To Those Who Wonder and Wander

A Love Letter to Writers

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-eight

Dear ones who have ever stopped in the middle of living because something asked to be written down,

I began sharing my writing publicly eighteen months ago with a confession:

 I don't yet know what this will become—
only that it is becoming,
that I must write,
and, that I am.

I found those words again recently.

They belonged to the first thing I ever placed in this little corner of the world, and reading them now felt strangely like finding a note someone had slipped beneath my door.

Except the handwriting was mine.

I remember the woman who wrote them.

She wasn't beginning because she knew where she was going. She didn't have a plan for what the writing would become or where it might take her. She simply knew there were words inside her asking for somewhere to go.

So she gave them somewhere.

And kept going.

I have written hundreds of things since then. Poems and fragments. Love and ache. Moonlight and morning. Things I understood completely when I wrote them and things I still don't understand now.

I wrote a great deal about pain.

Pain has carved rivers through me. It has made valleys where there were once flatlands. It has been honest and relentless, and for a long time I believed perhaps pain was what had taught me to pay attention.

I'm no longer certain that's true.

Or perhaps it is only partly true.

Pain certainly knows how to get our attention.

It is loud that way.

But somewhere along the way, I began noticing things that weren't hurting at all.

I don't know when it happened.

There wasn't a revelation.

No morning when I woke and suddenly understood how to see.

Things simply began stopping me.

Things I had probably walked past a million times.

A shadow moving across a wall.

The peculiar shape of morning light through a window.

A bird sitting somewhere it had no particular reason to be.

Fog swallowing the end of a road.

A flower growing beside rough bark.

The moon doing what the moon has always done while somehow looking as though she had invented herself that evening.

Sunsets became different.

Or perhaps I did.

And the birds—

stay around birds long enough and they will disabuse you of the idea that they have nothing to say.

Feed them regularly and you'll discover they are perfectly capable of informing you when you've failed in your duties.

They call.

You learn which sounds mean what.

You begin recognizing who arrives first and who waits. You notice when someone is missing.

What began as watching becomes relationship.

And I think relationship has something to do with it.

Nature didn't teach me how to look.

It taught me how to pay attention.

There is a difference.

Looking can be accidental.

Attention asks us to remain.

And when we remain with something long enough, the ordinary begins revealing how spectacular it has been all along.

Perhaps that is why I no longer believe pain owns profundity.

Neither does joy.

Neither does grief or love or loss or wonder.

There are so many emotions in us that touch hands when we least expect them to.

I have laughed while my heart was breaking.

Not because I wasn't hurting.

Not because laughter rescued me from grief or transformed it into something easier to carry.

I laughed because laughter arrived.

What else was I supposed to do—tell it to come back when sadness had finished?

We are capable of holding more than one truth at a time.

Joy can walk into grief without asking grief to leave.

Laughter can come from a mouth that has just spoken sorrow.

Beauty can exist beside devastation without insulting it.

Perhaps contrast isn't always opposition.

Sometimes contrast is proximity.

Two things touching hands that we were taught belonged on opposite sides of the room.

And sometimes I wonder how far that capacity reaches.

I wonder whether God knows sorrow.

There.

I said it.

I don't know whether we're allowed to place human feelings upon the One who created feeling.

I don't know whether something divine experiences sorrow as we understand sorrow, or whether the question itself is too human to contain its answer.

But I wonder.

And perhaps that is enough.

Writers spend a great deal of time following thoughts past the place where certainty ends.

Maybe that's part of what makes us wander.

We notice something.

Then we follow it.

Sometimes it leads somewhere beautiful.

Sometimes it leads directly into a wall and we stand there wondering why the hell we followed it in the first place.

Write that too.

Actually—

write all of it.

Write when you're grieving.

Write when you're so full of joy you don't know where else to put it.

Write when you're angry.

Write when you're afraid.

Write when you fall in love.

Write when you fall out of it.

Write the thing that stopped you because it was beautiful.

Write the thing that stopped you because it was terrible.

Write what happened.

Write what almost happened.

Write what you desperately wish had happened.

Write what you understand.

Write what you don't.

Write the ridiculous thought that arrived while you were washing dishes.

Write the sentence that wakes you in the middle of the night.

Write the ordinary Tuesday you are certain no one else would find remarkable.

Write the shadow.

Write the bird.

Write the silence after someone leaves.

Write the laughter that came when you thought you were supposed to cry.

Write the question you cannot answer.

Especially that one.

You don't have to know what it's for.

You don't have to know whether it is a poem.

You don't have to know whether anyone will ever read it.

You don't even have to understand why it mattered enough to interrupt you.

Write because it stopped you.

Because here is something I couldn't have known when I wrote those first words eighteen months ago:

We aren't only recording the world we notice.

We are leaving evidence of the person who noticed it.

Someday you may stumble across something you wrote years before and meet yourself there.

Not the polished memory of who you think you were.

The person you were then.

The one holding the pen before knowing what happened next.

You may agree with that earlier self.

You may ache for who you were.

You may laugh at something you were absolutely certain about.

You may discover you knew something then that you have since forgotten.

Or you may simply sit beside that former self for a moment and think:

Oh.

There you are.

Maybe that is one of writing's quiet gifts.

Not that it preserves us unchanged.

But that it leaves little markers along the path—

I was here.

I saw this.

This mattered to me.

