The Place that Keeps Calling You Back

on what’s coming for you & a poll

Not every shift is sharp. Some arrive like breath fogging a window, barely there, until you turn toward it. A pause you didn’t mean to take. A feeling you almost missed. But now it’s here, just beneath the surface of things. You’re not sure what changed, only that you can’t quite move the way you did before. Not because anything is broken. But because something deeper is beginning to move. This piece began there. Not in clarity, but in weight. Not in answers, but in the feeling that something within me was stretching toward light again. Sometimes you only recognize the turning point once you’ve already begun to turn. This is for that moment, when what’s been stirring quietly deserves a home, to that steady place to burn. 

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Some weeks move like weather, fast and heavy, shifting without warning, leaving you a little windblown, a little unsure what day it is, what you meant to remember, what you lost along the way.

You don’t call it disconnection. You tell yourself it’s just life. The responsibilities don’t pause, so you don’t either. You keep the rhythms going; show up, pour out, do what’s needed. You carry on.

But when you spend too long tending only to what’s visible, your roles, tasks, the surfaces of your days, you begin to lose touch with the deeper current. That place where language and meaning meet. That place where you remember not just what you’re doing, but who you are.

Underneath all the movement, there’s a quiet forgetting. You forget what it feels like to slow your pace on purpose, to reach for a pen before your phone, to trust a thought enough to follow it. You lose the muscle memory of reflection. Of noticing. Of naming.

It builds slowly, this ache. Not loud. But deep. You feel it in the back of your throat, in your fingertips, in the way your shoulders curl in when no one’s watching. It’s not quite sadness. It’s more like the hollow ache of something important that’s gone untended.

You can live that way for a while. I have. For years, I believed my writing had to happen in long, quiet stretches of time or not at all. But most of us don’t live in those stretches. We write between pickups. Or between shifts. Or at the kitchen table after everyone else has gone to bed. We write in grocery store parking lots, on lunch breaks, in the silence after a hard conversation, or when the ache is too heavy to hold in our bodies alone. Sometimes, we write in a quiet room and wonder if anyone will ever hear it. And when we stop honoring those fractured windows—no matter what fills our days—the part of us that tells the truth goes quiet.

Until one morning you find yourself holding a spoon in one hand, staring out the window longer than necessary, wondering why the light on the trees makes you want to cry. You realize you haven’t written anything real in weeks. Maybe longer. You’ve been surviving on half-thoughts and mental notes, tucking lines into the corners of your mind with nowhere to place them.

It hasn’t felt urgent. But now, everything feels thinner without that thread. You realize it’s not just about writing. It’s about aliveness. You realize it’s not just about writing. It’s about presence. Clarity. The way you move through the world when you’re connected to yourself. Sometimes, it’s the act of writing itself, any small return to your voice, that begins to clear the path. That opens space in your thinking. That steadies your pace. You don’t wait for clarity to begin. You begin, and clarity finds you as you go.

You were never meant to live disconnected from your words.

Because they don’t just live on the page, they live in your body, your breath, the way you name your days. They live in how you remember, how you reflect, how you make sense of all the small, invisible thresholds you cross each day.

Then, even with everything else still moving around you, you begin to feel the pull. Not from a blank page or a looming deadline or some self-imposed standard of creativity. But from the part of you that still believes in depth. In stillness. In the slow and sacred work of noticing.

That part of you hasn’t disappeared. It’s just been waiting. And it’s still rooted, even now.

Maybe it came to you while you were wiping the counter down, the damp cloth warm in your hand. Or in that liminal moment before sleep, when your mind flickers with what-ifs and unfinished lines. Maybe it brushed your shoulder when you stood by the kitchen window and caught the early light breaking through the trees.

It’s not a place on any map. But it’s real, and it keeps calling you back.

You’ve tried to shake it off. Tried to reason your way out of wanting more. You’ve told yourself it’s just a phase, just a season, something you’ll return to eventually, when the dishes are done, when the inbox is emptied, when the house is quiet, when life slows down enough to make room.

But that longing doesn’t wait for your convenience. It waits for your return.

You know, somewhere deep in the quiet part of you, that you were made to follow it.

You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not too late.

You’ve just been living at a distance from the place where your words know how to find you.

That place isn’t gone. It’s simply grown quiet without your footsteps. But it’s still there, patient and alive. It doesn’t resent your absence. It only waits to welcome you back.

Return, real return, doesn’t mean producing something polished. It doesn’t mean chasing fire or brilliance or applause. It means sitting down, opening the page, and allowing yourself to be met again. It means letting your words stretch out, not to impress, but to breathe. To remember. To speak gently into the spaces where you’ve grown silent.

What I’ve come to believe, after years of writing through silence and storms, we need places that hold space for that kind of return. Spaces not built on pressure, but on presence. Not on volume, but on trust.

There is a place being prepared for that.

Not built for urgency or performance or scale, but for rhythm. For depth. For that quiet fire that still burns beneath all the noise.

You don’t need another formula.

You don’t need to fix yourself.

You don’t need to become someone new.

You need a space where your words can live. Not just visit, but come alive.

That place is coming.

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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: The Return.

Return doesn’t mean starting over.

It means starting from where you are, with thoughts that haven’t settled, voices that haven’t been used, and beauty that you almost didn’t notice.

What would happen if you wrote from this place, not the polished one, but the honest one?

Begin there.

Begin again.

Write from that place.

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Let’s meet in the comments.

What’s been keeping you from your words lately?

Or what’s been quietly calling you back to them?

Say it out loud. Sometimes naming it opens the door.

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.