Author Archives

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New Year Superstitions/Traditions

I want to credit the artist, but can’t remember where I first found
this charming illustration–if anyone knows, please let me know!

In my family we say “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” (or try to) first thing on the first of a new month. It’s supposed to be good luck, and can be surprisingly difficult to remember to do. There are loads of variations on this tradition. Some say only “Rabbit, Rabbit!”, some say “White rabbits!” Usually I just blow it by talking to my cats. This morning, though, I welcomed in 2025 with those three little words. Yay! It always feels exponentially more lucky when I manage to remember to say this on the first day of a new year. Also, since I heard my husband murmuring “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” in the wee hours of the night, I’m pretty sure we’ve got at least double luck heading into this year. I’ll take it.

There’s another New Year tradition or superstition that birders adhere to. They notice the first bird they see in the New Year and look to it for some insight into what the year ahead might hold for them. This morning, feeling pretty lucky with all my rabbit remembering, I thought I might try this. When I first thought of it, it was still dark outside, but even though I couldn’t see it, I could hear the rain pouring down. Clearly it’s a miserable day outside. Would the birds even appear? As the morning lightened, I postponed looking. What would I see? Does it alter things if the birds are enticed by my well stocked feeders? Should I also note what bird I first see when out and about? Am I skewing my own bird prophecy? lol

Finally, as the day lightened up a bit, I peeked out the window. Sitting on the platform feeder in the downpour was a tufted titmouse. This delighted me, as these are one of the birds I’ve been able to identify since childhood. Over the years, I’ve been mightily entertained by watching these small birds take oversized nuts and even peanuts from the feeders.

Quickly, I googled to figure out the symbolism. The first site I found noted that “Titmice are curious, joyful birds. They are adaptable and may be considered brave due to their small size and bold spirit.”

I dug a little further.

“If you’re lucky enough to see a Tufted Titmouse first, expect that this year when you see something that arouses your curiosity, you’ll not be able to stop yourself from fully investigating, ” writes Laura Ericson on her birding blog.

Well, this sounded promising. Taking time to embrace and entertain curiosity is always rewarding. I’ve come to believe that it’s a critical human trait, and I suppose it goes hand and hand with imagination. When we’re curious about things, we’re opening our mind to imagine alternatives. To wonder. To reconsider what we think we know. I just read Trevor Noah’s book “Into the Uncut Grass” and was intrigued by his reflections in the introduction on the importance of imagination. Among other things, he writes, “Imagining, I’ve come to understand, is crucial for conflict resolution…Imagination allows us to step outside of entrenched positions and explore new perspectives, to conceive of compromises that were previously invisible.” Curiosity does this too.

What superstitions or traditions do you embrace at the beginning of the New Year?

I wish you the best in 2025. May it be a year rich with curiosity and wonder.

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What Shall I Pack in the Box Marked Winter

I was inspired by a recent contest to write a rhyming poem about winter. The poem didn’t make the cut, but I had great fun writing it and now I have a Poetry Friday post. I call that a double win! I’m actually still playing with it, but here it is in its current version:

What Shall I Pack in the Box Marked Winter 
after Bobbi Katz

Newly bare branches patchworking the sky
Echoes of geese after migrating by
The first chilly breeze that tasted of snow
A flurry of flakes in a hypnotic flow
Waking to snow fallen thick through the night–
A snow day, a free day, a winter delight
Boisterous sledding, mad race down the hills
the laughter, the screaming, the thrills and the spills
Building a snowman with cold carrot nose
bent twiggy arms and a lopsided pose 
Laughing out clouds on a still, frigid day
watching them form, then drift slowly away
Damp mittens, hot cocoa and fresh, rosy faces
The welcome-home warmth coming in from cold places
Cold window panes etched with lacy frost flowers
Snuggling close through white-blanketed hours
The early night darkness and quiet to read
Space for the dreamers and dreams to take seed

©Molly Hogan

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise. Be sure to stop by and check out her cheerful mash-ups! In the meantime, enjoy all the wonders that winter brings your way!