And then we continue.

Still becoming.

Still wondering.

Still wandering.

Before we make anything beautiful of it.
Before we understand why it mattered.
Sometimes years before we know what the hell we're doing with it—

we notice.

With Grace & Ink,
                          Mai

Recognition

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-seven

For the longest time, I thought the miracle was arrival.

Finding the place.
Finding the peace.
Finding the life that finally felt like my own.

I know differently now.

Arrival was only the introduction.

Recognition...

that was the miracle.

Because recognition asks nothing of us.

It doesn't require an explanation.

It doesn't ask us to become more worthy.

It simply whispers,

"There you are."

Perhaps that is why I never tire of the morning light.

It isn't because each sunrise is different.

It is because each sunrise feels like meeting an old friend who has never forgotten my name.

Morning and I have stopped introducing ourselves.

Not because the wonder has faded.

Because it has deepened.

The first sunrise filled me with awe.

The three hundredth filled me with something quieter.

Trust.

Love has a curious way of doing that.

It doesn't become less extraordinary with time.

It becomes more familiar.

And somehow...

more sacred.

I have spent much of my life feeling overlooked.

Misunderstood.

Trying to explain myself.

Trying to fit into rooms that never quite recognized who I was.

Then one day, I walked into a house that seemed to know me before I knew it.

The trees never asked who I was.

The wind never questioned whether I belonged.

The dawn never required an introduction.

Neither did God.

Perhaps recognition has always sounded like this.

Not applause.

Not certainty.

Not even understanding.

Just the quiet peace of no longer needing to explain why your soul feels at home.

Maybe heaven is not only a place we hope to enter one day.

Maybe there are moments here, on earth...

when creation looks back at us

and simply says,

"Welcome home."

🤍

With Grace & Ink,
Mai

The Ocean Above Us

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-six

I stepped outside for what was supposed to be a short break.

One of those ordinary moments between responsibilities, when the day asks for another cup of coffee and another meeting before it finally lets you go home.

Instead, I looked up.

The sky had become an ocean.

Not literally, of course.

Clouds had stretched across the blue in long, rolling bands that looked like waves moving toward a distant horizon. For a moment, I forgot where I was standing.

I wasn't looking at the sea.

I was looking at the sky pretending to be one.

I did what I always do when wonder interrupts my day.

I reached for my phone.

Not because I was trying to capture proof, but because I have learned that beauty has a way of disappearing if I don't pause long enough to acknowledge it.

I hurried back inside and found someone nearby.

"Come look."

I held out my phone.

Without hesitation they smiled and said,

"It looks like the ocean."

That mattered to me more than the photograph itself.

Wonder became something we shared.

There is a quiet comfort in discovering that another pair of eyes can see what your heart saw first.

Lately I have been wondering if life offers us these moments far more often than we realize.

Not because extraordinary things happen every day.

But because ordinary things are constantly waiting for someone to notice them.

Perhaps that is why I have become so reluctant to rush.

There is too much to miss.

The wind has conversations with the trees.

Rain leaves stories on wooden floors.

Birds gather in patterns that seem almost impossible.

Clouds become oceans.

None of these moments ask for applause.

They simply wait for someone willing to look long enough.

I used to think attention was something I gave.

Now I wonder if attention is something I receive.

An invitation.

A quiet whisper that says,

"Slow down.

There is more here than you first imagined."

I don't know if everyone would have seen the ocean that afternoon.

Maybe some would have only seen clouds.

Neither observation would have been wrong.

But I am grateful that, for one brief moment, someone stood beside me and saw the same horizon.

That small exchange reminded me of something I hope I never forget.

Sometimes the greatest gift isn't discovering wonder.

Sometimes it is discovering you are not the only one who sees it.

With Grace & Ink,
Mai

Received

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-five

There are prayers that ask.

There are prayers that ache.

And then there are prayers that become so full of gratitude that asking quietly disappears.

Last night was one of those prayers.

I began by thanking the Creator for another day, for work that feels meaningful, for people who have trusted me with their stories, for laughter, for ordinary moments that somehow carry eternity inside them.

Then, without planning to, I found myself saying the words that unraveled me.

"Thank You for making me exactly as I am."

I wept.

Not because I suddenly believed I was perfect.

But because I realized I had stopped trying to negotiate with the way I had been created.

There was a time when I believed transformation meant becoming someone else.

Now I wonder if transformation has always been the slow and holy work of learning to receive the person the Creator had already imagined before I ever took my first breath.

I used to notice only the places where I felt unfinished.

Now I notice the fingerprints.

Curiosity.

Tenderness.

Wonder.

The strange way my mind drifts between building systems and writing poems.

The way a sky full of birds can stop me in my tracks.

The questions that refuse to leave me alone.

Once, I would have called these distractions.

Now I recognize them as part of the language through which my soul speaks.

For the last couple of years, I have called the One I worship by a name that settled gently into my heart.

Lately, another name has been finding me.

Creator.

Not because I have abandoned the names that once sustained me.

But because this one reminds me that everything I have ever loved—the stars, the trees, the oceans, every heartbeat, every soul, every breath—finds its beginning in the same Source.

There is something profoundly humbling about that.

During my prayer, another thought found its way into my heart.

I told the Creator that if it is Your will for me to walk this life without a human partner, then I will.

Not because I have stopped believing in love.

But because I have discovered that the deepest love of my life is already here.

