Butterfly Mind

A rest in Lille

June 10th, 2025

I am near the end of my stay in Europe. Our son went home Saturday, and my husband went home Monday. We travelled to Paris, Lille, Roubaix, Brussels, Bruges, and Ghent over the past 11 days, and I returned to Lille for a final three days before I go home to Virginia. I am grateful for the peace and beauty of it after whirlwind days of sightseeing. When I first arrived here yesterday on my own, I ached for my husband’s company. I felt lonely without him. I walked the cobbled streets of the old town, restless and not wanting to go back to the empty apartment I’d rented for my three nights.

Finally, at around 5pm, I climbed the steps to my loft. I craved a place to rest, away from people. I’d picked this place for the windows I could write in, and I had a lot of catching up to do in my journal. I’ve successfully written at least 1000 words a day in my 1000 words of summer notebook, but that’s the extent of what I’ve managed to squeeze in during our full days of eating, walking, seeing cities and art and architecture, trains and metros, grand plazas, chocolate and waffle shops, wine caves, cafés, crêperies and gelato shops, boulangeries and patisseries, brasseries, cobblestones and stone stairs, castles and cathedrals and book stores and pen shops. I haven’t drawn or reflected on my days. I haven’t blogged.

I wanted to go through photos and maps and my daily 1000 words to make entries in my sabbatical journal, but my apartment seemed so empty. Quiet in a disquieting way. I opened the windows and heard the sounds of the street below, the white noise of the voices of friends and families talking and laughing with wine and snacks at outdoor tables on a clear evening, of suitcases clunking over cobbled sidewalks, of mopeds zipping and bicycles rattling.

I didn’t want to go sit at a restaurant by myself, and the sound of glasses clinking made me want to create a nice evening in. Some cold wine, music, something no fuss to eat.

Luckily in France, bread and wine are easy to come by. Within 10 minutes, I had walked to the bakery on the corner and gotten a ham and brie sandwich on a baguette, then walked around the corner to a gourmet shop for a chilled bottle of white wine. Like so many people in France at 6pm, I walked the cobblestones home with a baguette in a paper bag in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

Back at the apartment, which has no means of making sounds — no TV, no stereo — I opened my laptop and played Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I found the corkscrew and wine glasses I had no doubt would be in the kitchen.

With music, a glass of wine, a baguette sandwich I could eat with one hand while writing with the other, and the distant background sound of diners’ glasses tinkling and bell towers’ bells ringing, I finally felt at ease after missing my people all the day long. I began going through my daily entries from the trip, my photographs from the Louvre and Lille, and before I knew it, it was midnight. Time to rest.

Solo evening in Lille
On our way

May 29th, 2025

Today is the day! Our daughter landed in Paris a little over a week ago, successfully boarded a train and arrived in Lille, and has texted us nearly every day about the fun times she’s having in her study abroad program. Nine hours from now, my husband, son, and I will lift off to join her.

New places used to intimidate me. Especially cities. Cities bustle with scads of people who all know where they’re going and how to get there. I live in a small town, among trees and birds and quiet roads, where I’m rarely in anyone’s way, and I almost never worry about doing something gauche or gaping like bumpkin.

My job has given me the gift of travel. And not just travel, but travel with companions from around the world, who have visited every continent, who give me courage as I watch how they navigate new places, what tools they use, how they prepare, how they interact with city’s residents with respect and deference, and how we work together as a group and with the city and its people to know where we want to go and how to get there.

I’m so grateful for this. It has changed my life. For me, travel is up there with literature for understanding and appreciating humans in all our grace and fallibility. Around the world, we all struggle with the same things. We have always all struggled with the same things. Love, power, survival, wonder. We create, we destroy. We try to figure out what this thing called life is. Many of us struggle. Many of us try to get along with each other. Many of us create and appreciate beauty. Many of us smile and laugh and lift each other up.

