Today felt like the right moment to pick up the pen again. During a quiet layover in Anchorage, I opened one of my long-untouched art journals and added a new page. The page is very simple, not like most of my journals, but I needed somewhere to just start again. Just one step forward. It felt like reconnecting with a piece of myself I had set aside for far too long.
I started this particular journal back in 2017. Seeing that date on the first page made me laugh and wince all at once because has it really been that long? Teaching filled my life to the brim for years, and while teaching filled me up, my art journals fill a different part of me. I have missed the meditative creative wandering that happens when I sit down with paper, color, glue, and ink.
I brought several journals with me on this trip, hoping that the physical presence of them would nudge me back into the habit. I have been in Anchorage for a few days, which is my own little “summit break,” as Carlos calls it, between flights and between seasons of nonstop work. I just wrapped up weeks of intense effort finishing the illustrations and music for my whales book (which will be available on Amazon very soon!), and I am about to fly down to see Tabitha in San Diego, then Maggie and Simon for Thanksgiving in Milwaukee, and finally spend a few weeks with my parents in Manitowoc before returning home to the island with Magdalena. I am so excited for her to see St. Paul Island. Gideon has been out to visit, but none of the others yet, and I want them to know this remote, beautiful, wild, and stunning place we now call home.
Before I left the island, I also rediscovered two small cooperative journals my kids started years ago, one an insect book and one a plant book. I had brought them in the move intending and finally adding a page or two. When they were little, we passed several nature journals back and forth the way artists sometimes do, each adding entries, drawings, and little treasures from our world. They have been sitting for ages. I decided to bring them along on this trip.
In Tabitha’s plant journal, I tucked in a tiny dried lupine from our St. Paul summer and wrote a short entry about it. I love that lupines on the Pribilofs share a genus with the bluebonnets of Texas, and it feels like a scientific thread tying two very different homes together. I plan to give the journal back to her when I see her, and I hope she will not wait as many years as I did before adding to it again.
The insect journal is next, and that one makes me smile even more. Little-kid Tabitha wrote, on the caterpillar page, that “caterpiler tast nasty and groces.” I am going to have to ask her whether she ever actually ate one because if she did, that is a story I never heard. She used to love bugs and swore she would be an entomologist someday. Now she works on helicopters, and while that is not the same thing, there is a poetic connection there. Wings, flight, tiny mechanisms that somehow make lift.
Even though St. Paul Island does not have many insects, which is fortunate for living there but unfortunate for the purposes of this little book, I want to add something local. The few insects we do have deserve their moment in ink.
As for my own journal, after finishing a new page, I prepped the next one the way I used to, laying down a wash of color that waits for tomorrow. And I experimented with a new art supply, a glass dip pen and fresh ink I picked up in Anchorage. The ink lasts longer than you would expect with each dip, and the simple act of writing with it feels decadent and old world, like slowing down just enough to notice the shape of each word.
All in all, this tiny creative moment in Anchorage feels like a soft restart. A reminder. A gentle return.
Here is to picking the pen back up again.
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