Hi folks,

Winter is my annual time for deep reflection. And yes, many moments of “What the heck am I doing with my life?”

Recently, I’ve been listening to the book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, which is all about meta-cognition. It’s a topic that I love. I even wrote my graduate thesis about it! (The title was ‘Veritas Through the Eyes of an Educator: An Epistemological Guide for a Post-Truth World’ 😆)

As a multi-passionate small business owner, educator, and artist, I have followed many a curiosity and rabbit hole over the years. (Like, did you know I once starred in a short film that won at the local film festival? Or was interviewed by several national news media outlets about guerrilla gardening? Or helped start a free school in Washington D.C.?)

How does this all relate? Well, it does, and it doesn’t. What Cunff describes in her book is that rather than becoming siloed in goal/career/milestones that we create tiny experiments to find our true ambitions. Her basic approach is: Observation → Question → Hypothesis → PACT (I will xxx for xxx amount of time)→ Reflect.

In the spirit of this type of praxis, I’m observing SAD within myself as the days are short and gray. I’m less motivated and more prone to reminiscing that sunnier days are visually more appealing and easier to get out and do stuff. What would help me find joy in winter? I wonder if really looking and seeing the beauty in winter will help.

I will be really looking at the wide variety of different colors of winter and highlighting one color in some photos every week until spring.

This week: GOLDEN moments.

It’s my favorite and easy to spot in grayness. The golden canary grass around my pond. Golden citrus in my salad. Golden beeswax. Golden moments are little jewels in winter.

Two bits of housekeeping:

• Our Spring Flower CSA shares are now available to purchase in time for the holidays. Picks up in either Port Townsend or in the Seattle neighborhoods of Phinney Ridge or Capitol Hill. I’ll send you a pretty physical card in the mail for gifting!

• There is 1 seat left in my Orcas candle dipping workshop. I’m looking for a host space in the PT area after the holidays. Let me know if anything springs to mind!

Batten down the hatches and don’t blow away in tonight’s storm,

Emmy and Kai