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Local Treasure

A few Saturday mornings ago, I was in my regular spot, writing at my desk. I had every intention of remaining there. I had a prompt to respond to and a list of other creative and mundane “to do’s” to accomplish. I was content, but also determined to be on task and focused.

Then I glanced outside and saw this sky:

It takes a much stronger woman than I am to resist that lure!

Mere minutes later, I was hastily dressed and in my car driving down to the waterfront. I arrived there to soft light and a flock of seagulls.

I stood at the shoreline and watched the gulls swoop and dive. Their white and grey bodies shone against the changing light and mist and fog. It was mesmerizing.

I watched them while my fingers grew cold, then colder and then began to ache. They flew in large circles or ovals over the water, their dark shadows mirroring them in the river, like phantom dance partners.

Often gulls can be quite loud. On this morning they were mostly silent, adding to the surreal atmosphere. Occasionally, one of them called — a sudden thrust of sound partially muted by the fog and mist. Echoing off and away across the river.

After a while, I wandered further along the shore. Raindrops from the previous day’s storm lined branches. Many were oddly shaped and half-frozen, etched with crystal. Caught in a liminal zone between water and ice. A spider web strand had transformed into a showcase for glowing orbs, neatly arranged along its length. Each one a complete, dazzling marvel.

Glancing upriver, I saw more gulls and a horizon layered with fog-softened grades of water, tree and sky.

Somehow, I’ve fallen out of the habit of visiting the local waterfront. I’ve been enjoying lazy mornings at home instead, or the occasional trek down to the marsh. Watching the gulls’ aerial ballet on this morning, seeing the light shift, and noticing the beauty that surrounded me, I felt a shift, a gentle click and an opening. It was as if a key had turned in some internal lock.

I was where I was supposed to be.

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Winter Light

I was the one to set this month’s challenge for the Inklings. I took part of a prompt from James Crews’s new book, “Unlocking the Heart,” and invited everyone to “begin with a specific sensory experience (of taste, sight, smell, sound or touch) and see where that leads you.”

Weeks after setting this challenge, it occurs to me that a wide-open prompt can be more difficult to enter into than a more defined one. Too many choices, maybe? I suppose it’s like the way that writing within a tightly structured form can actually free ideas. Maybe they bounce off the boundaries and meet up with each other in new and unexpected ways? At any rate, I was hoping to tap in to some evocative smell or sound or even texture (an ode to oatmeal?), but over and over I kept coming back to sight.

To me, winter is all about the interplay between dark and light. There’s such a lush generosity to the light at this time of year. It is transformative. As a photographer and a writer and a human being, I’m drawn to it over and over again. I find it quite challenging to capture both in words and in photographs, but here are a few unrelated small poems and photos attempting to do so:

within deepest snow
winter’s cold heart
blazes a brilliant blue

patient square of amber light
awaits in the dark, chill night
welcome home

late sun gilds the meadow
winter-bare oak tree
glows like an alleluia

You can check out what the other Inklings did with the challenge by clicking on the links below:

Linda @A Word Edgewise
Mary Lee @ A(nother) Year of Reading
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Heidi @my juicy little universe
Catherine @ Reading to the Core (She’s opting out this week, but her blog is always worth a visit!)

Carol is hosting this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Apples in My Orchard.

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PF: Kindling the light with small poems

I’ve been trying to fashion small poems lately. To root through the ashes and find small sparks, then breathe on them gently like kindling, hoping to ignite a flame, to create a little light. I like to write Wordle poems sometimes, but one day this past week my guesses wrote a very succinct poem without any tinkering from me:

That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but who am I to reject a poem when it’s staring me in the face?

Here are a few other poems from this week:

fire warm at my back
coffee in hand
gold on the horizon

©Molly Hogan

jays bombard the feeder
the view fractures, shifts, renews
kaleidoscope blues

©Molly Hogan

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Ruth at her blog, There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town.

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Small lights in the dark

This morning as I walked out to the car, the horizon was aglow, lighting up the dark. It was lovely, but it didn’t stir me as it usually would. Its impact felt muted. Beauty is having a tough time finding its way inward these days. There’s so much to slog through first, I guess. This feeling has been hard to shake, and honestly, I’m not even sure that I should shake it.