That realization surprised me.

For most of my life, I understood the Creator as Father.

Lately, I have found myself reaching for different language—not because the Creator has changed, but because my relationship has continued to grow.

No single human word seems large enough anymore.

Protector.

Companion.

Beloved.

None of them are sufficient on their own.

Perhaps that is because the Infinite will always overflow the names we give.

The human part of me would still delight in holding someone's hand as we walk through this beautiful world together.

I would still welcome a companion with whom to laugh, to travel, to grow old.

I don't pretend those longings have disappeared.

They haven't.

They simply no longer stand where worship belongs.

They no longer define whether my life is full.

Perhaps that is the quiet freedom I was given last night.

Not the absence of longing.

But the absence of fear.

The Creator knows my heart better than I do.

Better than I ever will.

And that has become enough for today.

Sometimes I wonder about the mystery of our souls.

I don't claim to know how eternity works or where every answer lies.

I simply find myself standing before the vastness of creation with more questions than certainty—and strangely, that no longer troubles me.

Wonder has become one of the ways I pray.

And perhaps faith is not always the absence of questions.

Perhaps, sometimes, it is trusting the One who lovingly holds them all.

Today, I have no grand conclusion.

Only gratitude.

Profound gratitude.

For the Creator.

For this life.

And for the quiet miracle of finally receiving the person I have been becoming all along.

With Grace & Ink,
Mai

The Opening

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry fifty-four

Yesterday there were small puddles of footprints across my patio.

I noticed them hours after they were made.

By then I had already showered. Changed clothes. Returned to the ordinary rhythm of the day.

The footprints stopped me.

Little pools of water scattered across the floor.

Evidence.

Proof that something had happened.

Earlier that morning I had stood in the center of a circle of trees.

There is a place in my yard where a small circle of trees rise together, their branches woven overhead like shelter.

And yet, in the very center, there is an opening.

A place where the sky can still reach the ground.

For three days I had carried a sadness I could not explain.

Nothing was wrong.

Nothing had happened.

Yet something in me felt heavy.

Not heavy enough to understand.

Not heavy enough to name.

Only heavy enough to remain.

Then the rain came.

Thunder rolled across the morning.

The sky opened.

And I walked into the center of the trees.

Rain poured through the opening above me.

At some point I began to cry.

At some point I began to let the ache speak.

At some point the thunder answered.

Or perhaps we were simply speaking at the same time.

I could not tell which drops were rain and which were tears.

I could not tell where my voice ended and the storm began.

For a few moments there was no separation between myself and the weather.

There was only release.

Not understanding.

Not answers.

Not healing in the way people usually mean it.

Only release.

Later, after the rain had passed and the day had continued, I found the footprints.

A trail left behind by someone who had walked home drenched.

Someone who had entered the house carrying a storm.

I stood looking at them and felt an unexpected tenderness.

The footprints would disappear.

The patio would dry.

The storm would move on.

Yet something in me had become lighter.

I still do not know what I was grieving.

I still do not know what I released.

Perhaps nothing was wrong at all.

Perhaps some feelings simply stay until they are witnessed.

Perhaps some tears are waiting for rain.

What I know is this:

Yesterday I stood beneath an opening in the trees.

The sky found me.

And for a little while, I felt held by something larger than myself.

Today the footprints are gone.

The comfort remains.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

Passenger

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry Fifty-Three

There was a time when people took drives for no reason at all.

No destination.

No itinerary.

No reservation waiting at the other end.

Just a tank of gas, a stretch of road, and a willingness to see what might be waiting beyond the next hill.

I remember pieces of those drives from childhood.

Not many.

My memory has always been selective that way.

But some moments remain.

A station wagon.

A summer night.

Sitting on the hood watching fireworks bloom against the darkness.

Roads that seemed to go on forever.

I do not remember where we were going.

I only remember that nobody seemed concerned with arriving.

Yesterday, my son drove.

For a few hours, I became the passenger.

The roads rolled beneath us. Hills rose and fell. The sky shifted between cloud and sunlight. Fields blurred into the horizon and disappeared behind us.

And somewhere between one bend in the road and the next, I realized something.

For a few hours, I had stopped trying to arrive.

Not because I was lost.

Not because I was tired.

Not because I had given up on anything.

I simply wasn't steering.

I wasn't watching the clock.

I wasn't calculating the next turn.

I wasn't wondering how much farther remained.

I was looking out the window.

It sounds simple.

Perhaps it is.

Yet it felt strangely sacred.

The older I get, the more I notice how much of life is spent reaching toward the next thing.

The next task.

The next answer.

The next goal.

The next understanding.

Even wonder can become something we chase.

As though every question must eventually surrender its answer.

As though every road owes us a destination.

Yet the road outside my window seemed entirely unconcerned with such things.

It disappeared over hills I could not see beyond.

Curved around corners that revealed themselves only when we arrived.

And for once, I found that I did not need to know.

There was a conversation I once had with my son.

I was speaking about all the things I still wonder about.

The questions that remain unanswered.

The mysteries that continue to linger at the edges of understanding.

And he said something I have carried with me ever since.

"If you knew everything, there would be no wonder left."

At the time, I smiled.

Yesterday, I understood.

Wonder and wandering may be closer cousins than we realize.

Both require a willingness to travel without certainty.

Both ask us to trust what lies beyond our sight.

