being catapulted to a wholly different part of my life. A wholly different version of myself. A version I deeply love, and hold so dearly.

They close with Tree to Grow, my favorite song, and tears fall fast and sure. The night feels like a tender remembering, and something in me softens hearing them again after all this time.

I start running again. Perhaps the avid year-round runners of Minnesota inspire me, but I relish the bitter cold cutting across my face. I breathe deep as my lungs stretch. I feel my endorphins spike and soreness bloom everywhere. I surprise myself by wanting to keep going.

I proceed to try a local running group. We run around the lake and I easily slot in, running in rhythm with strangers. We share beers afterward, and I meet new people each time.

My bus ride to and from work quietly becomes a favorite part of my day. I sink into that liminal space, and my mind wanders far and wide. I watch the choreography of city life, read the rhythm of each neighborhood passed through. I notice that I begin to know the line by memory.

I’ve now been in Minneapolis eight months and I start to see the frame of the life I’m building here. The early novelty has started to wear off. It no longer feels new or thrilling in the way it once did. I’m no longer in a sort of forward tilt, where everything glares bright in a flurried momentum. Something steadier begins to take its place.

It starts to feel less like starting over and more like learning how to stay. Less like endless possibility, more like faithful participation.

I’m now inside the slow work of building a life here. Of settling into rhythms, into commitments. Of digging my roots deep and beginning the patient work of seeing what grows. Of asking the question, What does it mean to keep tending to what I started?

I realize something this month that I’ve had backwards for a long time.

I thought readiness came first. That I needed to heal more, plan better. Frantically learn, think myself into circles, chase the moving target of understanding. I thought preparedness was the prerequisite for stepping forward.

But readiness rarely arrives that way. It blooms the same way spring does — a bit wobbly and unabashedly experimental.

And that is what my life has felt like this month. The slow accumulation of days where I keep showing up. Trying something new. Saying yes. Stepping into rooms and seeing what happens. And with each small attempt, the next one comes a little easier.

Slowly, almost without noticing, I’m beginning to belong to my days.

Readiness, it turns out, grows the same way spring does.

By testing the air.

I’ve been turning some questions over in my mouth:

Do you want to get married?
Buy a house?
Stay in such-and-such industry?
Do you want to live in Minneapolis?

Answers die on my tongue.

The questions feel like walls boxing me in, like they’re asking me to fold myself into a shape that isn’t mine. Like they’re asking me to mark the boundaries, to carve the shape, before touching the pulse that will fill it.

These questions turn a living, breathing becoming into a yes or no proposition.

I find these questions live on an axis of checked boxes, certainty, and milestones. They suggest a life marked by arrivals. They keep me chasing and comparing and running, ruminating on if I’m somehow behind or lost. As if the life I’m building doesn’t quite translate.

I’m drawn to the pull of a different axis, one that tilts toward aliveness, toward curiosity, toward texture.

It’s the quiet architecture of inhabiting a life that feels like it’s your own, to trace the spaces of a life with your hands, noticing where you soften, where you come alive, where something inside you says yes.

This axis breathes. It moves with the seasons, it lets me spin, reach, try, and return, always tethered to my pulse as both compass and current.

It begs that I keep listening, that I ask:

Am I alive in this?
Are we?

It’s not rootless, but responsive.

It isn’t indecision, or unwillingness to choose, to commit, to decide. It’s not that I don’t know what I want. It isn’t passivity. It’s that what I want isn’t a fixed outcome, it’s a way of aliveness — something I can feel answering back when I step inside it. It’s guided by active attention, continually asking and noticing and meeting and orienting.

So maybe the questions aren’t, Do you want to get married? or Do you want to live in Minneapolis?

But instead, How do you want it to feel while it’s becoming? What kind of life makes your pulse answer back?

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I end up going to Mia every weekend, always sitting along the same wall of windows. I keep returning to write. To find a quiet gallery, to find a piece I hadn’t noticed before. I keep returning as a way to grow familiar.

I keep waking before dawn to write with tea in hand. By now, it’s a practice I crave. The page a place to empty my head, writing anything and everything.

I continue to ride the bus to work, sitting on the east side on the way in, and on the west side on the way home. It feels like a particularly sunny month and rays cut through the windows, flickering across my eyes, bookending my days in light.

I feel the passage of winter, as I reach for my gloves less and less. I watch the days grow longer, stepping out each night to a lighter sky—from ink blue, to cobalt, to cornflower.

