excavation & integration
The home where Charles Darwin stayed in 1836, when visiting the Wolgan Valley in the Blue Mountains, Australia. I made this photograph when I visited in 2013.
Marcus and I have been in the throes of the Great House Purge and Cleanout of 2025, and let me tell you, friends, it has been illuminating. Researcher Brené Brown says that shame cannot survive being spoken, and if that’s true, permit me to speak the following: for people who lost all their belongings 7-1/2 years ago (thanks Hurricane Harvey!), we have amassed an astonishing amount of crap. It’s embarrassing, really.
Anyway, my point is that Marcus and I have been cleaning out our closets and emptying our garage and sorting through our attic and it feels like a geological dig, peeling back layer after layer of our previous lives — several lives that all happened in the last 7 years.
“Oh, that’s when my second book came out, remember that?”
“Wow, I haven’t seen this since lockdown. Man, that was a crazy time …”
“Oh! Alex’s freshman year high school ID card. Remember how excited she was to be finally in high school?”
And with each moment of reminiscing comes the decision: do we keep it, donate it, or trash it? Do we want to look back on this item again in ten years time? Would it give someone else joy? Has it served its use, and must be discarded?
Around here, we feel like we’re approaching an inflection point, and to be honest, one of the big reasons might be because our only “child” is approaching her twenty-first birthday in mere weeks. Whatever the reason, there’s something particularly clarifying about this sorting exercise, this review of tangible mementos of our lives. The entire process allows us to evaluate which of our past experiences we want to hold, and which we hope to let go of. We’re able to think about who we were, and how to integrate them into who we want to become. We can take stock of how far we’ve come, in advance of looking forward to all the future adventures that may lie ahead.
It’s dusty work, but it feels … hopeful.
So my wish for all of us this week: that we remember all the things that got us here, with gratitude. And that we think about all that we can create in the future, with hope.
Keep making light, lovelies.
A little about the new book.