If You Only Had The Edges

on April's embers

Embers are here. Gathered from the slow unfolding of April. Threaded with flickers. Grief at the edges. Wonder in the midst. Motherhood reshapes the margins. This is not a recap. Not a list. A slow return to what glowed. A gathering of what stayed lit. Even in the mess. Even in the middle. See what stayed. 

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There are things we tuck into the corners of our lives not because they don’t matter, but because they glow too dimly to carry all at once. Lately, I’ve felt a pull to begin gathering what flickered. To take note. To reflect before it fades.To take inventory of what’s lived in the margins of my days, my books, my journals, and notice how the quiet traces begin to form a thread. How, when gathered gently, they become something more. A kind of wonder that invites us to explore, to create, to return.

Spring didn’t arrive in its fullness this year, who am I  kidding, it never does.  Here in the Colorado mountains, it came slowly. One thaw, one snow-dusted morning at a time. Some days felt like winter still had a hold. Others gave us sprinkles of spring. Something about this in-between season asked me to pay closer attention. I think that is what nudged me toward this, beginning a New Monthly Series on Embers in the Pines. 

Embers are the small things, the fleeting glances of wonder, the quiet sparks that linger. If I slow, if I let the margins widen, I find the world opening up in golden fragments. Flares of aliveness I want to gather. To hold. To remember.

At the end of each month, I’ll trace what hovered at the edges, what lived in the margins, what nearly went unnoticed, and write toward it.

Sometimes words. Sometimes, photos I’ve snapped. Sometimes both.

More like a quiet return. A way of seeing again. A gathering of what still glows.

This month’s embers began with a question I couldn’t ignore.

I wrote a sentence in the margin of a page last week while the milk frothed for my cappuccino. I didn’t finish it. I can’t even remember the whole thought now, just the curve of the word keep and the way my daughter’s voice interrupted it. Even now, that unfinished line stays with me. It felt like something was trying to get through. I have a whole collection of those moments.

Words caught mid-thought.

Ideas that arrive while I’m folding towels or rinsing a bowl.

Lines scrawled in the margin of a half-read book, the edge of a lesson plan, or on a sticky note in my Bible. They live at the edge of my life, not gone, not forgotten, just waiting. This is the texture of motherhood, too, writing around the edges, in the soft chaos, with one hand on something else. Then this question found me, not in a rush or by accident, but as an invitation. 

A question

Beth Kempton

offered this week, one that’s still echoing in me: What is hovering in the margins of your life that could actually be significant, if given more time and attention? As a mother, I’ve come to know this kind of question not as something to solve, but something I’m already living.

It wasn’t the kind of question I could write my way out of. It asked me to stay with it, longer than I expected. When I did, things surfaced like late snow in April, unexpected, but not unfamiliar.

A few paragraphs I haven’t had the courage to finish.

A conversation I keep rehearsing and avoiding in equal measure.

A story idea I shelved the day everything felt too tender to touch.

A prayer I’ve been afraid to say out loud.

A part of myself I’ve been trying to silence because I don’t know what she would say if I let her speak freely. A hope I’ve buried beneath the practical. A longing that keeps showing up at the edges of other people’s joy.

The margins of my life aren’t blank. They are lined with things I’ve set aside,  not because they didn’t matter, but because I didn’t know how to carry them just yet. Things I’ve saved until I had more clarity. Or more space. Or more certainty. Some of what I carry in the margins isn’t waiting to be finished, but grieved. Not all silence is creative. Some of it is aching. Mothering lives here too, in fractured attention, in the absence of long stretches of time. We make, care, think, and create in the gaps. We write beside the needs, not in place of them.

The margins hold things. Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for the perfect stretch of time and began scribbling instead.

On napkins. On the backs of envelopes. In the notes app. In the quiet creases between one need and the next.

That’s where so much of my life gets written now.

Not in the pages, but in the margins.

Not in the fullness, but in the flicker.

There is a lot that is shaped by the role of a mother.  A mother of a disabled child, too, that steady presence required, by the hands that are always mid-task. Even my noticing feels interrupted at times. I  am marginalized. Still, I notice. Still, I gather.

Some days, I resent that.

Some days, I ache for more space than a margin. I ache for a blank page, a full hour, a room with a door that closes. But even when I don’t have those things, I still write. I still reach because something in me refuses to stop noticing.

