She's Back: A Weekly Wrap-Up & The Little Life I've Been Living
Well, hello there, loves.
It has been a while. A long while, if I'm being honest — and if you've been here with me before, you know that honesty is kind of my thing. I won't make grand apologies for the silence. Life simply called me inward for a season, and I answered. But I'm back, I have my coffee, and I have stories. So let's do this.
The Night Sky & My Porch Swing Ritual
I have become a creature of the gloaming.
If you don't know that word, let it wash over you for a moment — gloaming. That tender, bruised hour between daylight and full dark, when the sky can't quite decide what color it wants to be. I have made it my habit to settle into my porch swing right at that hour and simply wait. I wait for the dark to drop behind the trees like a curtain falling at the end of a long act. I wait for the first star to make its quiet announcement. I wait until the fireflies, if the season is right, begin their little morse code conversations in the yard.
This is my church. This is my reset button.
The night has always been my deepest source of inspiration — there is something about the dark that tells the truth in ways the daylight simply refuses to. The photo above is my actual view. This sky. These trees. This silence that isn't really silence at all, once you learn how to listen.
If you haven't tried it, I cannot recommend it enough — put your phone down, step outside, and just sit in the arriving dark for twenty minutes. You will return to yourself. I promise.
My Garden Tub Altar & The Magic of Water Meditation
I have little altars everywhere. On windowsills, on bookshelves, on the corner of my writing desk. Altars are simply sacred arrangements — objects gathered with intention to create a focal point for reflection, prayer, or magic. If you've never made one, you are missing one of life's quietest pleasures.
My newest and perhaps most beloved is the one I created for my large garden tub, and I am completely obsessed with it.
Long bubble baths have become a cornerstone of my morning self-care routine — not a luxury, but a genuine practice. And having a beautiful altar beside the tub transforms an ordinary bath into something deeply meditative. I light a candle, sink into the bubbles, and let whatever needs to surface simply come.
For my tub altar I gathered several crystals that feel aligned with water energy and emotional healing. I used amethyst for intuition and spiritual calm, rose quartz for self-love and tenderness, selenite for clarity and cleansing energy, blue lace agate for soothing communication and peace, and moonstone for its deep connection to water, cycles, and the feminine.
Want to create your own? Here's how:
Find a small tray, a wooden slice, or even a pretty dish to serve as your base. Arrange your crystals, a small candle, perhaps a shell or two, a tiny vase of flowers, or any object that holds meaning for you. Keep it simple or make it elaborate — there are no rules. Just let it feel like you.
One very important note: please do not place water-soluble crystals or stones directly in your bathwater. Stones like selenite, halite, lepidolite, and certain calcites will dissolve or crumble when wet, and some can even release minerals you don't want on your skin. Keep them on your altar beside the tub where they can hold space without being harmed.
From a Wiccan perspective, water is one of the four sacred elements and holds tremendous ritual power. Water deities you might choose to honor or invoke during your bath rituals include Yemaya, the Yoruba ocean mother goddess of healing and nurturing; Aphrodite, who was born of the sea and governs love and beauty; Oshun, goddess of rivers, sensuality and sweetness; Nerthus, the Norse earth-water goddess of fertility and peace; and Sulis, the Celtic goddess of healing waters and sacred springs. Simply speak their names with intention, offer a flower or a drop of honey to the water, and invite their presence into your practice.
A bath altar is equally powerful for those with no spiritual practice at all — it is simply a beautiful, intentional space that tells your nervous system: this time is sacred. You matter here.
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Assembling My Bountiful Girl
Oh, this one made my heart so full.
Meet my newest baby — assembled from the Hailey Donna Rubert Bountiful Kit, a gorgeous 28-inch hand-painted toddler kit by a wonderfully talented reborn artist. She arrived already beautifully painted, which meant my job was to bring her to life — stuffing her, weighting her so she has that satisfying, realistic heft, and assembling all her parts into one cohesive, breathing-looking little person.