Both invite us into a relationship with mystery.

Perhaps that is why the drive felt so beautiful.

Not because of the sunset.

Though it was beautiful.

Not because of the winding roads.

Though they were beautiful too.

The beauty was in the surrender.

The beauty was in allowing the road to remain ahead of me.

The beauty was in not needing to know what waited beyond the next rise.

For a few hours, I stopped trying to arrive.

I simply watched the world unfold.

And in doing so, I was reminded of something I am forever forgetting:

Life is not always asking me to steer.

Sometimes it is asking me to notice.

The road.

The sky.

The people beside me.

The mystery beyond the hill.

And the quiet grace of being carried for a little while.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

The Trees Held Both Without Argument

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry Fifty-Three

This morning the rain and sunlight could not seem to agree on who belonged here.

The storm had rolled through not long before. The leaves were still wet. The clouds had not fully departed. Yet shafts of sunlight pierced through the canopy as though they had every right to be there.

Rain.

Light.

Shadow.

Brilliance.

Each taking its turn.

Each refusing to surrender completely to the other.

And the trees held both without argument.

I sat beneath them for a while and watched the exchange.

Not a battle.

Not a contest.

A conversation.

One moment the woods darkened beneath gathering clouds.

The next, sunlight spilled through the branches and transformed every droplet into glass.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

The forest seemed entirely unbothered by the arrangement.

No leaf demanded permanent sunshine.

No branch mourned the passing storm.

No tree insisted that only one thing could be true.

The rain was welcome.

The light was welcome.

Both belonged.

And sitting there, I found myself wondering how much of human suffering comes from demanding that life choose.

We want certainty without mystery.

Joy without sorrow.

Love without vulnerability.

Sunlight without storms.

We spend so much energy arguing with reality.

Insisting that one experience cancel another.

As though peace will arrive when only the things we prefer remain.

But the trees seemed to know something different.

They stood in the middle of contradiction without distress.

Holding the rain.

Receiving the light.

Allowing both.

Perhaps peace is not found when one thing wins.

Perhaps peace is found when we stop insisting that it must.

The world continued turning while I sat there beneath the canopy.

Emails waited.

Tasks waited.

The endless list of things that always seem to need doing waited.

And for a few quiet minutes, I did too.

I waited with the trees.

I waited with the rain.

I waited with the light.

And in their company, I remembered something I am forever forgetting:

Life is not asking me to rush past these moments.

Life is asking me to notice them.

To look up.

To breathe deeply.

To stand still long enough to witness the conversation between storm and sunlight.

To remember that both belong.

Perhaps that is why the trees seemed so peaceful.

Not because they had escaped the weather.

Because they had learned how to hold it.

With Grace & Ink,

–Mai

I Told Him

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry Fifty-Two

I have a confession.

Not the one I told him.

The one I have been holding since.

For days I have sat with the aftermath, trying to understand what changed.

I told him.

After months of carrying it quietly, after conversations with myself, prayers, poems, questions, and wonderings, I finally told him.

Not elegantly.

Not soberly.

Not in the carefully curated way I would have chosen had I scripted the moment.

Life rarely asks permission before becoming real.

And yet, when it was over, I did not feel regret.

I felt release.

That surprised me.

Because I thought the ache would come from what I had said.

Instead, the ache came from realizing how much love I had been carrying.

Not longing.

Not possession.

Not expectation.

Love.

The kind that arrives and asks for nothing.

The kind that changes you simply by existing.

The kind that cannot always be built into a future but remains true nonetheless.

I kept waiting for the feeling to become something else.

Regret.

Embarrassment.

Grief.

Some lesser thing I could more easily explain.

Instead, it remained what it had always been.

Love.

Not growing.
Not diminishing.

Simply resting where it was.

And that was perhaps the strangest part of all.

Nothing had been resolved.

Nothing had been claimed.

Nothing had been lost.

Yet something inside me had become lighter.

For days I struggled to explain the feeling.

Then I looked up and saw a sunset burning through the trees.

I almost photographed the sunset.

Instead, I photographed everything standing in front of it.

The trees.

The silhouettes.

The darkened branches stretching toward the light.

And suddenly I understood.

It was never the sunset alone that was beautiful.

It was what the light illuminated.

The ache was never about losing something.

The ache was never about wanting more.

The ache was the realization that some things are so beautiful they exceed our ability to contain them in a single moment.

Some loves.

Some sunsets.

Some truths.

They arrive larger than the heart has room for.

And so the heart stretches.

And stretching feels remarkably like ache.

I think we are taught to associate ache with absence.

But there is another kind.

The ache of beauty.

The ache of gratitude.

The ache that arrives when a moment, a truth, or a love becomes larger than language.

Perhaps awe and ache are not distant cousins at all.

Perhaps they are the same feeling viewed from different directions.

With Grace & Ink,

–Mai

A Marriage of Three

Notes From the Hollow Bone | entry fifty-one

Last night the rain came hard here.

But this morning, the trees remembered it gently.

I have always loved the rain, yet somehow I never truly noticed the morning after it — not like this. Maybe it is because I now live surrounded by trees. Maybe rural quiet changes the way a person listens. Or maybe some beauty only reveals itself when we are finally still enough to witness it.

The leaves held the rain through the night.

