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

I Didn’t Know I Was Waiting to Arrive

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-nine

I have always loved the sky.

Not casually. Not in passing.
But in the way you return to something—again and again—
because it speaks a language you don’t quite understand,
yet somehow feel fluent in.

The way it shifts without asking permission.
Soft blues that stretch into something endless.
Clouds that gather, drift, dissolve—
as if they are thinking out loud.

Light that moves across trees like a quiet hand,
touching everything without holding anything.

I have watched it for years.

From different windows.
Different rooms.
Different versions of my life.

And it was always beautiful.

But if I’m honest—
there was always something beneath that beauty.

A quiet reaching.

Not loud enough to name.
Not heavy enough to stop me.

But present.

Like I was standing just outside of something
I was meant to be inside of.

I didn’t question it.

I just kept watching.

Kept admiring.

Kept telling myself this was enough.

And maybe it was…
for who I was then.

But something has shifted.

Nothing dramatic.
No moment that announced itself as change.

Just… a quiet noticing.

The sky is still the sky.

The trees still catch the light the same way.
The colors still move through the day
in that slow, familiar rhythm.

And yet—

I am not looking at it the same.

I sit now at a window
in a house I didn’t know I was waiting for.

A space that feels less like something I acquired
and more like something that recognized me.

Every angle, every view—
as if it had already decided
it would belong to me one day.

Long before I ever thought to ask for it.

And when I look out now—

there is no reaching.

No quiet ache beneath the beauty.

No sense that something is missing
just beyond the edge of what I can see.

There is only this:

Presence.

I am not watching the sky
as someone standing outside of her life.

I am in it.

Fully.

Without needing it to give me anything more
than what it already is.

And that is new.

I didn’t know how much of my life
had been shaped by a feeling I never named.

A subtle longing.
A soft, persistent sense that I was still on my way
to something I couldn’t quite define.

Even in joy.
Even in beauty.

There was always a thread of almost.

But that thread is gone now.

And I didn’t cut it.

It simply… isn’t there.

This is what I understand now:

Arriving doesn’t always look like movement.
It doesn’t always come with a moment you can point to
and say—there it is.

Sometimes it is quieter than that.

Sometimes it is the absence
of what used to follow you everywhere.

The absence of reaching.
The absence of searching.
The absence of needing something more
to make this moment complete.

I sit here,
watching the same sky I have always loved,

and for the first time—

I am not looking for anything inside it.

I am just here.

And maybe that is what it means to arrive.

Not to find something new—

but to finally recognize
you are no longer missing anything.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

Lives We Could Have Lived

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-eight

Tonight I found myself thinking about the many ways a life can unfold.

It began with a woman older than me, standing in the yard of a small Missouri town, showing me where my property line meets hers. She walked slowly down the hill from her place to mine, using a rake the way someone might use a walking stick, tapping it into the earth as she moved.

Spring was beginning to whisper its way back. The ground still carried the debris of winter—twigs, brittle leaves, the remains of storms long past—but she pointed to different corners of the yard and named what would bloom when the weather turned.

“You’ve got tulips here,” she said, brushing aside a patch of leaves with the rake.

She pointed up toward a tree that had not yet awakened.

“That pink dogwood will be beautiful when it comes out.”

Near the entrance to my driveway stood a Rose of Sharon that had been there long before I arrived, waiting quietly for another season to begin.

She remembered all of it. The people who had planted the flowers. The years the yard had seen. The small histories rooted beneath the soil.

We walked through the grass like that for a while, talking easily, the conversation drifting wherever it pleased. Her husband worked somewhere above us on the hill, cutting wood from a tree he had taken down. The sound of the saw drifted through the air between bursts of birdsong that kept pulling my attention upward.

Every so often we leaned against the glass table in my side yard—the one that will eventually sit in the middle of a garden I have not yet planted. We rested there a moment, then wandered off again across the yard.

She told me she had grown up here. Foster care as a child. Married in her twenties. The man working above us was the same one she had chosen all those years ago.

He is dying now, she said matter-of-factly, as if she were describing the weather.

Still, they are preparing the lake cabin together while he has the strength—fixing things, putting it right—so that it will be ready for her later.

She spoke about it without drama. Without sadness exactly. Just the quiet acceptance of someone who has walked a long road and knows that every life eventually asks us to carry certain truths.

At one point she left the rake leaning against my fence as though the earth itself could hold it upright for her.

Then she pointed to a small stone pathway cutting through her yard.

“My son Charlie made that,” she said.

I asked where he lived.

She named a town I did not quite catch. Somewhere a ways from here.

