"All you want is honey"

Morning darklings,

Billie Marten’s song Milk & Honey is a latest obsession. I don’t know which I was taken with more—the lyrics or the vibe.

🎵I'm just content with time well spent
Savor the taste of sugar

But all you want is milk
More than you can drink
All you want is honey
You can't take the sting
You live for overkill
But you're ungrateful still🎵

The song resonated with me for multiple reasons, as I’m sure it will for many of you. It’s about a problem we see all the time—a lack of contentment, a seeking.

This has been a big theme in my life for a few years now. Sometimes, it’s others who want the honey. Those around me have notoriously not been satisfied with what they have. Whether it’s because not everyone gets their fair shake—the one we were promised—or the financial gap that’s been put on a swath of a generation or trauma that’s left holes where love and kindness should have been, the end result is the same.

🎵You're unsatisfied🎵

But I’m not immune. I see others with their thriving careers, with their ever-growing social media platforms, with their book tours and gallery openings, and I want milk and honey. I’m already getting stung, I think. I have been for so long. So I can take it. I’m taking it now. Then I recognize—I’m ungrateful still.

How many people dream of what I do every day? How lucky am I to write and publish? To sculpt and paint and stitch and create?

🎵You pick up every rose in sight
But all the roses die
I'd rather keep them alive
Roots grow slowly🎵

I want to live the slow life. I’ve been curating it, wintering, reorganizing, finding myself in the quiet. I have been picking fewer flowers, opting for photos and deep inhales that live in my olfactory memory rather than letting them decay in my hand or on the dashboard on my way home. I’d rather see them again in a day or a week, watch them blossom and the petals fall away, enjoy the seasons changing and the browning leaves, then be in awe as it all happen again. I’ll still enjoy the ones given to me, because those come from a place of love, not consumption, not the need to own.

I’m not immune to a lack of contentment, to a tugging need to seek. I’m human too. But I’m aware. I’m uninterested in being that person.

So I’ll try, I’ll put the work in, I’ll do what I must to be content with time well spent.

a lil mood board

Until next time, harness the Little darknesses and embrace the Little things.