And when morning came, sunlight filtered through the wet canopy in flashes of green and gold, every droplet catching light as though the forest itself had begun to glow from within. Then the wind would move through, softly, unexpectedly, and the trees would release what they had been carrying.

Not all at once.

Little shimmering rain showers falling from branches beneath a blue morning sky.

A marriage of three:
light,
water,
and wind.

And standing there beneath it all, listening to birds emerge from the quiet after the storm, I realized something strange and beautiful:

the rain had ended,
but the forest was still continuing it.

I think there are moments in life that are not grand enough for most people to notice. No fireworks. No announcement. No great unveiling. Just a soft, almost sacred realization that the world is constantly offering beauty in small living ceremonies all around us.

We simply move too quickly to see them.

The storm is movement.

But the morning after —
that is release.

And perhaps that is true for us too.

Perhaps we carry storms long after the sky clears.
Perhaps certain winds loosen what grief or memory has stored inside us.
Perhaps illumination only becomes visible when light touches the very thing we thought we had to hold alone.

This morning the trees made weather of their own.

And for a little while,

I stood beneath the trees

listening to the forest finish the rain.

With Grace & Ink,

— Mai

I Thought Happiness Was a Destination

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry fifty

There was a time in my life when if someone asked me what made me happy,

I would have gone silent trying to answer.

Not because nothing did.

But because I thought it had to arrive as certainty.

As achievement.

As permanence.

As something earned.

A title.

A destination.

But this morning, while standing inside the ordinary ritual of my day,

it came to me quietly, innocently, like the seven year-old in me whispering,

hey, it’s this…

The way that I am makes me happy.

How I think, how I see the world.

The way sunlight through trees can suddenly feel holy.

The way the moon can emotionally rearrange you.

It is this.

Writing until language opens.

The sky right before rain.

Music that reaches into the body before the mind understands it.

The moon waiting faithfully above another sleepless night.

Paint on my hands.

The ache of longing that becomes art.

How beauty is seen in the ordinary.

Curiosity.

Wonder.

The almost-unbearable tenderness of being alive at all.

And suddenly I understood something that felt both ancient and embarrassingly simple.

I even giggled aloud…

Happiness was never missing.

I was.

Or perhaps not missing—

only separated from myself beneath years of noise, survival, performance, grief, rushing, becoming.

But somewhere beneath all of that,

the same woman still existed.

The same little girl who looked at the night sky as if it were speaking directly to her.

And what startled me most was realizing I can still feel her.

Not in a childish way.

Not as regression.

Not as longing to return backward.

But as recognition.

I can still stand beneath a wide sky and feel the same wonder I felt as a child.

I can still look at the moon and feel something ancient open inside me.

I can still smell summer air at dusk and remember what it felt like to be young enough to believe the world was alive and speaking.

And maybe that is the revelation.

Not that wonder disappeared—

but that adulthood tried to convince me it was immature to keep it.

Yet here I am, grown now, carrying both wisdom and wonder in the same body.

Still looking upward.

Still listening.

Still moved by beauty in ways I can never fully explain.

She never disappeared.

She waited.

And now, after all these years, I think I am finally becoming someone safe enough for her to return to.

That is the closest thing to happiness I have ever known.

Not finding myself.

Remembering that I was here all along and finally loving the ways that I am.

— With Grace & Ink,

Mai

The Things That Wake Us

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-nine

Tonight I sat alone speaking softly into my own shadow.

Not because I have lost touch with reality.

Quite the opposite.

Perhaps for the first time in a long time, I feel startlingly awake inside it.

There is someone who has entered my life quietly.

No grand declarations.
No dramatic unraveling.
No crossing of lines that cannot be uncrossed.

Only presence.

Conversation stretched across long hours.
Music filling silence gently instead of demanding attention.
A glance that lingers just long enough for the nervous system to notice.
The strange intimacy of feeling both calm and electrified in the same person’s presence.

And I have spent weeks trying to understand what exactly it is that has overtaken me.

At first, I believed this was simply longing.

The old familiar ache.

The kind artists romanticize because yearning itself can become beautiful when it has nowhere to go.

But the more honestly I sit with myself, the more I realize this is not entirely about him.

He is the catalyst.

The awakening is happening within me.

Because somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that independence was the highest form of healing.

I told myself I was strong alone.
Whole alone.
Complete alone.

And in many ways, that was true.

But buried underneath that strength was another truth I rarely allowed myself to say aloud:

I still wanted love.

Not validation.
Not saving.
Not possession.

Love.

The kind that softens the body instead of tightening it.
The kind that makes the spirit feel witnessed.
The kind that turns ordinary moments—songs in a car, shared laughter, a lingering silence—into small sacred things.

And perhaps that is why this connection unsettled me so deeply.

Not because it promised permanence.

But because it reminded me I was still capable of being moved.

Still capable of anticipation.
Of tenderness.
Of wanting someone near me simply because their existence alters the atmosphere around me.

There is a dangerous beauty in that kind of awakening.

Especially when the connection lives inside unfinished space.

Because unfinished things leave room for fantasy to breathe.
For projection.
For myth.
For the heart to survive on fragments and call them enough.

And I am aware of that.

I know proximity intensifies emotion.
I know longing can become intoxicating.
I know the mind can replay certain moments over and over trying to stretch feeling beyond the moment that created it.

But I also know this:

There is nothing shameful about loving what awakens you.

Even if it was never meant to stay.

