March, 2026
I have been away from this page for some months now. I did not mean to stay gone so long, but grief has a way of making time irrelevant — the holidays came and went like weather I watched through a window, present but not quite participating. January was its own country entirely. My father died on the thirty-first, at the cold end of the coldest month, and something in me understood this as completion in a way I am still turning over, the way you turn a stone in your palm to feel its weight.
I am not here today to grieve openly. That work happens in private, in its own rooms.
What I want to speak to is something I noticed while I was away — a quiet turning, the way a plant on a windowsill orients itself toward light without drama or announcement. My artwork has been shifting beneath me. The confessional pull, that old need to wound the page and call it honesty, has loosened its grip. I find myself drawn instead to the heron in still water. To the way early light diffuses through fog. To hope not as a performance but as a posture, a decision the body makes before the mind catches up.
I think of Sarton writing in her journals about the quality of a particular afternoon, how the light fell across her desk, what the garden was doing in early March. Not navel-gazing — something more outward than that, and yet profoundly interior. The self as witness to the world rather than as the wound at the center of it.
This is what my art wants now. This is what I am learning to give it.
I am still here. I am still Stacy, still nocturnal, still drawn to the moon's particular logic. But something has softened at the edges, opened. There is a tenderness toward living that I want to make visible in what I create — not as sentiment, but as intention. As discipline, even. To look at the wildflower in the cracked pavement and choose that as my subject. To let that be enough. To let that, in fact, be everything.
It is good to be back.