“He’s not doing well,” she added, almost gently. “Drugs got the best of him.”

And then she kept talking about the flowers that would bloom in the spring.

There was no judgment in her voice. No bitterness. Just the matter-of-fact dignity of someone who understands that love does not disappear simply because life becomes complicated.

That was the moment I understood something quietly.

Everyone has a story.

Some are lived in one place long enough to become part of the soil.

Others wander.

Some are still searching.

Earlier that afternoon I had been telling her, before her story took the room, that I had spent the last year moving through the world differently. My children were grown now. Settled in their own lives. No longer needing me in the same way they once had.

So I began wandering a little myself—checking on them, making sure they were well, trying to understand what my own life looked like now that the center of it had shifted.

But when she began to speak, my unfinished sentence no longer mattered.

Her life was answering a question I had not known how to ask.

What does it mean to live one life fully?

And what becomes of all the others—the ones we nearly chose, nearly kept, nearly entered?

Later that evening I thought of a man from my past who could not remember my birthday when I asked him about it. I laughed because I could not remember his either.

But another birthday surfaced immediately in my mind, belonging not to him but to the boy I loved when I was thirteen.

My first love.

Two Virgos. Two days apart. The same year.

Back then we were certain that feeling something deeply meant it must surely last.

He has since passed away.

And still, his birthday remained somewhere in me, intact.

Memory is strange that way.

It does not always keep what was most important.

Sometimes it keeps what was most formative.

And then there is the quieter truth, the one nearest to me now: that I have caught feelings for someone who is not mine to have.

Not because there is no feeling there. That would be simpler.

But because timing, circumstance, and the clarity that comes with maturity have a way of standing at the edge of certain beautiful beginnings and saying—not this one.

I feel it.

And I stop it.

Not out of fear.

But because there comes a point in life where integrity matters more than possibility.

There was a time when I did not know how to do that.

When feeling something strongly was enough reason to follow it wherever it led.

But age has its own kind of wisdom, and sometimes that wisdom looks like restraint.

Sometimes it looks like standing very still in the presence of something that could have been extraordinary and choosing not to step toward it.

That too is a kind of love.

And perhaps that is what I am learning in this season of wandering and listening and noticing the small stories unfolding around me.

That a life is not made only of the things we do.

It is also shaped by the things we do not do.

By the roads we recognize and walk away from.

By the loves we honor without claiming.

By the quiet understanding that the world is full of lives we might have lived if one small moment had turned a different way.

The woman who stayed in this town lived one of those lives.

The boy whose birthday I still remember lived another.

The man whose presence I quietly step away from belongs to yet another.

And I—somewhere between wandering and settling—am living the one that remains.

The only one that ever truly belonged to me.

And tonight, I find myself grateful not only for the life I have lived…

but for the many beautiful ones that passed close enough to remind me who I am.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

Under the Veiled Moon

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-seven

 Tonight the moon was soft, concealed,
her silver brightness partly sealed;
like bowed-in-prayer, her gentle light
still folded heaven into night.

 I lay in bed and spoke His name,
no stage, no script, no need for fame;
just like a child with open hands,
asking what it barely understands.

 I thanked Him not for days “all good,”
but for the path I never would
have chosen, yet can now retrace
and see His fingerprints in place.

 Then in the middle of my prayer,
my stomach growled into the air;
I smiled beneath that quiet ache —
a training ground that does not break.

 It whispered, learn to watch, to wait,
let body, spirit integrate;
let joy arrive without a sound,
a steady knowing, holy ground.

 Beneath the moon’s thin, veiling glow,
one truth is all I need to know:
that Love knows love, and in that sight
I’m seen, I’m guided through the night.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

When the Morning Arrives Softly

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-six

There is a version of me that only lives in the early light —
before the coffee,
before the world begins its movement,
before my mind remembers there are lists and clocks.

She is quiet.
She is honest.
She is unarmored.

And in that stillness, I remember —
nothing is demanding me anymore.
Not in the way it used to.

Because I no longer bow to urgency.
I no longer chase what is already meant for me.
And peace — I’m learning — doesn’t run.
It settles.
It waits.
It arrives gently and expects nothing in return.

Sometimes I think God speaks loudest in the softest places —
a pale sky,
a slow morning,
the way the day opens like water rippling from a pebble’s touch.

And what I hear isn’t instruction.
It isn’t direction.
It isn’t even a whisper.

It is simply this:

Be still with yourself.
Be patient with your becoming.
Everything is flowing as it should.