Ten years ago, I would have been terrified to spend time by myself in a foreign city, or even a large city in the US. I’m amazed our daughter just flew to Paris by herself, and took a train from the airport to Lille, and didn’t seem to bat an eye about it. I love this for her. It bodes well for more travel in her future.

I wouldn’t call myself adventurous now. Big new places still intimidate me. But I’m braver. I will stay on my own for a few days after my husband and son leave. I booked an airbnb in Lille so I can hang out with our daughter if she’s around, and go off on my own if she’s not. I’ve got three sets of bookmarks on my map — Paris, Lille, and Brussels — marked up with recommendations from books I’ve read and from all of you (thank you!). I’ve got my notebooks and camera and e-reader packed. I’m dreaming about croissants and crepes, art and gardens. Architecture. Wine, cheese. Waffles and chocolate. Belgian beer in fancy glassware. I’m ready!
Three books

May 26th, 2025

Life of Pi

Life of Pi is always the book that jumps to the front of the line when I think about books that had an impact on me or changed my life. My experience with it was deeply personal and I don’t expect that others will undergo something similar, but Life of Pi gave me permission to believe in whatever brings the most joy, meaning, and sense to my life. For this I will always be grateful. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the unknown and unknowable, to the transcendent, to the depths inside of us, to universal connection, to the divine force. To all of the things that would be encapsulated by the word “God” except that the first association of that word conjures an image of the Judeo-Christian god, which does not match at all what I want to think about when I think about the divine. Until Life of Pi, I felt torn about this mismatch, and about what I can or can’t believe about God. Now I believe exactly what I want to believe, and I have fun with it, and it feels real and right to me.

Roots

Though it’s been many years, Roots by Alex Haley also had a deep impact on me. I was maybe in my twenties when I read it, and it was the first piece of art I’d experienced that showed slavery in an unabstracted, un-whitewashed way. It was the most brutal book I’d ever read at that point in my life. It humbled me.

Roots opened my eyes in a way that no public or private schooling in Georgia did. Last year I read How to Say Babylon by a Jamaican author who escaped her patriarchal Rasta home and landed at UVA in Charlottesville, Virginia. She was shocked there to be confronted constantly on campus by statues and monuments to Confederate “heroes.” In Jamaica, the statues and monuments were to those who overthrew slavery, not to the ones who perpetuated it. In the South when I grew up, we didn’t go deep on the realities of slavery for the enslaved nor how it continues to reverberate in the Black American experience now. My guess is that Southern schools don’t go there now either.

I remember I kept thinking, in and around the heartbreak and shock of reading Roots, This wasn’t that long ago. I know now that Roots is problematic for plagiarism and because Haley didn’t outright represent it as fiction, but I read it as a novel, and I stand by its impact. Literary fiction helps us understand one another. Understanding helps us love one another. We could use a lot more love among one another right now. Roots showed the realities and ramifications of slavery in a way I never had been exposed to before. It made me want to understand deeper, to bear witness, and to not forget. In doing so, it paved the way for some of the richest reading of my life, like The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Trees, James, and most recently, Beloved.

Ducks, Newburyport

Other than the two people I know who already read this — both of whom recommended it to me — Ducks, Newburyport is not a book I expect anyone in my life to read or ever have any desire to read. It is a single sentence that goes on for 1000 pages, which I know sounds awful and terrible and the worst thing ever, who would want to read that? Where do you stop when you need a break? I totally get that, which is why I don’t expect anyone to read it, and is also why I love it so much and why it goes on a list of three books that had an impact on me. The audacity! Who would do this? What writer would have the guts to say, you know what, I’m going to write an entire novel in one sentence, and not only that, but it’s going to be a good novel, with characters and plot and a phenomenal central conflict that is going to come out of nowhere at the end (or maybe the reader got a tiny hint, because I did throw in some foreshadowing) and it is going to BLOW the reader away?

A true artist, that’s what writer would do it.