As I moved forward, there was an unexpected flash of color in the doorway of our free-standing “office”. I took a small detour to check it out, and the sudden incongruity of the reflection pleased me. I snapped a photo with my phone.

As I stood there, I suddenly heard rustling and crunching out beyond the zone of visible light.

“What’s that?”

It was probably deer. Probably. Most days I would have imagined bears, coyotes and/or a roaming raving maniac, and would have stepped lively back into the light and then scampered into my car. But this morning I didn’t care. These days I vacillate between deadened and defiant. I’m not sure which was dominant at this point, but I took another step into the dark, gazing about me. The noises got louder, seemingly closer. Whatever was out there clearly wasn’t worried by my presence. I was still pretty sure it was deer. My eyes scanned the field in the dim light. I could see nothing, other than the dim shadows of trees and the hint of high weeds in the fields. The noises continued. Finally, the awareness of time passing pulled me back toward to my car.

As I drove down the driveway, I kept my eyes peeled. I drove a bit slower. Glanced to the left. Glanced to the right. And then, sure enough, there it was, barely visible in the dim light. A small deer standing in the front yard. I’m sure there were probably more of them, based on all the noise I’d heard, but this was the only one I saw. And yes, deer are plentiful in Maine. And yes, I see them frequently. But still, this sighting somehow felt like a small victory. A small light in the dark.

At the end of our driveway, I turned to head out toward the main road. As I pulled onto Main Street, another flash of color caught my eye. At some point during the last 24 hours, our neighbor had carefully wound brightly colored lights around each segment of a tree. A bold rainbow tree now decorated their side yard.

My spirits lifted just a bit.

Yet another small light in the dark.

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Finding My Way

It’s been hard to find my footing after the events of last week. The best analogy I have read is Anne Lamott’s in which she says: “If you are anything like me, you can barely remember having ever felt so stunned, and doomed, except when someone very close to you died, or divorced you, or the godawful biopsy results came back.

It’s a little as if the godawful biopsy results came back, and 73 million people cheered and gloated.“

In the aftermath, I’ve been reading a lot, writing a little, lamenting and brooding. And trying to find a way forward. What does one do? I don’t know, and neither do most of my go-to gurus. But I’ve been gathering ideas from different places.

One powerful piece of advice that always offers a way forward, comes from the recovery community: “Just do the next right thing,” they say. Apparently, this originated with Carl Jung who wrote, “And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step…”

Of course, determining what that step is can be a bit trickier.

This week Katherine May suggested that taking time to pause and tap into our resources is critical at this time. She defined resources as “something that we can draw on when we need to; or, better still, something that we can turn into a habit that becomes protective of our sanity, part of our steady functioning”. When I followed her prompts to consider my own resources, writing and writing communities were near the top, along with nature and photography.

And then Mary Lee Hahn of A(nother) Year of Reading put out a call to write haiku for healing (#haikuforhealing).

I’m weaving all these influences together, quite haphazardly, but it does seem like they create a path of sorts to follow. I remain uncertain what the next right thing is, but at least I’ll be doing something. As I ponder the magnitude of this moment and what it says about our country, I want, no need, to celebrate beauty, connect with community and dwell in gratitude. So, each day I’m writing, often haiku, trying to kindle some light in these dark times. It feels a bit like lighting a candle outside during a brutal gale…but I guess it’s something:

rainpatter slows…stops
patches of blue sky appear
soon there will be sun

©Molly Hogan

in the dark front room
the Christmas cactus bloomed
unnoticed until now

©Molly Hogan

day nears its end
late-hanging leaf and gold finch
compare their fading hues

©Molly Hogan



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The Day Looms

The day looms before me. I can feel myself pulling away from it. Wanting to hide. Seeking anywhere to linger in a bubble of ignorance. I try to ground myself to this moment. Listen to the slight trickle of water in the aquarium. Hear the faint tick-tick-tick of the clock in the kitchen. Outside it’s still dark. The day awaits. There’s nothing I can do right now.

