A photo I couldn’t quite fit into last week’s journal entry. I’m itching to go back out there but the weather has been bleh lately.

One more for the collection.

Life has been all over the place the last few weeks, but thankfully, things seem to be slowing down. I took this photo of the moon last week, and I wish I could explain why the moon comforts me so much, but I can’t find the words.

I took this last summer, a week after I purchased my macro lens. I remember following this little guy for a while because he wouldn’t stay still long enough for a photo. I had so much fun doing so that I really miss the vibrancy of life that winter seems to lack.

I hope to keep posting my love of leaves without shame in the years to come.

I’ve been feeling directionless lately, like a boat adrift at sea, but every time I look up at the moon, I feel comforted. Phenology, or paying attention to nature’s rhythms, is a word I learned last year, and it, like the moon, has become my lodestar in troubled times.

All bark and no bite makes Mario a nice young man you might want to introduce to your parents one day.

A photo of the big dipper I took with my iPhone. My iPhone. This was my first attempt at astrophotography, and I’m really happy with how it came out. It was freezing out, though, so I didn’t take more. It made the whole world sparkle like diamonds this morning, though.

I have another doctor’s appointment tomorrow, but this time I’m seeing a new doctor. I hope she can help me.

A fresh coat of snow has fallen and everything is white. More and more people I know are getting the virus. I hope we can make it through winter in good health. I hope.

“One day this will all end,” I wrote in July, “and the question I ask myself is whether it was worth it.”

COVID has made me confront my own mortality more than anything else I’ve ever experienced, and all I want to do is squeeze as much life as I can out of my allotted time on earth. I want to push myself until I can’t move anymore, until I can’t breathe anymore, and I wish to die with a smile on my face and a legacy worth existing, worth the blood, sweat, and tears I’ve shed and will shed.

I have to keep reminding myself that everything I do matters. That my life matters, that my actions matter, that my words matter.

But goddammit do I wish I can enjoy the pure beauty of existence sometimes. That this breath is the most beautiful thing to ever exist, and that this breath is enough.