Each full moon, I write to honor the wild rhythms of nature and the raw truths I carry inside. These are moments to reflect, grow, and be brave enough to be seen.
January’s Wolf Moon rises over the Columbia, frosty and luminous, painting light across the black water. This is the hungry moon, named for the wolves who howled outside villages in the deepest winter, their voices carrying across frozen landscapes. They weren’t hunting. They were locating each other, calling out into the dark: I’m here. Where are you?
I stand at my window watching the moon scud behind misty clouds, and I feel that howl rising in my own chest. Hungry and surviving, I’m here too.
What the Year Devoured
A year ago, under February’s Snow Moon, I watched crows discover peanuts that a rare Pacific Northwest snow had covered. I was starting this new ritual then, learning to pause and reflect with each full moon. I had a job I’d held for fifteen years. I had a rhythm. I had no idea how fragile any of it was.
July’s Buck Moon brought the layoff. Fifteen years, gone in a day. I shed my old crown and stood blinking in the sudden light of unemployment, all that creative energy I’d been doling out for “someday” suddenly the only thing I had left. Could I turn it into money? Could I build something that would hold?
Not fast enough. I quickly learned that creativity alone won’t pay the mortgage. I spent the summer and fall casting nets, hauling lines, trying to catch something big enough to sustain me. Instead I caught a hundred small fish, spreading myself across too many projects at once.
I was hungry enough to just keep fishing, but I wasn’t surviving.
What Survived
Somewhere in the exhaustion, I stopped. Not completely, but enough. I stopped chasing new ideas and started finishing the ones I’d already begun. I moved at winter’s pace because the world refused to move any faster.
And in the space that opened up, I did something completely new. I set up an easel in the corner of my dining room, near the window where the river light comes in. I taped paper on the floor, unpacked the painting supplies I hadn’t touched in years, ordered lamps and glass jars. I cleared that little corner and made it mine. It’s defiantly not in my office, calling me to leave the jobs and come be.
My first attempt is a study of dappled light on a white wall, but using no whites. I’m mixing paints with different temperatures but the same tone, layering warm over cool, pushing the limits of my skill. No one will buy this painting. I might not even hang it up. The only one getting anything out of this painting is me.
I’m ignoring the hunger to monetize and surviving on what is left of me.
The Howl
I’ll need a corporate job again in 2026, and I’ve made peace with that. The six months I gave myself to build Lingua Ink will be up soon, and it’s clear that I’m not going to turn creativity into income that quickly. My publishing company and book series will continue but I can’t survive on them yet.
But in this slow season, I am someone who gets paint on her apron. After work, after dinner, I walk 15 feet to my easel and start layering colors. I have a queue of paintings in my head: a colorful tropical scene, a monochrome self-portrait, maybe the blue painting León makes in my own novel. It is for me and me alone.
What survived isn’t the job, the frantic business-building, the ten-hour days. It’s what’s left of me when the lean times have stripped all pretense. I make things. I howl into the dark not to hunt, but to say I’m here.
The Wolf Moon hangs over the river, and I think about far away wolves calling to each other across a frozen distance. I’m here.
Hungry and surviving.