I wrote about this book right after I read it (see Gobsmacked), so I won’t repeat all that again. If you do think you might want to read the book, maybe don’t read the blog post, it might have spoilers.

Daily writing prompt
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
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A small commitment

May 24th, 2025

My podcast tree has grown a new branch. I don’t know how I found it, maybe I was clambering around, looking for stuff about creativity, but I scrambled onto the London Writers’ Salon and came to rest. Specifically, I sat with my legs swinging to listen to an interview with Jami Attenberg. The episode summary promised and delivered everything I wanted: Writing 1000 Words A Day, Learning How to Write Again, Finding Creative Inspiration, Committing to Creativity Daily.

I, of course, immediately took a field trip to Blacksburg Books and ordered Attenberg’s book. And subscribed to her Craft Talk newsletter.

After hearing the episode last month, I toyed with the idea of joining the community to write 1000 words a day for two weeks on something besides my rambly what’s-in-my-head journaling. In morning writes, I’ve listed topics to explore. While I wondered when this year’s #1000wordsofsummer event might start, I considered what project I might work on for a two week, 14,000 word commitment.

I learned a lot about my writing self in the process, namely that I recoil from planned writing work. That’s what it feels like when it’s planned: work. Right now, what attracts me to writing is spontaneity, and being in the moment. As soon as a topic becomes planned, I lose interest. Right now, I want to play. I don’t want to work.

One of my favorite writing prompts is the Here and Now* exercise. I frequently do this exercise when I want to write but don’t have anything in mind to write about. I love it because it makes me pay attention, right here, right now. It engages my senses and makes me realize how much I don’t know, like what kind of trees those are across the street, the ones I see every dang day of my life, or the name of the little hat a pendulum (pendant) light wears (it’s a shade, just like a lamp), or whether those metal ceilings with stamped patterns in them have a name (pressed tin ceiling).

I’d considered focusing on a particular topic for 1000wordsofsummer — I found one I thought I was excited about — but as it became more clear that it would feel like work instead of fun, Jami announced the dates of this year’s event: May 31 – June 13. The entire time I’ll be on vacation in Europe.

There’s no way I’m doing a project that feels like work while I’m there. But can I sit in a café, on a train, in a garden, on a museum bench, and write 1000 words on the here and now? Hell yeah I can. And I can’t wait to do it.

*There are many variations on this prompt. Here and Now is what Priscilla Long calls it in The Writer’s Portable Mentor. In Old Friend from Far Away, Natalie Goldberg uses “I’m looking at,” which can be expanded to “I’m listening to, I feel, I smell…”
Walking

May 23rd, 2025

Wind blows through the treetops so they bend and sway, slowly, as if underwater. It breathes out, lips pursed, blowing a whoosh of air above me so the trees swish and rush. The surface of the pond moves as if a current runs through it. Ripples race across its skin. Canada geese are blown along with the rippling, their feathered egg bodies and black curved necks racing like boats in a regatta.

The air is chilly; my only exposed skin is on my hands and face. I wear a jacket, baseball cap, and long pants to cover everything else. Sound and touch are my active senses right now — cold skin, neck hairs tickling in the wind, ears full of the rushing of leaves papering against each other, the forlorn sound of a goose honk, the twitter of birds in the trees behind and above me. A duck just waddled under the round stone table I’m writing on.

The sun has come out from a cloud and shines dappled buttery light on my page. My hand casts a strong shadow from the light that shines behind. The light feels like warm honey on my back. A male mallard sits in a spot of sunlight under the canopy of the giant oak above us both. Its emerald head is tucked under its wing. Its feathers flutter in the wind.

A big gust is blowing through now. The shadows of the tree’s leaves race across the table, my pages fly up, my body chills. Wind hisses across my ears. Across the pond, weeping willow tendrils swing like heavy green hair that almost sweeps the water.

Green surrounds me. Green grass in this glade. Green trees above me. Green moss on the low stone wall behind. Willows, oaks, azaleas, ivy, magnolias, dogwoods. A bike bell dings. The sky is a clear blue against the emerald of the earth.

