This fall and winter, I am inviting two new words to guide my creative life: attention and mischief.

Hello friends,

The air is soft with early morning birdsong as I write with a half-cup of coffee nestled in my lap. I'm sitting on the big madrone tree at Seward Park again, feeling appreciative just to be breathing.

The clouds burst a moment ago with a spring rain shower. I only know because I can hear drops hitting the broad maple leaves that form a protective canopy over my journaling session. I am safe here…

Mid-February is here and I am exhaling. Over and over, as if by doing this enough times slowly I can release every micron of tension-residue from every cell in my body. The days are getting lighter, and it (mostly) feels like it's working.

A few days after Christmas I’m eating veggie curry watching the sea through the window. There’s a lighthouse on a little island that appears and disappears through the clouds. Sometimes there are figures walking on the headland near the tower.

I’m here as a kind of halfway house­—after spending Christmas with my family in the suburbs and before going back to my tiny studio in the city centre.

One of my saving graces this year has been an enormous Madrone that fell in the park near my home. Surrounded by old growth, I go there Saturday mornings to sit on the three-foot-thick trunk and breathe. Stretching the muscles of my screen-weary eyes I look up, left, down, right. Birds whisper, the scent of cedar cleanses, and once a coyote spirited by. We looked at each other for a long moment, suspended. The year has been strange.

When I last wrote to you it was January and now it's May and the peonies are blooming. So much has happened. My world has changed, our world has changed.