This blog turned 20 last week. I've only blogged once in all of 2025 (and while in past years I could point to more frequent activity on my Substack newsletter, I've only updated it six times so far in 2025). Most of my energy outside work and family this year has gone to the podcast, but even before I started working on season two, I just don't have the energy or desire to write much after the past couple of years of work increasingly tapping more and more into that particular reservoir of mental energy (to borrow from one of the folks I interviewed for season 2...you can listen to that episode here).
I've considered what to do to mark this milestone. Do I keep blogging, focus more on the newsletter, or try to keep doing both? Do I keep the blog public as more of an archive of my thoughts over the past 20 years, including marriage, two cross-country moves, grad school, babies, self-employment, day jobs, etc., or do I say 20 years is enough over-sharing and make this blog private moving forward? There's probably already a fully AI version of me based on the nearly 500 published posts here. I know it may sound delusional to even put this out there, but I have half a dozen book/memoir ideas based on categories of writing here over the years (art school, pandemic, and nearly 20 day gigs/jobs, to name a few). At times, I lean more toward fleshing out those ideas instead of adding more to the blog as is. At the end of the day, writing here, or posting anything anywhere, for that matter, is just really different now than it was 15-20 years ago, when folks actually commented on blog posts and people actually discovered and shared cool stuff on Instagram.
While I mull over all of the above a little longer, I thought for my 496th blog post that I'd write about the milkweed and monarch caterpillars-turned-butterflies that took over my heart and soul during the month of October. Butterflies, after all, can symbolize personal growth, change, and rebirth. There is also something hopeful about watching this process unfold, even though nature can sometimes be heartbreakingly brutal. And I have to wonder, did all this happen at a meaningful time, during or before a shift or change of some kind, perhaps gently nudging me to consider my own readiness to move on into the next chapter or phase of this writing journey.
With that, let me start at the beginning of the month of monarchs timelines. ..
On October 5th, some time after the milkweed I planted several years ago had cycled through going dormant and coming back to life more than once (this past summer spreading out and looking more robust than ever), I noticed FOUR monarch caterpillars chomping away.
Three days later, I noticed a chrysalis hanging from the underside of the fence trim near the milkweed plant.
We kept a close eye on both the caterpillars and the chyrsalis (not knowing exactly when the chrysalis had formed, of course), and over the next couple of days, one by one the caterpillars disappeared (they can sometimes crawl up to 40-50 feet to find a suitable place to pupate). On October 10th (my birthday!), I spotted one of the caterpillars about a foot or so away from the chrysalis.
The next day, I spotted it in "J hang" mode.
We knew pupation would likely happen within the next 24 hours. Fortunately, it was the start of a long weekend so we were able to check on it pretty frequently. At about 2:30 pm on Saturday, October 11th, we were lucky enough to be able to observe its transformation.
Here's chrysalis #2 after a little more time forming and hardening:
Meanwhile, we kept a close eye on chrysalis #1 as well, figuring it had been at least a week since it had formed without us noticing. On Friday, October 17th, around midday, I popped outside and noticed it was starting to get translucent (and hence darker, the translucency allowing for the orange and black wings inside to show through).
I checked on it first thing Saturday morning, and it was totally translucent/dark!
I then kept an eye out for the "pleat" at the top, a sign that emergence, or "eclosure", is imminent. Around noon that day I noticed the pleat!
I grabbed a chair and started watching and waiting (mind you, this milkweed plant and fence are in the front of our house, next to our garage, so I'm pretty sure our neighbors think I'm crazy by now). My husband and 17yo were camping, but I texted the 12yo to come out as soon as I saw the butterfly emerging:
Unfortunately, seconds after it started emerging, a tiny spider swooped in and started spinning silk around its back tarsi. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, the spider so small in comparison to the butterfly, even if it was in a particularly vulnerable state. In hindsight, I wish I'd knocked the little spider out of the way sooner (I am, after all, no nature documentarian...I will intervene!). Long story short, after some quick online research and about a half-hour of carefully wetting and removing the spider silk with a wet, lukewarm q-tip, toothpick, and tweezers, while I wasn't able to totally disentangle the butterfly's tarsi, I was able to remove all the silk I could see (I felt that going any further would risk damaging its delicate legs and claws).