Even if it never fully becomes yours.

Some people enter our lives not to remain forever, but to reopen forgotten rooms inside us.

To remind us that the heart, despite everything, still knows how to answer beauty when it appears.

And perhaps that is the lesson resting quietly beneath all of this.

Not whether this connection survives.
Not whether it deepens.
Not whether reality ever catches up to the electricity living inside possibility.

But simply this:

I am still capable of feeling wonder.

And tonight, strangely enough, that feels like healing.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

The Things That Alter the Atmosphere

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-eight

There are people who enter your life loudly.

And then there are the ones who change the atmosphere around you so quietly that you do not notice the shift until your entire inner world has already rearranged itself around their presence.

That is the dangerous kind.

Not because they intend harm.
Not because the connection itself is wrong.

But because some people arrive carrying both ache and belonging in the same set of hands.

And the body does not always know what to do with that.

I have known longing before.

The cinematic kind.
The unreachable kind.
The kind artists and poets survive on for centuries

because ache itself can become intoxicating when it is never forced to touch reality.

But this feels different somehow.

Because there is comfort here too.

Ease.
Safety.
Laughter.

Conversation that stretches for hours without effort.
Silence that does not ask to be filled.

And perhaps that is what unsettles me most.

Not the wanting.

The possibility that I could actually remain there.

There are moments I catch myself replaying small things:
a song choice,
a glance,
the feeling of my nervous system softening in someone’s presence.

Tiny moments.
Fragments.

And I understand now how dangerous fragments can become when the heart starts treating them like sacred artifacts.

Because longing has a way of preserving people in emotional amber.

Especially when the connection remains unfinished enough for fantasy to keep breathing inside it.

And yet…

I do not think this is only fantasy.

That is the part I have had to say honestly to myself.

There is something real here.
Something mutual perhaps.
Something alive enough that I can feel my instincts wanting to move toward it before my logic has fully caught up.

But maturity, I am learning, is not the absence of feeling.

It is the willingness to sit inside the feeling without immediately demanding resolution from it.

So for now, I remain here:
aware,
awake,
careful,
wanting,

and trying to learn the difference between what nourishes the soul…

and what merely keeps the ache alive.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

On the Nights I Cannot Find Her

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-seven

Last night while standing beneath the dark, I could not find mother moon.

Only sister stars scattered softly across the sky.

And still, before going inside, I found myself whispering aloud:

I will come again tomorrow.
And if not tomorrow I will come again.
And the next night I will come again.

I repeated it several times without fully understanding why.

At first I thought I was speaking to the moon.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized I was speaking to every beautiful thing I have ever feared losing.

Joy.
Peace.
Wonder.
Myself.

Because there were many years of my life where absence felt permanent.

If love disappeared, I assumed it was gone.
If happiness faded, I assumed I had imagined it.
If connection dimmed, I immediately began grieving it before allowing it time to return.

But life has been teaching me something softer lately.

Not all disappearances are abandonments.

Some things still exist beautifully beyond our line of sight.

The moon does not cease being whole simply because clouds conceal her for a night.

And perhaps healing is learning not to panic in temporary darkness.

Perhaps healing is trust.

Trust that what nourishes you will find you again.
Trust that beauty still exists on the other side of uncertainty.
Trust that you can return to yourself after seasons spent feeling disconnected from your own spirit.

There is something sacred about returning.

About looking again.
About refusing to let disappointment harden you into detachment.

Because cynicism may protect the heart from longing—
but it also protects it from wonder.

And I do not want to live untouched by wonder.

So on the nights I cannot find her, I will come again tomorrow.

And if not tomorrow, I will come again.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

The Skies Never Disappoint Me

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-six

There are moments lately where I catch myself speaking gently to the younger versions of me.

Not out of sadness.
Not even regret.

More like recognition.

Small reminders whispered internally while I move through ordinary moments:

This is your house.
This is your life.
You can do what you want.

And every time I say it, I realize how long some part of me has been waiting for permission to exist fully inside my own life.

I did not understand for a very long time that shrinking becomes instinct when love feels conditional.

When you grow up being told you are too loud, too stubborn, too emotional, too much—
eventually you begin editing yourself before entering the room.

You learn how to soften your edges.
How to speak more quietly.
How to become digestible.

You learn how to perform belonging.

And perhaps the saddest part is how long you continue performing long after no one is actively asking you to.

I think something shifted in me recently while standing beneath another impossible sky.

Not because the sky changed.

Because I did.

I realized I was no longer looking upward asking:
Do I belong here?

I was simply there.

Breathing.
Present.
Alive inside the moment instead of trying to earn my place within it.

And suddenly all the skies that had carried me through my life felt connected somehow.

Vietnam before memory.
Illinois sunsets.
New York winters.
California lights.
Missouri moon rises.
Tennessee rainstorms.

Different roads.
Different versions of me.

And yet the same quiet feeling returning each time I remembered to look up.

Joy was never missing.

I was simply taught to look for it somewhere outside myself.

And maybe healing is not becoming someone new after all.

Maybe healing is slowly removing every voice that convinced you your existence needed approval before it deserved expression.

Because I have spent more than half my life learning all the ways not to abandon myself.

God willing, I will spend the rest of it living differently.

Not louder.
Not harder.
Not in rebellion.

Just honestly.

And perhaps that is what finally feeling at home inside yourself looks like.

