Hi. I'm so glad you're here. I'm writing this to you from so-called British Columbia, less than a mile from the brackish water where the rivers run off the mountains into the tidewaters of the pacific ocean.

The weather here is all mist and rain and unexpected sunshine - mountains appear and disappear in the near distance within minutes, and every day there's something different to see. It feels like a fitting place to have landed, at my beloved's house, in a space that reflects the transition from the first half of this trip to the second.

I do and don't have words these days for the big things that are happening, for what I'm learning, but I wanted to share a little about these objects. I picked them all up around Lake Michigan on this trip west, and slipped them into the many pockets of my bag, and found them again while clearing out my backpack this morning.

1. A rock from the shore of Lake Michigan, with three wishlines wrapped around it. I wrote about what it was like to fall in love with this lake here. I love having a rock so full of the potential for wishes, which sometimes feel like longing, sometimes like desperation, and sometimes like a prayer, by which I mean a kind of holy resolve and a recognition & acknowledgement of relationship. (Plus, this rock feels really nice to hold.)

2. A piece of a cottonwood leaf, also from the shore of Lake Michigan, that I picked up and slipped into my pocket while I was talking with my brother on the phone about hard things: necessary changes, what we hope for, what feels heavy, what we can't do anymore. It reminds me that everything changes, even when it feels like nothing is happening. (And of my love for my brother, who's just an all around stellar human.)

3. A wood chip left behind by a beaver near the Milwaukee River. I slipped it into my pocket, not knowing why. When I think back, or hold it in my fingers, I think of the tree, and of the diligent work of beavers, who make wetlands, places that are neither river nor meadow, and houses that are both/neither in and/or out of the water. And I wonder, who are the builders of the in-betweens, both/neither, that sustain and shelter so much life? (And I wonder, too: maybe it's you, maybe it's us.)

Love (from in the midst of transition),

Kali

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