It was Sunday and I couldn’t shake the feeling that tears were in my forecast, hovering on the edge of my consciousness like a gray cloud getting bigger and bigger. Depression is in my DNA so I have to be hyper vigilant in a way other people don’t. I have to ask myself if it’s just normal sadness because of an external event or the kind that suddenly pours down on me out of a blue sky when everything in my life is pretty good. To forestall a meltdown, I decided to go for a walk — get those endorphins working! — and when I got home, I did an hour of yoga on my own. Sweat, songs on my Shuffle and the feeling of accomplishment because I stuck with entire yoga sequence on my iPad. All good, but what made the most difference was impulsively dumping out the tubes of watercolors I keep on the kitchen table, pulling a brush out of the jar I keep on the sink and quickly dashing off a little sketch of flowers in a vase. I didn’t let myself think about it, didn’t spend a long time setting out my tools, didn’t stall on the diving board afraid of jumping off.  Making something! Amazing how it made my internal sun come out.

I used to buy fresh flowers at the grocery store every week until I started feeling guilty about what seemed a luxurious self-indulgence. I would be GOOD, I told myself, and save rather than splurge on things I didn’t need. I’m supposed to be conserving money in case I lose my job, thanks to the casino we call Wall Street, and go from being a publisher to a pauper. Or if not a pauper, then a penny pincher and do-withouter. So for almost a year, I’ve mostly turned a blind eye to the purple irises, the white hydrangeas, the big open-hearted sunflowers. Last week, though, the peonies arrived. Buckets of deep rose colored ones first. Yes, they were expensive, but I had peony fever and I said “just this once.” And this week a few bunches were waiting of the palest pink ones with a dash of alizarin red in their centers. And I caved again. They don’t last long, these goddesses of the garden, opening in one lush, languid burst of sensuality. But their scent reminds me of my grandmother’s house in summer — the quiet rooms, the polished furniture, the lingering smell of woodsmoke from the past winter, starched white curtains gently breathing in and out on the breeze from the windows on a long gold-green afternoon. And peonies blooming in the yard. I would have paid twice what I did for the inrushing of that precious sense memory as I cupped their flower faces in my hands and inhaled.

I was filled with anticipation for the Super Moon last weekend and then managed to miss it completely. My weekend was out-of-control crazy straight through from Friday night to Sunday night. It began with bar tending at a friend’s gallery during Friday Art Walk, going to dinner, getting home late, and on Saturday another art exhibit, then a stop at another friend’s gallery for a glass of wine in her hidden courtyard and then on to a dinner party that was so beautiful it might have been a scene from  a movie. A long candlelit table outdoors under a sheltered porch, sudden rain showers in the garden beyond, wine bottles and delicate glasses, food so delicious it seemed like it jumped right from the pages of a magazine. Sunday was more of the same, and for an introvert who requires lots of solitude, it seemed that I was suffering from Super Moon lunacy. By Sunday night, my battery was dead, there were no words left on my tongue, and I was doggedly putting one foot in front of the other trusting I would soon shut the door on the world and burrow under my blue-striped duvet surrounded by all-white walls that had no intention of starting a conversation. At one point in that jangly weekend, I glanced up at the walls around my friend’s garden as the sun was going down and saw nature making this fleeting shadow on the bricks. It was time slowed, a deep breath of cool shade and mellow sunlight, a reminder that this is the kind of food my soul craves.

I love Instagram and all the other photo filter apps I have on my iPhone, but I worry that reality gets enhanced, manipulated and modified every time I use one in subtle, no-going-back ways. I’m torn, because this photo was taken on a magical evening with friends at a beachfront house they were renting on the South Carolina coast. Yes, the ocean roared and rumbled in at twilight making me wish I could live there forever and be rocked to sleep on its broad, capable chest. The clouds in that big, big sky were cinematic starlets, their lighting just so. And the Instagram fake frame captured and contained that special moment on the porch with friends, Champagne in hand, conversation out of control. So maybe it’s not exactly what I was seeing, but I think the argument could be made that it’s exactly what I was feeling. As long as I can keep the two things separate in my own mind and remember that reality is sometimes gritty and not always pretty.

I was walking back from the coffee shop near my office recently when I just happened to see a stencil of a clover on the street and snapped a photo of it. I guess it was left over from the St. Patrick’s Day celebration, but I took it as one of those little messages the Universe likes to leave in your path when you’re in need of an mental bitch slap. As in, don’t forget how lucky I am to be taking a break from a job many people would kill for with a kind of pretentious iPhone camera in my pocket and an expensive handmade coffee drink in my hand. I generally take all those things for granted in the sense of just not thinking about them deeply enough. It’s as if I’ve become so used to them that I have an unconscious sense of entitlement, and I really really hate that. It not only cuts me off from reality, but it also insulates me from the possibility of astonishment around every corner.  All the things and stuff I accumulate, like that daily complicated coffee order, distract me from bigger issues, deeper needs, the solitariness and yearning waiting at the heart of every life. What can I do without in order to live a richer life?

