These Roots Are Rising

On filling space and breaking free

When I came across the photograph in a box in the basement, I felt my whole body remember.

In the photo, I’m seven or eight, sitting on the stairs of my childhood home with my face pressed between the spindles.

I always loved sitting like that—on Christmas morning in particular, with the smell of French toast and cloves circulating in the air, the false greenery of a bannister garland scratchy against my cheek as I waited for the go-ahead to come down—but on ordinary days too. After school, I’d sit and peer through the slats while my older sister and her friends—kind punks with chin piercings and wide-leg cargo pants—laughed and listened to Bush on the stereo. Though I was usually bossy and loud in my own circle of friends, in those moments, I became a shy thing, hugging the curve of the staircase like an ocelot.

It was the days of Harriet the Spy and decoder pens. I loved to sit on the stairs and spy on the world, to observe, to disappear.

But now I wonder, what did this view do to me? Living life between the slats, crouched, in hiding—have I been keeping myself small?

At the start of the New Year, I called this the Year of Deepening. 2025 had been full of change—an international tour, a pregnancy, a new job, new house, new baby. I declared 2026 to be a year of no change, a year of grounding down and settling into what had already taken root. Energy conserved, not expended.

But then, a little door opened. And through the crack, a slat of light: I saw another future.

I decided not to return to the job. I’m giving up the stability of income, the camaraderie of working with a team I loved. Instead, I’m going to expand my creative work, returning to the slip-slide life of a freelancer, an artist, piecing it together through writing and teaching. Through the building and stewarding of creative community. It is uncertain—especially at a time when I have two small kids at home, when sleep comes to me in slivers and shards—but it is what my heart loves best.

As with any new undertaking, there is, of course, the fear. The desire to retreat to the staircase and hide. To lurk and spy on others, letting them have their light. Little ocelot on the landing.

“Small potatoes,” I have often called myself in moments of doubt, when I’ve questioned the viability of my career as an artist. When I worry: who will care about what I make, who am I to think what I have to say is worthy of attention, why do I keep trying? I say it with a laugh and a shrug, a bit of self-deprecating humor, but somewhere inside, I have internalized it into a hard-pack of belief. A tiny tuber, inert in the ground.

You’re not small, you’re big! a friend once emphatically replied when I did my “small potatoes” bit for him. We don’t talk anymore, and I bear the rift like a bullet hole—but I’ll never forget the gift of what he said, how he said it.

But what if I don’t have it in me? I asked my mother over FaceTime recently. She was sitting in a courtyard in San Miguel de Allende, a bloom of fuchsia flowers filling the frame behind her head. Outside my window, two feet of hard-packed snow—the land impacted like a tooth, swollen with white.

What if you do have it in you? my mother replied.

What she said coalesced in my mind with what the old friend told me—the hot stream of the present meeting the cold wind of the past, creating an updraft. I felt myself rise.

What if I do have it in me? It was a kind of release from the cage I have built around myself, giving me the permission to bust out. To put myself out there in ways I haven’t before—for fear of failure, for fear of coming across as self-centered. But part of not keeping yourself small is reframing what it means to be big. It’s not about taking up space and demanding attention, but about living from a place of big vision and big heart. Being big means being abundant, giving to others from the overflow.

At this point in my life, I don’t create out of ambition to be great. Creating—and sharing—is a small green tendril of connection loosed into the wide, white world. A frequency opened up in the airwaves, a resounding hello across time and space. I write for the click of a picked lock—an opening, a slat of light, a widening.

For a while, my mantra was make room. Making room in my songs for silence. Making room in my body for another body. Making room in my home by paring down, streamlining, eliminating clutter. But now I think, fill space.

So I’ve changed my mind. (And it’s okay to change your mind.) This is not a Year of Deepening but a Year of Lengthening. Reaching out, stretching, expanding. Energy shooting upward, the sap beginning to run.

These roots are rising.

I’m driving through white lengths of farmland, the baby asleep in the carseat. This stunning, numbing, holy cold. The sun casts long shadows of trees across the snow, creating alternating strips of dark and blinding brightness. The corridors of light and shadow are so strong and prevalent this time of year, it’s like living in a cage. Winter can feel like such a prison.

This area is the heart of Shaker homeland, the site of the central meetinghouse and village. A breakaway religious sect of the Quakers, the Shakers were known for their simple, unadorned furniture, and also for their songs. Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free. I’ve become a little obsessed with Shaker style—the wooden pegs and spindles, the unfussiness of clean lines. Last fall, we found a set of spindle-backed dining chairs on Facebook Marketplace, and now this is where we sit each day, my family, my friends. These spindles, these slats, pressed up against my back as I look out at the faces of the people I love, the life I love. From here, the view is clear.

Tis a gift to be free, I hum as I drive up Shaker Mountain. A hawk hauls itself off a telephone wire, catches an updraft, is gone into the blue.

What if I do have it in me?

Even Harriet the Spy eventually stepped out of the shadows and became a writer.

Fill space, I think. And I rise.