Welcome 2026

Welcome, 2026

I am not stepping into this year with a list clenched tightly in my hand, or a voice raised in declaration, or a need to reinvent myself into something sharper, brighter, more easily understood. I am stepping into it slowly, with a quieter kind of courage, carrying only what feels honest enough to stay.

2025 moved through my life like a long season of weather, unpredictable, sometimes heavy, sometimes unexpectedly gentle. Reshaping things not through force, but through duration. It was a year of endings that did not arrive cleanly, of truths that took their time revealing themselves, of learning how to stand inside a life that no longer looked the way I once imagined it would. And yet, threaded through all of it, there was beauty: my boys growing in ways I can already feel myself wanting to remember, their laughter filling rooms, their small hands still reaching for mine; meals made from real ingredients, eaten slowly; candlelight flickering in the early dark; moments so quiet and ordinary they almost went unnoticed, except that they were holding me together all the same.

I do not want to call this healing, as if I were something broken that needed fixing.
I think of it instead as becoming weathered, like wood softened by years of touch, like stone warmed by the sun, like anything that has endured and therefore knows how to last.

So when I look toward 2026, I feel less interested in becoming new and more interested in becoming true.

This year, I want to live with a different posture, one of tending rather than striving, of devotion rather than urgency. I want to move through my days with the understanding that what I choose to hold is what shapes me.

Tenere — to hold, to keep, to tend.

That is the word that has been quietly guiding me here. Holding what matters close without gripping too tightly. Keeping what feels essential and letting the rest drift away without resentment. Tending to the small, often invisible things that make a life feel rooted: the way light moves across a room in the afternoon, the ritual of making something with my hands, the patience required to raise children and ideas at the same time.

I want days that feel intentional but never rigid, beautiful but still useful. I want romance that lives in the everyday, in linen sheets and warm bread, in handwritten notes tucked into books, in paint water clouded with color after a long afternoon of making. I want to write the way one speaks when no one is rushing them. I want my home, my work, my art, and my mothering to remain imperfect, textured, and unmistakably mine.

This space will be shaped by that same spirit.

It will be a place for words that feel held rather than performed, for reflections that do not ask to be polished smooth, for rituals, memories, recipes, sketches, and thoughts that arrive quietly and stay awhile. A place to return to, not to escape the world, but to remember how to move through it with care.

I do not know everything this year will bring.
I am learning that not knowing is not a failure of imagination, but an invitation to presence.

What I do know is how I want to meet it.

With both hands open.
With steadiness.
With tenderness for what is real.

Welcome, 2026.
I am here.