I feel so blessed that in the past few weeks I’ve had wonderful dinners with friends that involved conversations that reverberated long after the meals were over. One impromptu dinner was prefaced by a visit to an exhibit that made my eyeballs and imagination sing. Later our wine was laced with spicy gossip and art talk. Another dinner of salmon en croute was eaten while I played Bananagrams with friends who are as obsessed with word games as I am. And on yet another occasion, we talked about the places we’ve been and the ones on our most-wanted lists. Dreams and plans and what-ifs. During my dinners with friends, our wandering talk took us from the right way to grow gardenias to weddings in Tuscany to political outrage. The food ranged from burritos to sautéed bok choy to homemade macaroni and cheese. None of these evenings could have happened via Facebook or Twitter or email. They had to be in the flesh, in the moment, improvisational and impromptu,  the verbal equivalent of a Keith Jarrett concert. Sometimes it’s so easy to have 140-character chit chat that I forget it’s the fast food version of conversation. And when I have the real thing, I wonder how I settled for less.

From the time I get up in the morning to lights out at night (and sometimes after), big and little worries circle around me like low-flying aircraft just looking for a chance to land and unload their cargo. Even if they don’t make it to the runway, they’re always hovering in the background while I’m trying to get my work done or be creative or just relax. My most effective tool in controlling this traffic is a worry book. I’ve used it before, but tend to lapse and forget how important it is to keep it up every day. The notebook has to be tiny to fit in my purse or pocket, and every morning I write down what’s worrying me that day. It can be as trivial as “need to replace the ceiling fan that’s coming unmoored” to “what if I lose all my retirement money.” With a worry like the former, I can take a practical step toward putting it in the hangar for good: make an appointment with myself to pick out a new one and write that down in the book. Unfortunately, I’ve inherited a bunch of irrational worries like the money issue from my childhood, and they are constantly homing in when I least expect it. The very act of writing them down clears the air and gives me space to think, dream, imagine.

Procrastination and laziness are my first cousins. I mean to do so many things, start so many projects, set so many goals, and after giving it a lot of thought, I usually just lie down and read something trashy and eat something toxic instead. A case in point is exercise avoidance. Most nights when I’m lying in bed I swear to myself that, yes damn it! I will get up early the next morning and drive to town for a spinning class. I pack my workout bag, make my intention and then reliably hit Snooze each and every time. One of my problems is trying to take giant leaps forward. Given that I basically quit exercising a year or so ago, I should know that I need to crawl before I walk. I hate exercise so much that I have to trick myself into doing it. So after two years off the mat, I signed up for an online course called 30 Days of Yoga for People Too Busy to Do Yoga, and the only commitment I have to make is to spend 10 minutes a day, 6 days a week, doing some yoga. Building the habit for 30 days of being good to my body. So I’m making that commitment here in writing, and I hope I’ll be too embarrassed not to keep this promise to myself. Coincidentally (are there really any of those?), at the same time I signed up for this online course, I found two easy beginner classes taking place at a studio just a couple of blocks from my house. The right kind of beginner yoga at the right time of day in the right location. The Universe speaks and I listen.

I’ve spent the last year or so going through a dark tunnel, a kind of emotional birth canal, but as painful and private as it has been, I don’t think I’d have missed this journey. It’s weird to reach my age and realize that you have to keep being reborn over and over again. During this time, I’ve struggled with writing, with finding inspiration and motivation. I had to keep plugging away at the writing I do for my job and meeting deadlines, but at times it was so hard that it was physically painful, as if I were performing brain surgery on myself with a spoon. The joy and the juice simply vanished, and keeping up with my blog, other than sporadic posts, was out of the question. As a result I lost momentum and probably some readers, but looking back, I don’t think I could have done anything differently. I tried to push myself, to force creativity, but evidently I needed that fallow time in order to revision my life. Recently, I had eye surgery that resulted in my seeing colors so much more vibrantly  (I put on a sweater today that I always thought was black and discovered it’s actually navy blue!) and distant objects with stunning clarity, and my inner vision seems to have evolved as well. I have a ways to go and I know there will always be setbacks and dead ends, but I can sense light ahead now where for so long there was only a tentative groping in the dark.

Although I haven’t lived in Kentucky since I left home at 17, I remember in spring how luscious it was and how the land helped shape my ideas of beauty at an early age. Lately, I’ve been singing along in the car with Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and the Country Strong version of “Silver Wings” by Garrett Hedlund, and I find myself relaxing naturally back into my country twang. After I moved away and around the country, I worked hard to eliminate my accent, wanting to blend in and not be thought a hick. I stopped dropping my “gs” and tried to get my speech to stand up straight instead of slouching and slurring. To this day, though, I’ll forget and order scrambled “aigs” for breakfast, shave my “laigs” and start a question with, “Do  you reckon…”. When I belt out “Don’t leave me, I cry/don’t take that airplane ride” in a flat nasal drawl, I sink down into the girl I was — mostly innocent, hopeful, still unformed — and I feel at home in my skin for a little while in a way I never do out in the wider world. Sometimes I tease myself with the idea of moving back to Kentucky, but then I remember that home is where the hurt was, to paraphrase U2, and my longing for those open fields, dry stone walls and shady woods is best left pressed between the leaves of memory like the petals of a forever young, bright yellow daffodil.