I added the softest little wig and gave her some delicate eyelashes, and just like that — she was darling. An absolute darling. I named this little lady Lindsey Lou.
I want to talk about this hobby for a moment because I think it deserves more than a passing mention. Reborn dolls are not for everyone, and I have made my peace with that. But for those of us who love them, there is something genuinely healing about this process. Working with my hands. The quiet focus of it. The tenderness of dressing a tiny body in soft clothes and choosing the perfect face to look back at you.
It heals my inner child in ways I don't entirely have words for. There is a little girl inside me who needed gentleness, who needed something soft and safe to care for. These dolls give me that. And I will never apologize for it.
The Veggie Roast That Changed My Dinner Game
I have been on a quiet mission toward simpler, cleaner living — and that mission has made its way into my kitchen.
One of my absolute new favorite meals is this incredibly simple, deeply satisfying veggie roast with cheesy rice, and I have been making it on repeat.
Here's what I do: I take a big pan of whatever vegetables speak to me — bell peppers, potatoes, zucchini, onions, broccoli, carrots, mushrooms — and I sauté them with fat-free butter, salt, pepper, and just a little garlic. Then I roast the whole pan at 380 degrees for about two and a half hours. Low and slow. The vegetables caramelize and soften into something almost sweet, deeply flavorful, and completely satisfying.
The rice alongside is simply prepared and stirred with a little low-fat cheese until it's creamy and comforting.
No meat. No bread. Just vegetables and rice and the knowledge that you are feeding yourself something genuinely good.
If you want to make it even cleaner, swap the butter for a drizzle of olive oil — it roasts beautifully. This meal is filling, naturally low-fat, and almost entirely whole food. It's become one of my comfort meals, and comfort food that is also good for you feels like a small miracle.
The Weed That Stopped Me Cold
I was on one of my evening walks when I saw it.
A single weed. Growing straight up through a crack in the concrete. No soil to speak of. No one watering it. No one encouraging it or making space for it or telling it the conditions were right. Just a living thing that decided, apparently, that it was going to grow anyway.
I stood there longer than I probably should have, staring at it.
Because I know this weed. I am this weed.
There are seasons in life when everything around you is hard and grey and unyielding — when the ground beneath you offers nothing soft, when the light seems to come from the wrong direction, when no one is tending to you and the odds feel genuinely stacked against your blooming. And yet.
And yet.
Something in us pushes upward anyway. Not because conditions are perfect. Not because we feel ready. But because life, when it is stubborn enough and rooted enough and quietly determined enough, simply insists on itself.
That little weed didn't ask permission to exist in the concrete. It just grew.
So did I, and so can you.
My Current Reading Companion
My current daily companion on the nightstand is 365 Buddha: Daily Meditations by Jeff Schmidt, and it has been exactly the gentle, grounding presence I needed this season.
Each day offers a single reflection — a brief meditation drawn from Buddhist wisdom that you can carry with you like a smooth stone in your pocket. I read mine in the morning, usually before I do anything else, and let it settle into the day like a drop of ink in water, spreading slowly outward into everything.
If you are looking for a daily inspirational read that doesn't demand too much but gives back enormously, I cannot recommend it enough. Wisdom doesn't always need to arrive in a thunderclap. Sometimes it comes in a single quiet sentence that rearranges something small inside you, and those are often the most powerful shifts of all.
A Note Before I Go
I took a long hiatus from this blog and from my creative life coaching work. Longer than I planned, if I'm honest. But I want you to know that in my absence I was not idle — I was living. Deeply, sometimes difficultly, always meaningfully. I was tending to my inner world, navigating hardship with as much grace as I could manage, building rituals that sustain me, and slowly, quietly finding my way back to myself.
And now I am back. Not because everything is perfect — it isn't. But because I have something to offer again, and I have learned that withholding your light during the rebuilding serves no one, least of all yourself.
So here I am. Porch swing and all.
I'll see you next week. 🌙
With so much love, Stacy