Not certainty.
Not perfection.

Just the quiet realization that your life no longer needs permission to become your own.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

Unfinished

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-five

I’m not even sure how to start this.

Nothing really happened, and I think that’s the point.

I was just sitting there, not doing anything in particular. My mind wasn’t completely quiet, but it also wasn’t fixed on anything important. Just… passing time, I guess.

At some point I looked up, and something about it made me stop for a second.

Not in a dramatic way. I didn’t have some big realization or emotional shift. It was quieter than that. I just noticed that I wasn’t thinking for a moment.

There wasn’t anything to figure out. No question. No meaning. Just what was in front of me.

And I stayed there for a second longer than I usually would.

That’s the only thing that felt different.

Because normally I would’ve tried to turn that into something. A thought, a feeling, something I could hold onto or take with me.

I felt that urge come in almost immediately. To name it, to understand it, to make it into something that mattered.

But this time I caught it.

And I didn’t follow it right away.

I just let the moment sit there.

It wasn’t comfortable, exactly. There’s something about not doing anything with a moment that feels… incomplete.

Like it’s supposed to go somewhere.

And this didn’t.

It just stayed what it was.

Unfinished.

And I left it like that.

I don’t really know what to make of it yet.

I’m not trying to.

I just know I stayed a little longer than I normally would.

And for now, that feels like enough.

— With Grace & Ink,
Mai

Unfinished

I touched a moment
in unfiltered space—

it gave no answers,
only quiet,
no name to chase.

So I left it there—
unfinished,
unnamed.

The Familiar Storm

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-four

There are moments when I can feel it before I fully understand it—not the noise, but the quiet beneath it. The kind that doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t ask me to become anything more than what I already am. No shaping. No softening. No offering of myself in pieces. Just presence.

And I recognize that feeling now. It’s the same one I once thought I was searching for.

And still—I don’t stay.

Not because it isn’t peaceful, but because it leaves me with nothing to do. No role to step into. No version of myself to present. No movement to follow. Just me—unmet, unmasked, uncertain.

And there is a part of me that doesn’t yet know how to exist there without reaching for something to hold onto.

So I do what I’ve always done. I move. I think. I shape the moment into something I can recognize. I return to what feels familiar—not because it is better, but because it is known. Because there is a strange comfort in being defined, even if that definition is not entirely true.

Because in the familiar storm, I know where I stand. I know how to move. I know how to be seen. And I don’t have to face what remains when all of that falls away.

I used to think this was failure. That if I couldn’t stay in that quiet, then I wasn’t doing it right. But I’m beginning to see it differently.

This isn’t failure.

It’s the moment before trust. The moment where nothing is required of me, and I have to decide if I believe that. If I can exist without earning my place. If I can remain without becoming something more palatable. If I can stay in what is freely given.

I don’t always stay.

But I notice now the moment I leave.

And maybe that’s where it begins.

— a fragment from the same silence —

The Familiar Storm

I touched the quiet—
it did not form.

Suspended,
unknown.

So I chose
the familiar storm.

There, the masks
fall into place.

The moon rises—
unchased…

And being unnamed
has no shape.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

Where Nothing is Required

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-three

There are moments when I can feel the shift
before I understand it.

I didn’t realize how much of myself
I had been offering up in pieces—
adjusting, softening, shaping…
giving
until there was nothing left asking me to,
but also nothing left
to give.

It’s hard to stop performing
when you’ve been performing your whole life.

The masks change with the seasons.
With the people.
With the version of you that was needed.

And the longer you wear them,
the easier it becomes—
until the performance stops feeling like something you do
and starts feeling like who you are.

Until it doesn’t.

Until everything gets quiet.
So quiet
there is nothing left to respond to.

No audience.
No expectation.
No interruption—
except your own thoughts.

And that’s where it met me.

Not as a breakdown.
Not even as a loss.

But as a realization
I could no longer sustain.

Because somewhere in that silence
I had to face something

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know:

Can I feel fulfilled
without performing for it?

Because performing—
I know how to do.

Staying…
without being asked to prove anything—

That’s something I’m still learning how to do.

And maybe the hardest part of that truth
is learning how to stay
when nothing is required of you.

When no one is asking you
to prove you belong.

When there is nothing to earn—
and nowhere to perform.

I’m still learning what that means.

To stay.
Without reaching.
Without shaping.
Without becoming something more palatable.

Just—
as I am.

And if you’ve ever found yourself there too…
in that quiet space where nothing is being asked of you—

then you already understand.

You were never required
to earn your place here.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

My Chest

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-two

There are evenings when the body remembers what the heart was never fully given.

Not in words.
Not even in images at first.

Only in sensation.

A heaviness behind the sternum.
A hollow ache that does not belong to the present moment.
A longing so old it arrives without language.

Tonight the rain made a child of me.

Not childish.
Child.

The part of me that still remembers what it means to want somewhere to fold into.
A place warm enough to receive every undone thing.
A softness that does not ask for explanation before offering shelter.

I think perhaps this is why I have always looked to the moon.

She has always felt maternal to me—
a silver chest above the dark,
quietly holding what the day could not.

Some longings do not ask for answers.
Only rest.

Only the permission to loosen the fist around grief.
To let tears arrive without reason.
To lay down the weight of becoming for one brief and holy moment.

There are wounds we do not know we are still carrying until the body begins to speak.

