18 November 2025: Winter beginnings, and the common experience

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18 NOVEMBER 2025

We call her winter. According to the latest and greatest on my morning newsfeed scroll (stroll?), there is a butterfly-shaped hole in the sun, which means there are solar winds headed towards little old us. A beautiful and terrifying thought.

At this time of year, and in fact this time in my life, I am finding comfort in using my hands to create things. It began around Halloween when my daughter was home, and we made a pumpkin-shaped plate. Happy with this process, I now have a newfound obsession in clay as a medium for creating. Daily poems have returned to my hand, too.

I quietly give my procrastination the name “hibernation” and feel better about the less “productive” days.

I find myself reading more at the moment - this usually happens in bursts. But I hope that I can make a habit of it. Two-liners, aka short-form content (even the word content makes me reel), have become quite tedious to read. Too much information without the benefit of context.

At times I have succumbed to creating these short versions of myself as well, and always feel that there is something missing. That is why I am here, putting pen to paper, words on a screen.

I find it hard to talk to the camera, and normally have to do around fifty takes before I am even slightly ok with what I have said, the tone, how the light looks at that particular time, and by that point I have lost all sense of purpose, and start asking myself “why? why?” and “do people really want to hear about another lost artist, when they are so busy trying to make their own day make sense?”

So yet again my phone storage fills up with videos that I will delete in a week’s time to make space for more pictures of strange word pairings, French menus, local events posters, screenshots of silly memes, uninspired quotes, or alternatively, and most of the time, videos of my daughter doing something funny.

So what is the point of this post? This is me trying to figure out a way to share the context behind my music - what I am doing and where I am going. It just doesn’t sit right to share art without making an attempt at some kind of background. Trying to convey the stories that led to the art.

Life has been quite shaken this past year, as we have had to learn to deal with terminal illness in the family. I have not said this out loud outside of my family and friends yet, but it is a universal experience, so here I am writing it down.

With the last year being as it has been, I have had many moments when music has felt selfish, and I have simply pressed the pause button, and focused on what is right in front of me. The feelings of selfishness have at other times been cancelled out by another voice in my head saying “yes but - surely it is all the more important to say things with our creativity when we are experiencing challenges.”

Even so, life has slowed down, and I feel comfort in this slow pace. I have found myself catching up on a lot of new music lately, where before podcasts had become my background noise and comfort. Music, crafts, and reading, have led me to an inspired space, and I hope to follow it around some sort of corner.

If you read this far, thank you, and I hope to share real moments with you again soon. I might even feel adventurous enough to add a picture of mine and my daughters’ clay pumpkin to this post, because I feel a childlike pride…

À bientôt les amis <3