Last month, grief was so front and center, sat before my eyes and all I could see. It was like wading through a brush too thick, unable to get out from under it. Like being in the eye of a storm—the air heavy and thick, the real force hovering just beyond.

There was too much happening, I slipped into survival mode.

This month, the storm quiets and lands forcefully in my body. Not all at once, not all the time, but with fervor.

Its tendrils spread through my chest, sharp and pressing. I sleep more than usual. I return to my yoga mat again and again, stretching my body long, trying to tend to all the places it hurts.

My ribcage burns. Something tightens there and will not loosen. It spreads outward like heat, like something molten touching everything. I visit the chiropractor each week and I cry on the table. It feels as though grief stored is making itself known. Like the hurt is pushing against its confines, meeting bone.

I don’t think grief ever really leaves. It just changes rooms.

I am learning how to hold it differently. To place it, gently, into the vase alongside everything else. Not as something to overwhelm, but something to tend. Its contrast only making the joy more brilliant.

Some days the gesture feels meaningful. Much of the month it feels like a futile thing. Like such a small offering against something much too large. As the weeks pass, I lose steam. I feel a deep tired. And still I keep adding to the vase. More out of habit than hope. The muscle memory of the thing rather than the desire.

And so, I spend the month filling that vase, nudging myself toward practices that fill it stem by stem.

In the evenings I alternate between reading Mary Oliver and Ross Gay. The note on my phone grows longer, filled with fragments and words I want to hold onto. I jot down, “As if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt,” and “Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!” I write, “The sun today!” and words like shiver and scoop.

Joey and I take long walks. We often follow the creek, always sitting on the same bench. There’s a volley of birdsong overhead. We hear owls, too, and sometimes smell a faintness of smoke and ash.

He runs on the nearby frozen lake, a novel and utterly joyful thing for both of us. He breaks into wild, ecstatic loops, racing in circles across the ice. It is the most delightful thing to witness—a sudden arrangement of joy, bright and unruly, placed directly into my hands. Oh, to express the big and rowdy and uncontainable pleasures of the body. I see something bright added to the vase in real time.

I visit Easy Day often. Mid-month, temperatures climb and it’s sunny and 50 degrees. I sit outside at the cafe for hours, Joey at my feet. Live music plays and I write. It’s peaceful and perfect.

I join a community choir and it means more than I can say. We warm up singing, I am theirs and they are mine. The words ring through the room until it permeates everything, until it’s all I can hear. It’s like we wrap our voices around our sorrows. Like we wrap hands with another and hold tight. I leave each rehearsal feeling like something fragile inside me has been gently set back into place.

Still, grief keeps moving through the room. February carries echoes of January.

I carry parts of them with me.

I listen to Rolling Golden Holy over and over. I walk the halls of Mia weekly. I lay my blanket across my lap each night, tracing the wool through my fingers. Something like hearing, moving through, and touching the outline of a memory.

I keep lighting candles, keep going to memorial sites. I keep looking. Keep watch. Something like tending to the shape of what was lost.

Because of them, because of all this, something takes hold in me. Something like resonance, like something still sounding. And also like roots spreading, like a web binding.

I touch the ache, recognizing its cry: it happened, it happened, it happened. It mattered, it mattered, it mattered. And I hold fast to the part of me that chooses to stay wide open.

I think this month has been a search for chosen sites of attention. Small stabilizing forces. Stems for the vase. It’s a fragile keeping, often feeling frivolous or foolish. It also feels fleeting. Like I’ve chosen to bind hands with liminality. But the point was never permanence. The point is the tending. To doing it over and over and over again and letting things matter. To keep making, however I can, a bouquet. Or a vase.

I meet the new year with my hand laced in another’s, legs tangled together. Running my fingers along their forearm, tucked into the sleeve of their sweater. With a gentle kiss as the ball drops. I let myself feel cautiously hopeful.

They teach me how to play chess. I learn words like bishop, pawn, and rook. I make moves on the board—slow and deliberate, cautious by instinct. They respond in kind. Really, I’m marveling at their tenderness. How they teach me with such gentleness, a patience so wide open. As if my not-knowing deserves the utmost of care. I wish I had reached across and kissed them then.