Later, I’ll go to school for a half day of PD (professional development). No one’s mind will be on what we’re doing. Then I will vote. I will not tune in to the media today. Why crank up the anxiety volume? I’m not even sure I’ll check the news on Wednesday morning. I don’t expect that things will have been decided yet, and I’m so concerned about what might be coming. I can feel anxiety growing like a toxic algae bloom, deadly and smothering.

So, again, I breathe in and feel my lungs expand with air. I listen to the water trickle in the aquarium. I hear the far off hum of tires on the road. Others have begun their days. I’m trying to remember that we are all linked, but I feel the embers of anger stirring beneath my anxiety. How have we gotten to this place?

A faint tapping begins on the windows. I can hear raindrops hitting the fallen leaves. The water still trickles. The clock still ticks. No light has yet appeared on the horizon.

The day still looms, but now I’m writing. Soon, I’ll post these words to share. I’ll read other posts. Comment. Connect.

Later, I will vote.

That’s what I can do right now.

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November Challenge

Poorly Chosen Craft Move

Conferences plus Covid
alliterative perhaps
but assuredly not poetic

Ugh! So, there’s some context for you. I’ve been swimming in conferences, fever, unplanned absences, cancelled conferences, sub plans, election angst, rescheduled conferences, cancelled rescheduled conferences, etc. And although I can now smell, I still have a very limited range of taste. Somehow, that just seems to be the sour icing on this unpleasant cake I’ve been consuming. But, on the bright side, I’m getting better (yay!), I only have two more conferences to make up, and Linda set us a lovely challenge for the month. Thank goodness for writing friends and challenges!

For our Inklings challenge, Linda shared Joy Harjo’s poem, “Fall” and asked us to respond to it in any way we chose. For some reason (in the midst of fever perhaps?), it seemed like a good idea to print out the entire poem, cut apart the words and then use every single one, some still in phrases, to write a new poem. So, that’s what I tried to do. It was a mixed success.

Ultimately, I took that poem and removed some words and phrases away to come up with this. Every word in this poem is in Harjo’s poem (unless I’ve lost track!), but I’ve chopped out quite a few. Mostly it still feels a bit fever-dreamy to me.

In the Aftermath of Lament

With you on my mind
I cry a forever blue song,
another hanging perfectly
in a necklace of days.

Sky is slightly overcast.
A jay is there again.
The divine yellow leaves
now dark, damp,
a jacket for the earth,
might open the hallway
into this day.

If I need forward,
if I hear the rain,
will your story keep in mine?

©Molly Hogan

To see what the other Inklings did with this challenge, click on their names:

Catherine Flynn
Mary Lee Hahn
Heidi Mordhorst
Margaret Simon
Linda Mitchell

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Patricia J. Franz at her blog.

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Some Wordle Poems

There’s just something about a random group of words that inspires me to connect some dots and create a poem. In other words, I’ve been playing around with Wordle poems again. They’re such a fun, low-stakes way to keep myself writing. In general, my rules are to use all the words I guess when playing Wordle, in order, within the poem. Variations on the words are okay. Here’s one I wrote with these words from a recent game: gutsy, dream, pearl, farer, carve.

On This Morning

With a hopeful, gutsy stride
I step from my dreams,
cradling the pearl of wisdom
granted to all wayfarers
who travel the currents of night:
The day is open before you
Carve your own way
Always seek the light.

©Molly Hogan

Late last month I was inspired by this photo of a friend’s sister’s newly painted porch. Isn’t it gorgeous!?

It was obviously in my mind when I started playing Wordle a few days later, so I began guessing with the word “porch”. Usually I put my Wordle word guesses in the poem in the order in which I guessed them, but this time I moved them around a little. My words were: porch, clone, cloud.

“My house is where I like to be …”
Daniel Pinkwater*
for Jules Myers

No clone to convention,
she painted her porch
a stirring orange.

Now she’ll sit
amidst sunbeams,
contentedly watching
the clouds drift by.

©Molly Hogan

This line is borrowed from Daniel Pinkwater’s book “The Big Orange Splot”, which is a huge favorite of mine. Any other fans of Mr. Plumbean out there?

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Jama at her blog, Jama’s Alphabet Soup. She’s celebrating all things donut in a scrumptious post! Be sure to check it out and the other links you’ll find there.