It hung out there for about two and a half hours and I once again totally lucked out and just happened to be going out to the car as it was testing its wings and flew off. I wasn't fast enough to document it but I was pleased and relieved to see if was able to fly, after all.
That experience was mildly traumatic but I had chrysalis #2 to look forward to and now I had the recent experience under my belt in order to react more quickly should a predator of any kind decide to interfere (should I be so lucky as to be able to witness any part of the process again, of course). Every day I checked on the chrysalis and the days were adding up. By day 21, I'd mostly given up hope, assuming that there was something wrong (OE perhaps?) and this butterfly was not going to eclose.
But then on Sunday (day 22!), I noticed what I thought certainly was a bit of darkening/translucency happening. Other family members agreed.
Monday morning I checked on the chrysalis and it was undeniable: this butterfly was going to eclose, after all! But it was Monday and I had a pretty busy day ahead. While I checked on it as often as I could, between meetings and such, I wasn't able to see it emerge, but I'd say the image below is probably within about a half-hour of it doing so:
This was around 2:45 pm. Given they need at least 2-4 hours for their wings to fully expand and dry, while I didn't realize it at the time, it wouldn't be ready to fly until after sunset. And butterflies don't fly at night because it's too cold.
My 17yo and I, again, not knowing this at that moment, watched it for longer than I'd like to admit given it was a work day. And it seemed to be falling/fumbling a bit more than seemed normal for a new butterfly, so I was worried there was something wrong.
But it made it through the night, roosting in this nearby succulent planter, and flew off sometime Tuesday morning between 9 (when the above photo was taken) and 9:30 am., when I took this photo of it seeming to warm its wings in the morning sun.
I knew I probably wouldn't see it take off so I wished it a wonderful life and safe travels. Watching those two monarchs emerge (one against the odds, the other after a long, quiet wait) felt like the perfect metaphor for this little corner of the internet turning twenty. There’s something about witnessing transformation up close that reminds me how much of life (and writing) is about timing, patience, and learning when to intervene and when to just let things unfold.
I don’t know yet what’s next for this space, whether I’ll keep writing here, shift more to the newsletter, or let the archive stand as its own kind of time capsule. But I do know this blog has been one of the most constant threads through so many phases of my life, allowing me to capture the messy in-betweens and I'm grateful I've had the time and space to keep it going this long, even if increasingly sporadically. And maybe that’s enough for now: to sit with the gratitude, to acknowledge the change, and to see what wants to take shape next.
I started this update over on my biweekly monthly newsletter. While I've deviated form the list format over the past couple of summer updates, the more I wrote, the more I felt this slightly more cohesive rambling needed to live here on my blog. I'll round out the sporadic summer updates there as well, maybe later today, maybe next week. And what a busy summer it's been! Working on the podcast (season 2!) has completely filled in all the little nooks and crannies of free time this summer. I’ve also recently moved into a new/manager role at work. Perhaps I’ll say more about it in a future post when the transition is official and further underway (I just accepted the role less than two weeks ago). I’ve written about my current day gig in a few different posts over the past nearly six years, but most recently here.
Last summer was a bit of a turning point for me. Maybe because I was also reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, I started to realize how much of my life I’ve spent working toward some future thing that, in the end, doesn’t always pan out. On the one hand, as Burkeman touches on, as someone who majored in art, I can definitely relate to “the feeling of frustration at having to work a day job in order to buy slivers of time for the work you love.” This is, after all, the story of my professional life (I’ve written about almost all of my 20+ day jobs here). And, I'd add, the impetus behind the podcast!