On January 5th, I start a new job. I wake early and journal curled up in my bed with peppermint tea in hand. I take the bus downtown, reveling in being on public transit again. It makes me think of New York and I’m hit with a wave of grief. I feel grateful to miss it, and also glad to have left. I make a habit of listening to music and sitting by the window watching the city go by. I immediately meet people at the office who feel like they could be friends. I notice that I feel relaxed in the space, like I could settle in here.

That’s how Minneapolis has felt—like I can let myself stay.

Renee Nicole Good is murdered by ICE. It’s my third day at my new job, and I see a protest starting to form outside the window. Awareness settles over the office like a fog.

What ensues is hard to name. The fury and devastation permeate everything, everywhere. It’s a force that floods the streets in an immediate and resolute fashion. The outcry is quick and determined. The vigilance is constant. The fear and rage too large to metabolize.

I read Renee’s poems. I look closely at her face. I see posters of her all over the city. Makeshift memorials, too. It feels like an inflection point, like it did with George Floyd.

The city rallies in an unbelievable fashion. I attend trainings. I pack lunches. I transfer groceries from one place to another. I join neighborhood chats. I take Joey to more cafes and people pet him with a devastating need. I bundle up on the day of the statewide strike and go to a restaurant down the street to make sandwiches. I share coffee with neighbors as I slot in along an assembly line of people desperate to help. It’s not enough, it’s not nothing.

The high is -10 that day. The birdsong is notably loud.

I think about migration. How it isn’t just admirable because it’s brave, but because it’s necessary. How leaving is often the most true response in changing conditions. How leaving is often the answer to an ache that can no longer be ignored.

I think about how violent it is to call that movement criminal. To erect borders and deny welcome. To argue legality is to willfully misunderstand what is happening. This is fear masquerading as order, deciding who is permitted safety and who is not.

Bodies often move like birds, because staying would cost them their survival.

The morning after the strike, Alex Pretti, too, is murdered. I hear the news while brewing my coffee. No no no no no no flies through my mind like fireworks. That evening I walk down the street with a candle and stand alongside neighbors, groups forming at every corner with the glow of candles as far as the eye can see. Five small children stand next to me, each with their own candle and it all feels so fucked up.

The cautious hope I feel on New Year’s snuffs out, and it all comes to an end soon after. They say, “I think you’re wonderful.” We hold hands as it’s ending. It’s a different kind of ache when it feels like something came so close. When you have to grieve an “almost.” It’s a different kind of ache to look in another’s eyes and to know you were supposed to meet, in spite of it all. To see so much good. To bury my face in their neck before I say goodbye and walk out the door.

I realize we move like those chess pieces on the board, with drawn-out carefulness always anticipating risk.

They tell me once that chess is about thinking two or three moves ahead—that a stronger player is always strategizing beyond the move at hand.

We never quite play to win. We play not to lose.

I write every day this month. The words feel urgent almost, as if they’re incessantly looping in my mind and need a place to go. I wake early and write by lamplight. I write before I go to sleep.

I cry often. I cry with my face buried in my pillow, choking out sobs. I cry into Joey’s fur. I cry in the sushi line. I stare through blurry vision as the man slices crab and cucumber and avocado. I cry while buying red tulips at the co-op. I cradle them in the crook of my arm, like a fragile silly little lifeline. I cry while walking along the lake.

At least it does something to shake loose the grief tight in my chest. A grief that is both my own, and one that is also at a scale so much bigger. I grieve old wounds and stories that haunt me like ghosts. I grieve what almost was, what hovered just shy of becoming real. I grieve alongside an entire city. I grieve a bone-deep exhaustion of what it is to continue to pay attention.

My mind thinks of that that chess board often.

I realize something else, too: I never let them see the full cost.

I was braver than I have ever been, and I still withheld.

I communicated more clearly than I ever have, and I still chose palatability. I named my needs, and kept the cost of feeling them to myself.

I hid the heavy weight of fully wanting and not fully feeling it returned. How my body stayed alert, scanning for any perceived shift. How the push and pull left me unsteady, like there was nothing sure to grip. Old wounds were pressed, alarms were tripped. I opted for composure because I didn’t know how to trust that there would be hands there if I fell apart.

This, too, was playing not to lose.

I listen to Robyn a lot. I dance around my living room. I force myself to go on walks in the frigid cold. I light candles and shower in the dark. I buy tulips every week. I sit in a pocket of sun whenever I can.

My friend invites me to make a vision board with her and her neighbors. I circle themes like trying, presence, and pleasure.