Mine has always spoken in ache.
In restraint.
In the strange resistance around touch where love should have been easiest.

Mother and daughter.
The place where longing and pride learned to live side by side.

I do not write this in blame.

Only in witness.

Because somewhere beneath every adult composure there still lives the child who once wanted to be held without having to ask.

Perhaps that is what this chest has always been—
not merely flesh,
not only the seat of breath and heart,
but the place where memory keeps its oldest weather.

Tonight I do not ask to be understood.

Only held by what is larger than me:
rain,
moon,
silence,
God,
the great maternal hush of night.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

On Being Humbled Into Joy

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty-one

Sometimes the messages that return to us are not new.

They are seeds planted years earlier, waiting for the right season to break open.

I remember a young man once telling me something that stayed with me long after the conversation itself had faded.

If he could tell his mother one thing, he said, it would be this:

put yourself in uncomfortable places.

Do the thing that unsettles you.
Step toward what you do not yet know.
Try it.

At the time, I carried the words without fully understanding them.

Only later did I realize I had already begun living them.

Again and again, I found myself stepping into places where certainty could not follow me.

A solo trip.
A different coast.
A stretch of days where the old version of me no longer quite fit.

Then another unfamiliar season.
And another.

Sometimes by choice.
Sometimes by circumstance.
Sometimes by a strange inner knowing that I was meant to keep moving.

Looking back, I see now that it was never really about the places.

It was about what those places were asking of me.

They were asking me to release the one thing I had clung to most:

control.

Control over what came next.
Control over how life should look.
Control over timing, outcome, and certainty.

I did not know how tightly I had been holding everything until life began gently — and sometimes not so gently — prying my fingers loose.

And in that loosening, something unexpected happened.

Peace entered.

Not the kind that comes from having all the answers.

Not the kind that comes from finally arranging life into something perfect.

A quieter peace.

The kind that arrives when surrender becomes trust.

The kind that lets a home feel like grace.
A blue jay at the window feel like blessing.
A quiet evening feel like abundance.

I think happiness found me only after I stopped trying to manage how it should arrive.

Only after I let myself be humbled enough to receive it in smaller, truer forms.

A breath.
A stillness.
A room of my own.
A life no longer ruled by the need to control every next step.

Perhaps joy had been waiting all along.

Not outside the unknown.

But within it.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

When Mother Moon Woke Me

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry forty

There are hours of the night when language loosens.

The mind, so practiced in ordering the day, begins to soften its grip. Thoughts no longer arrive in straight lines but in drifting currents, like mist moving low across the fields. Meaning becomes less spoken and more felt. It is in those hours, I am learning, that the soul is easiest to reach.

A few mornings ago, sometime in the tender dark between night and dawn, I woke.

Not abruptly. Not from fear.

I woke as if I had been called gently back to the surface by something luminous and familiar.

She was there.

Mother Moon, framed perfectly in my window, as if the sky itself had leaned close to my bedside. Her light poured through the glass in quiet silver-blue tones, resting across the room like a hand laid softly upon a shoulder. I lay there, half-dreaming, half-awake, and turned myself toward her, tilting over the side of the bed just enough to keep her in view.

I did not want to lose the sight of her.

There was no urgency in the moment, only wonder. The kind of wonder that does not ask questions because it already understands something deeper than explanation. It felt, in my body, like coming home. Like seeing a beloved face after a long absence. Like being gathered into something older and wiser than memory.

The closest image I have for it is this: it felt like what I imagine it must be to rest in a mother’s lap.

Not the memory of it, but the longing of it.

A heldness.
A safety.
A tenderness without condition.

And yet Mother Moon is more than mother in the earthly sense. She is not limited by one human shape or one human absence. She is vast, feminine, ancient, and entrancing. She carries comfort and power together — softness and awe in the same breath. There is something in her presence that quiets the noise within me and returns me to myself.

As I looked at her through the branches and the early morning veil, what changed in me was not dramatic. It was subtler than that.

Something in me eased open.

The places that had been carrying unnamed tension, thought, longing, and the quiet ache of recent days simply loosened. For a moment, there was no argument inside me. No need to solve, define, or understand.

Only rest.

If she had spoken, I believe she would have said:

Sleep, my sweet child.

And perhaps that is why I revere her so deeply.

There are voids in us that life leaves unnamed. Places where memory cannot fully reach, places where longing takes the shape of a question we have carried for years. Yet sometimes grace arrives in forms we do not expect — through prayer, through a conversation, through the first blush of dawn across a Missouri sky, through moonlight slipping perfectly through a bedroom window.

I have come to believe that God, in infinite tenderness, meets us in these places.

Sometimes through people.
Sometimes through silence.
Sometimes through the sky itself.

Perhaps that morning I did not need an answer.

Perhaps I only needed to be reminded that I am held.

That even in the hour when language loosens and the soul is easiest to reach, I am not alone.

The moon watched me as I drifted back toward sleep, and I lingered there, resisting the pull of rest just a little longer, the way I do when a painting is still unfolding beneath my hands or when a line of writing refuses to release me. I wanted to remain in that sacred threshold between waking and dreaming, in the presence of something that felt at once divine and deeply intimate.

Maybe this is what grace sometimes looks like:

a light at the window,
a body softened by wonder,
and the quiet understanding that not everything most true must first become words.

With Grace & Ink,
                      Mai