So I sit here — not chasing light,
not reaching for the next version of me,
not proving, fixing, or performing.

Just being.

And I’m finding that simply being here 

— with Him 

— is enough.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

When You Find Your People

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-five

Some unions aren’t built by bloodlines —
they’re woven by God.

You wander for years thinking you’re “too much,”
too bright, too loud, too deeply feeling —
until one day you walk into a room
and realize you’ve simply been speaking
the wrong language your whole life.

And here —
here, among souls who burn the same way,
you are not asked to shrink.

Laughter isn’t measured.
Tears aren’t judged.
Prayer is breath.
And being fully yourself
isn’t dramatic, or excessive,
or inconvenient—

it’s welcome.
It’s understood.

It’s home.

This isn’t replacing blood —
it’s expanding love.

Because sometimes God sends a village
that doesn’t look like where you came from,
but looks exactly like
where you were always meant to belong.

And when you meet them,
there is no performance,
no proving,
no earning.

Just recognition.

Just
finally.

With Grace & Ink,
— Mai

If God Penned in Sunlight

 Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-four

 If God penned letters in sunlight,
this one would arrive the way dawn does—
quiet at first, slipping between the ribs of the world
without asking permission,
carrying a warmth that knows exactly
where you’ve grown quiet.

The letter would read…

 Look here.
Even the ghost forest radiates
when seen at the right angle.
You call these branches bare,
but I call them honest—
nothing extra, nothing pretending,
nothing performing a season
that isn’t meant for them.

 You think you’ve lost your way
because everything feels transparent now—
but transparency is not emptiness.

 It is clarity.
It is readiness.
It is the place where even muted light
finally knows where to land.

 You don’t have to grip this moment
as if it might crumble.
It won’t.

 What is meant for you has never depended on your force—
only your openness.

 And then the sunlight would soften
into that amber seam between day and night,
resting itself on the edges of every branch,
as if underlining its last line…

 You are not meant to know your destination
before you begin.
Only to trust the One
who keeps writing your story
in colors you haven’t learned to name.

 And in the hush that follows, you would feel it—
that subtle, reverent tug
toward whatever is next.
Not a command.
Not a warning.
A presence. A promise.

 A letter from God written in light
on the bones of a forest
that refuses to fear winter—
a reminder that you, too,
can let the sun tell you
where to stand next.

 — With Grace & Ink,
Mai

The Light Behind The Ghost Forest

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-three

Lately I’ve been standing inside a kind of holy uncertainty — a tender stretch of life where nothing is settled, yet everything is speaking. The quiet mornings, the shifting skies, the soft ache of not knowing where my next footing will land — all of it feels like its own kind of prayer.

This poem rose from that space.
From the part of me learning to listen again.
From the part of me remembering that home isn’t a destination at all —
it’s wherever I stand, breathe, and look up at the sky.

The Light Behind The Ghost Forest

The light teaches the branches
what humans always forget —
that all will be well.

Not because life bends to our urgency,
or because we’ve earned the right
to shape the seasons,
but because the world knows
how to return to itself
without needing our permission.

The bare trees don’t argue
with the quiet of their own becoming.
They do not fear the leaves they’ve lost,
nor grasp for the ones not yet grown.
They simply stand,
rooted in a wisdom older than memory —
that what is meant to come back
will find its way in time.

Meanwhile, we —
with our tender, racing minds —
cling to every what-if
as if the horizon were ours to manage,
as if a single sunset required
our supervision to arrive.

But the light keeps trying:
slipping through the branches,
gliding across the bones of winterwood,
whispering its gold reassurance
to anyone soft enough to listen —

You do not have to force your becoming.
You do not have to outrun your fear.
You only need to stand your ground,
open to what is already on its way.

For resilience is not born
from strength alone —
but from patience,
from trust,
from surrender,
from the quiet willingness
to believe that life is not against you,
even when it is silent.

And so the light teaches,
again and again,
the lesson we forget most easily:

all will be well,
even before you understand how.

— With Grace & Ink,
Mai

The Cusp of Unknown

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry thirty-two 

Today feels like standing at a threshold I didn’t plan for but somehow needed.
I’ve left the quiet edges of farm life—those soft, patient mornings that held me—
and now I’m in motion again, carried by skies I don’t yet know
and roads that will take me farther before they settle under my feet.

There’s no map for this kind of shift,
only the trust that the next place will reveal itself
at the exact moment I’m meant to arrive.

And yet… gratitude rises.

Not because life is perfect (it isn’t).
Not because the future is clear (it’s not).
But because there is something sacred
in realizing I am still capable
of being present
even in uncertainty.