I sauna and cold plunge. It’s the only thing that quiets my brain, the contrast so jarring it empties my head.

I think a lot about how glad I am to be in Minneapolis. How I questioned the decision endlessly while living in New York, but I haven’t questioned it once since returning. I’ve never felt prouder to be here, actually.

January is a month that feels like utterly too much. And yet, it brought me here, with words and ideas pouring out faster than I can catch.

It brought No Small Thing. This work is a refusal to minimize the lived texture of a life. Nothing about this feels small to me. Not the joy, not the devastation, not the ordinary places they appear. Paying attention to all of it feels like my life’s work.

Joy, especially, is not incidental. It’s the measure I keep returning to—not because it’s easy or constant, but because it insists on itself even as an antithesis to grief. Maybe especially then.

I hope you stay.

The light splits through my windows, stretching far and wide, touching everything.

It’s never lost on me, this.

For the past few years, I’ve dreamed of a home bathed in light. In New York, the window in my bedroom looked into a narrow alleyway. It was dark in my room more often than not, except in the winter, when the light was low enough to cut into my room at 2:30 in the afternoon. I’d close my eyes and picture my next place, knowing that someday that home bathed in light would be mine.

For a long time, I had this quiet sense while living in New York that something was off. Not dramatically wrong, just misaligned. I stayed anyway. I sat within that feeling for two years. I kept my life small enough to manage, convinced that there was something purposeful in the waiting. I didn’t know yet what needed to change, only that the version of my life I was living no longer fit.

It’s now mid-November and I left New York five months ago. I moved out of that dark bedroom on May 1st. The trees have gone bare. They stretch like spider webs in the sky. The ferns in my backyard have shed, the grass has yellowed. The mornings are cool, markedly quiet and still. Yesterday I stretched out in the grass, threading the blades through my fingers while the sun warmed my face.

Even as all appears dormant, there’s a whole orchestra of activity below ground. Roots are strengthening, extending, and storing. Fungi and microbes are supporting the soils health. Tissues are strengthening, readying their defenses for frost and cold. Buds are slowly forming, though they won’t emerge for months yet.

For a long time, I mistook dormancy for failure.

The last two years for me in New York were winter. I’d meet with my therapist and bemoan how I felt this gap between who I was and who I knew I could be. The gap felt impossible to cross. I’d watch myself spin in the same cycles, fall victim to the same patterns, and hide inside the same rhythms. It was painful and frustrating. I lost patience with myself. I had outgrown the version of the life I was living, and I was afraid I was wasting time, scared I was missing my life while I was in it.

I see now that something else was happening.

I see now it was something like a Tetris board. Pieces falling in from above, awkward and mismatched at first. I’d rotate them again and again, trying to force a fit.

But slowly, without me noticing, things began to slot into place. Space cleared where there had been clutter. What felt like delay was actually alignment.

Sometimes what looks like stagnation is the slow work of becoming ready.

And when I arrived in Minneapolis, growth and change came fast and hurried. Buds split the surface and sprouted with gusto.

It’s not that Minneapolis saved me or fixed things. It’s that I arrived ready.

I found my apartment within a week of returning. I toured it on a Saturday. The sky was dark and heavy with rain, but I only saw the large southern windows running the entire length of the place. I saw the three-season porch and visualized plants and an easel. I saw the fireplace and original hardwood floors. I knew it was mine. Within two days, I signed the lease.

One of my best friends lives two blocks up the street. We see each other weekly, the regularity of it still brings tears to my eyes. The lake is three blocks away, and Joey and I walk along it almost every day.

Within my first week, someone introduces themselves to me while I’m writing at a café, Joey at my feet. A small, remarkable stroke of luck. They color my life in a way that feels improbable. A domino effect follows. One thing tips into another. My last job leads to my current one. A painting class leads to the easel that now lives in my porch.

I say yes more than I used to. I stretch. I try. And it all still feels like luck rushing toward someone who’s finally open enough to receive it.

I don’t pretend to understand what those last two years in New York meant. They were hard. I felt lost more often than not, impatient with myself, afraid I was losing sight of my own life. But I can see now that they were not empty. They were not nothing.

What looked like stagnation was preparation. What felt like failure was quiet work. Roots strengthening. Buds beginning to form deep below the surface.

And now, in this place flooded with light, things are growing faster than I can keep up with. Not because I forced them to—but because the season finally turned.