“Sometimes I think the difference between what we want and what we’re afraid of is only the width of a page.”

Beth Kephart

I don’t need a quiet life to notice. I just need to not look away. Even when the words don’t hold, I still hold the practice.

The habit of reaching.

The belief that something lives there,  that something wants to be named.

There are things living in those pauses like unlit lanterns. Their glow possible, but still waiting.

Not urgent. Not loud. But present.  I’ve begun to believe that presence is enough.

Motherhood hasn’t silenced my creativity, only changed its rhythm. It arrives in fragments now, in pauses, in the time between everyone else’s needs. Maybe that’s what wonder asks of us anyway, to catch it mid-motion.

This, to me, is what creating with wonder looks like.

Not finishing.

Not perfecting.

But returning — again and again — to what gives off light.

Creating with wonder isn’t just about having something to say. It’s about being willing to listen sometimes. I used to think wonder was something that arrived with beauty or silence. Now I know it arrives in the holding.

In the way we stay close to something we don’t fully understand yet.

In the way we name what we notice, even when it interrupts us.

Especially when it interrupts us.

There is no perfect moment to begin, only the grace to begin from where you are. Creating with wonder is not about waiting for the right time. It’s about recognizing that even here, in the margin, in the middle, in the mess, there is something worth paying attention to.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”W.B. Yeats

Grief, too, has taught me how to notice. How to slow down. How to find beauty in the wreckage and meaning in what’s no longer whole. It lives beside wonder more often than I expected. They walk together more than I knew.

Wonder doesn’t always show up glowing. Sometimes it shows up through tears, or silence, or a repeated phrase in your head that won’t go away. Sometimes it’s the ache that remains when everyone else moves on. Sometimes it’s your own voice asking, isn’t there more? Sometimes, wonder is just the grace of keeping going, even when nothing looks beautiful yet.

Some things ask to be lived before they can be named.

This month, I didn’t finish the story.

I didn’t solve the question.

But I kept writing in the white space, in the margins.

I kept naming the flickers.

I kept gathering what glowed.

What flickers might still set fire, if we simply let it stay lit a little longer. And that, I think, is how a fire begins. Quietly. In the places we return to without fully understanding why.

A wing’s width from wonder.

That’s how close we are, always.

To awe.

To tenderness.

To the trace of belonging that lives in our bones.

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April’s Embers

The birds have started gathering in the tall pines again. I can’t see the nests yet, but I hear the rustle of new beginnings.

A song played while I was folding towels, and I had to sit down. It pulled something loose I hadn’t let myself feel in years.

The prayer I didn’t say aloud, only breathed, as I watched my son sleep.

 A shadow stretched across the hallway at just the right time of day, and for a moment, I remembered the shape of a silence I’ve missed.

A book I’ve kept by my bed for weeks. I haven’t opened it, but I keep it close—just in case I’m ready.

My daughter gathered what we’d thrown away, scraps of cardboard, ribbon, a paper cup, and made something from it. She called it beautiful.

The word again written beside a line of scripture in my journal. I don’t remember what I meant, but I knew it when I saw it.

The sky turned lavender just after dinner, and I almost missed it. I was rinsing a plate when the light caught the sink. I stood still, hands wet, just watching.

A bowl of farm eggs on the counter, blue, deep brown, and cream. I paused at the colors, at the quiet abundance in what we so often rush past.

I opened my journal after too many days away. The page didn’t judge. It just waited, like it always does.

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Kindling: A flicker of thought. A small moment waiting to catch light. A place to begin, not to rush past, but to rest within. This ember is here for pausing for warming your thinking, your noticing, your remembering.

Today’s Kindling: If only.

If you only had the edges, the scraps of thought, the things you wrote down quickly before someone needed you, before the day turned loud, what would you find?

The margins are not where meaning fades; they’re where it begins.

You don’t have to name it all.

You don’t have to act on it yet.

Just begin by turning toward it.

Because sometimes, it’s not the blaze that changes us.

It’s the gathering.

What were your April Embers?

Write from that place.

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If something surfaced as you sat with these words, you’re gently invited to share in the comments. A memory, a noticing, a sentence you’re still holding. Only if it feels right. There’s space here.