Morning falls all over me like grace, like snow, like pudding. Tea fixes me right up and I dance a little in my fleece and wool, my scarf and hat on inside because we keep our house coldish at 64.

Sitting at our granite kitchen table, I see snow flurries cross the double windows like gnats. Earlier I walked with our dog through the streets and on the pathway. My favorite place was over the bridge with the icy stream below. Winter is upon us.

I go upstairs without my hat on and catch a chill. My shoulders hunch with the virus strain and my head throbs a bit. I blink a thousand oysters back in South Carolina.

Today I realized that I’d never really accepted my new job, because I loved being a reporter so very much. In a series of losses, first the newspaper changed radically from the best job of my life as a beat reporter for a hyperlocal daily in the town of Bluffton, SC, into a stress cauldron where fewer and fewer people were supposed to get more and more work done and you never knew who would lose their job next. Then we left Bluffton to return to Boulder, a move my daughter described as “leaving a dog in the road.”

And we’d only been here a year or two when she had the first round of adolescent trauma and public humiliation that would eventually result in her skipping a grade and beginning fresh, and either during, before or after that Steve told me he didn’t want to be married anymore. Then there was the entire year of grief and regrouping, the paperwork, rediscovering music in my life, meeting my beloved, eventually dating him, moving now into his house, our engagement, my daughter living more with her dad this year (she’s already a senior!) And at long last, I turn my attention back more fully to my career.

I don’t want to share any of this. And that’s why I haven’t posted in so long. Christopher is the one who suggested I create this extremely personal blog because it’s so much alike in style to my book Awe. If people like this level of intimacy and this style of writing, they will enjoy the book.

But lately, I’ve reached a new level. Do I write about our traumas as a family? Do I share my deep ambivalence at any job that’s not that one? And what about the transcendence of our sexual ecstasy? I mean people love us opening our hearts, but what about our angelic portals? What about our kitchen drains? I am so uncomfortable with the new level of intimacy flowing out of me. Rather, I love it, but it’s all the exact stuff I wouldn’t normally share.

And does anyone care?

I believe in boundaries, and in having a private life. But at the same time, my “art” if you want to call my writing that (you can call it ‘trash’ and it makes no difference, it’s still the same substance, the silken thread that spools out of my abdomen.) My writing has always come from the most truthful, most vulnerable places. And now that push comes to shove I’m balking.

Oh, no, no, I never actually expected anyone to read any of this.

And yet who, besides myself, have I written for all along?

I shrug my shoulders and surrender. I can say no now. It’s just that I don’t know any other way to write than to share it all open to this gentle snow.

Show me the way, God, teach me. Maybe you’ve got a nifty screen back there somewhere I could use to block some of this magenta hue, some of this wild pinkness to everything I love?

No. The female divine sexuality of the universe, of mother nature, of the cosmos, the feminine mating of matter with God, this has been trying to speak to you and through you since you were 10. And now its time has come.

It’s not that I’m embarrassed, though it is that, of course it is. But there was never any other way this story could end.

I take my beloved’s hand and hold me as we walk toward the blinding light of sunrise.