I am thankful that I can soften instead of fear,
that I can stay humble in the unraveling,
that I can choose kindness while life rearranges itself around me.
I am thankful for the breath that anchors,
the faith that lifts,
and the quiet whisper that says —
You are exactly where you need to be,
even if you don’t yet know why.

The Cusp of Unknown

Between the leaving and the stay,
the heart relearns its sacred way.
And still the dawn, in gentle tone,
reminds me I’m not walking alone.

Though shadows blur the steps I take,
my faith remembers what won’t break.
For every path that shifts or bends,
the unseen mercy still attends.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

The World Teaches Us to Earn Love — But the Soul Knows Better

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry thirty-one

There comes a moment in every life when the old teachings fall apart.
Not because they were loud, or cruel,
but because they were wrong.

 Most of us were raised — quietly, subtly, relentlessly —
to believe that love is something we win.
Something we earn.
Something given only when we behave well enough,
break small enough,
or shine bright enough to be chosen.

 We were taught, without words,
that love has conditions, thresholds,
exams we never quite pass.

 And so we grow into adults who perform.
Adults who carry childhood hunger into grown bodies.
Adults who chase the illusion that if we can become
soft enough,
strong enough,
beautiful enough,
forgiving enough,
quiet enough,
pleasing enough—

 then maybe love will stay.

 But there is a truth older than this world,
a truth that arrives only when we are finally tired
of performing our way into belonging.

 It is simple.
It is ancient.
And when it lands, it lands like revelation:

 Love is not earned.
It is given.
There is nothing you can do, or fail to do,
that makes you more or less worthy of it.

When my son said this to me — in the soft honesty of a struggle he did not deserve —
I felt something inside me break and glow at the same time.
A mother knows a child’s pain before he speaks it,
but this time, he named a truth I had searched for my whole life.

 He knew the only woman who had ever loved him fully, fiercely, without condition
was his mother.
Not because he earned it.
Not because he performed for it.
But because love — real love — is given in the marrow,
not negotiated in the mind.

 And as he spoke, I realized something I had never dared to admit:

 Every child deserves that kind of love in their lifetime —
not just from a parent,
but from a partner,
a companion,
a soul that says “your breath matters to me”
at dawn and at midnight.

 Not love that demands we erase ourselves.
Not love that thrives only in honeymoon glow.
Not love that punishes difference or silences truth.
Not love that folds under its own immaturity.

 But love that is whole enough to hold two perspectives.
Love that understands disagreement is not danger.
Love that recognizes one truth:
I can be fully myself,
you can be fully yourself,
and if our paths align,
we will walk them together without fear.

 This is the love I want for my son.
This is the love I want for all my children.
This is the love I want for every boy who was never told he was worthy,
and every girl who learned to shrink herself to be chosen.
For every grown child who still aches at night wondering if they are enough.

 So hear this —
whether you are my son by blood,
my son by spirit,
or a stranger who needed these words:

 You are worthy of a love that does not leave.
You are worthy of a love that does not ask you to earn it.
You are worthy of a love that sees you — all of you — and stays.

 One day, someone will love you with the same devotion
your mother wished the world had given you from the beginning.
A love that knows your edges,
holds your shadows,
honors your truth,
and walks beside you not because you are perfect—
but because you are theirs.

 And until that day arrives,
carry this with you like a vow:

 Love is not the prize.
You are.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai

The Vows I Made to the Wild

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry thirty

I didn’t marry the world all at once.
It happened slowly—
in the way soft things learn to trust again.

One morning I found myself keeping promises
I never said aloud:
to return to the oak that waited for me,
to ground my shaking bones in its shadow,
to lift my face toward the same sky
that had watched me grow and break
and grow again.

I made vows without a ceremony,
without witnesses,
without anything but the wind
whispering yes against my cheek.

I vowed to come back
even on the days I felt unworthy of belonging.
I vowed to look up
when the world felt too heavy to lift.
I vowed to read the language of branches
and not demand they speak mine.
I vowed to listen
even when what I heard was only my own breath
settling into stillness.

And to the storms—
I promised respect.
Not fear.
Not resistance.
Just the knowing that life
cannot be all sunlight,
and that breaking open
is sometimes the truest way to grow.

Somewhere between the rain and the roots,
the world took me as its own.
And I—
with a heart that had been half-forgotten,
half-overlooked—
finally said yes.

This marriage has no ring,
no aisle,
no applause—
just a quiet union between the world above me
and the world within me,
two steady halves
forever calling each other home.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai