The summer is thick and syrupy right now. Humidity drips from the trees, and there’s a heaviness to the jungle air, which dropping down to the ocean relieves.

I once wrote- about 4 months after losing my brother- that my dance with grief had become a 2 steps forward, 5 steps back, side shuffle kind of situation. And I’m feeling that.

It has been four days since we said good-bye to our sweet, old dog, Samwise. He was diagnosed with cancer about a month ago, and though they thought he would have about 6 months left, things went sideways this time last week and quickly spiraled.

It’s funny how small steps can accumulate and lead to bigger things.

We don’t always know where we are going when we take the first step, but years later we can look back and see that we were on a journey the entire time, we just didn’t realize our own destination.

The concept of home has been on my heart the past few days.

What defines it. What creates it. Its multidimensional layers- house, location, family, heart, belonging, connection, love- there are many ways to define home.

They say the best way to learn something is to teach it.

I teach grief. I already knew the language fairly well, but I learned to speak it fluently when going through the loss of my brother, and in that fluidity I took my words, wrote a book, and have been an author and voice on grief since.

Every field and flower fades, but love is infinite. – – Melanie Chisholm

We found out today our sweet old dog, Sam, has cancer.

A beautiful morning at the beach where he laid by the ocean and sunned himself turned into a nightmare of a seizure just an hour later on the car ride home turned into rushing to the vet turned into cancer.

Change is the way of life. I try and stay open to it and let myself unform and flow and let go, though it’s not always easy and sometimes resistance creeps in at unexpected times in unexpected ways.

Our upstairs neighbors moved yesterday- we rent the downstairs of a giant home up in the hills of Kauai and they rented the upstairs.

I just lost a power struggle with a bunch of mosquitoes while sitting out on the lanai trying to write.

They started biting, I resisted; they kept biting, I persisted; and then I realized my foot was itching with a good number of fresh bites, so I threw in the towel and bid a hasty retreat indoors.

I finished my book today, Transformations of The Sun.

I know an ending when I write one, and after I wrote the last words and went through the final section- reworking, reordering, recalibrating- I realized I had finished my 122 passages for my next book.