This morning, in that first light of the sun when our desert mountains turn that lovely orange for three long moments, the waning gibbous moon hangs near them on its way toward setting. The air is clean, the mountain ridge crisp, each small jagged rock defined against the sky. I stop in the open sliding glass door, communing, grateful, quiet inside.

I had good sleep and woke to a kind of softening, I think. I’ve had whole days of late swimming in my own muck, impossibly impatient and crazy icky with my mother and even my auntie, unable to step outside of it. By yesterday, I managed to forgive myself. With this morning’s softening, my sadness—for my mother’s latest mental plummet, for myself, for our world—sits easier in me again. And my heart seems lighter, sweetness returned, my own milagro.

[Editor’s note: I have been committed to doing “real writing” each day in my notebook since December first. In my latest effort to return to something more robust than a haiku I have begun using my own three-word prompts again. Today’s were sun, swimming and sleep. And I owe this little piece in part to my dear friends, Marylou and Richard. I sent them a text update this morning that wended its way into today’s “real writing.”]