On the other hand, I realized I’ve been erring on the side of indecision (my former manager’s feedback staying with me all last summer into the 2024-25 school year): “We invariably prefer indecision over committing ourselves to a single path…because ‘the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally possible.’” I mean, just look at my ridiculous to do list when I quit my last job! What that two-year experience between jobs taught me is I was basically throwing spaghetti at the wall, so to speak, seeing which noodle would stick (the noodles being all the different creative endeavors I thought I’d accomplish with just a little more time) without bothering to define what sticking to the wall, to continue the metaphor, would even mean. Other than failing to monetize any of those creative projects, how was I measuring the "success" of any of those pursuits? I wasn’t.
Instead, I’ve tried to embrace this: “The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.” Put a little differently a little later in the book: “Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realizing that you never had any other option but to be here now.”
A recent example of living fully in the present in central Oregon
So that’s what I’ve tried to do. And the truth is, what I really want to do at the end of the day, when my day job is done, is not necessarily "produce" art. Like the industrial worker that Burkeman references, this is "what they actually longed to do with more free time: To 'look around to see what is going on.' They yearned for true leisure, not a different kind of productivity." In a weird way, too, this has helped me find peace with where I am creatively. I started the MFA program at SMFA in Boston almost exactly 20 years ago (lots of 20-year anniversaries in 2025!). Life after grad school did not go as planned, creatively and professionally speaking, and I've been agonizing over this and driving myself a little crazy ever since, trying to prove to myself and the world that I majored in art, pursued the terminal degree in it, even, for a reason and that reason would be validated by external sources. But that hasn't really happened. Does that make me any less of an artist? Why doesn't my unused French degree gnaw at me in the same way (wouldn't it be funny, though, if it did?). At the end of the day, lots of folks make perfectly acceptable careers out of a series of jobs that have little to do with what they studied when they were in their early 20s.
Instead, I'm slowly but surely finding peace after art school. Peace, and patience. Burkeman again: "as you dive into life as it really is, in clear-eyed awareness of your limitations, you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience." It's also one of the most consistent and satisfying takeaways from podcast interviews thus far, with 10 down and just one left to record. Speaking with a variety of creative folks at different stages of life, art, and parenthood has me returning to this idea of patience, something that's I think just really hard to embrace when you're young (which is ironic, if you think about it, given you potentially, theoretically, if all goes well, god willing and all that, have so much life ahead of you at that point): "patience becomes a form of power. In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry—to allow things to take the time they take—is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future."
What I love about Burkeman's book is that it's not prescriptive, per se, but it does provide a sort of set of instructions in various ways that I'm finding are echoed in these podcast interviews I'm recording with working parent artists. For example, he shares "three rules of thumb...especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life." Considering the second rule in particular—"embrace radical incrementalism"—when the podcast episodes are published and you begin listening to them (which you will, right?), you'll see that pretty much every artist that I speak with talks about how, after becoming a parent, they learn to "chip away" at their creative projects: "They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldn’t be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term."
It's taken me six years to get back to the podcast. That was not my plan. But in those six years, four of the artists I spoke with during season one became parents. Had I gotten around to season two more quickly, I wouldn't have been able to include two of those artists in this round of interviews. Indeed, I'm learning, with the podcast as just one example, "to allow things to take the time they take." And there's a really profound sense of peace with that, like letting out a big sigh of relief (try it when you're sitting in traffic running late to something...at that point it's almost completely out of your control and will take the time it's going to take!).
All that said, I am excited to be approaching the home stretch of podcast production so I can share these conversations with anyone willing to listen, hopefully by late September. Stay tuned (here, here, and/or here).
Former full-time Etsy seller, recovering #artistsinoffices, runner, baker, and cat person with multiple degrees in studio art, the ability to wiggle my nose and ears (but not at the same time), and an insatiable sweet tooth. I live and work in Oakland, California, with my husband, two kids, and two cats.
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