I am at the duck pond on campus. I loaded my backpack today with notebooks and a camera, water bottle and a package to ship, and I turned onto Glade Road when I emerged from the neighborhood instead of going straight down Meadowbrook Drive like I normally do. I walked to the post office to drop off my package. I walked to the botanical garden.

Walking is such a simple pleasure. It requires nothing — no jersey or special shoes, no fuel, no keys or helmet, no vehicle, no constructed facility like a pool. Yet it gives everything: fresh air, physicality, sunlight, wind, rain, leaves rustling, ducks waddling, Canada geese clustering in the corner of the pond the wind blew them all into. A feeling of being part of the world.

Maid in the mud garden sprite at Hahn Horticultural Garden

Daily writing prompt
Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.
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Laptop time at an all time low

May 22nd, 2025

Several people from work looked forward to their sabbaticals to completely unplug from technology: no computer, no internet. I didn’t vow to do anything of the sort on my sabbatical, but it occurred to me the other day that I frequently go whole days without opening my laptop. I still use my phone to communicate with friends and family, for internet searches, and to ask AI to do stuff for me, like make swim workouts, but I’m not on social media anymore, so my screen usage is a fraction of what it is when I work.

My eyes are grateful for it — they need the rest. Just as welcome, I feel present in the world and connected to it. Rather than only watching birds for a few minutes at the feeder, I watch for long stretches of time. They’re funny little creatures. They chase, they chirp, they dart, swoop, strut, and preen. I watch them hide in the leaf-heavy branches and move among the trees. They’re very busy at being alive. A crow hopped around the driveway the other morning, chasing after two bunnies, chattering at them, “Hey guys! Play with me!” They ignored him. The squirrels are funny, too. They raid the feeder, of course, and I love to open the sliding glass door and watch them freak out that I’m so close. The feeder hangs from the back deck on the second floor, and they leap from the deck rail to the nearest tree branch, arms spread like they’re leaping for their lives, land on the flimsy branch that bends cartoonishly low under their weight, and scramble up to surer stability with their tiny squirrel hearts racing. This little spectacle is such a delight, I don’t mind feeding them along with the birds.

I also get out of the house a lot more, now that I’m not fully concentrated on my screen all day. Yesterday, I went to our small downtown after lunch for a coffee. I took my notebook with me. I write a lot in notebooks. Maybe a couple thousand words a day, with my pretty pens and pretty ink and smooth paper. Not about anything in particular, just writing to write because I like the feel of it.

Without a laptop, I don’t need to carry a backpack when I go places; instead I carry my new tote with a notebook and pens. Yesterday I sat in the café and sipped foamy coffee, wrote my surroundings, and felt the difference between now, when graduations are done and town has emptied and 85% of the café’s tables were vacant, and two weeks ago when the line snaked out the door.

I had errands to run downtown. In my normal life, I would have driven from the coffee shop, which is on one end of downtown, to the book store, which is on the other. But this is a very small town. It’s only a 15 minute walk between the two. If I’d been traveling to a new city, I wouldn’t have even considered driving. So I treated home as if I were traveling, and I walked. I walked one block over from Main Street so I could walk past pretty residential gardens, listen to the birds, investigate berries, feel the air, and smell flowers. I walked to the co-op to buy cashews and poppy seeds for my overnight oats, to the art store to buy notebooks to take to Europe, to the dentist to pay a bill, and to the book store to pick up a book I’d ordered.

I’d been feeling the itch to blog again, so I opened my laptop today. Now the sun is up, though, and the wind is rustling the trees. The sky is blue with fluffy white clouds, and there seems to be some sort of bird convention in the front yard. There’s a lot of squawking going on. I have my computer glasses on so I can’t see them to see what kind they are. Maybe robins. It’s time for me to shut up shop and see what’s happening.

Daily writing prompt
How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
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