If you (like me) have spent any amount of time trying to “fit in” and/or feeling like you ought to be embarrassed by — or “grow out of” — your interests, your collections of tiny things, or your belief in the very magic we all believed in when we were young, you’ll understand when I say that I still cringe a little on the inside as I admit this (even decades later, and even though, ahem, I now know I was right all along): I was the little kid who believed plants and animals had thoughts and feelings, who believed I had a special kinship with wind and weather, and who saw ideas and stories in scenes and snippets, like teeny-tiny movies in my head.

Fast-forward, then, about a decade to when I lived (in a very small, very safe college town) in the middle of an actual forest. There, I would go on solitary hikes and long nighttime walks … and I was forest bathing long before I’d ever heard the term: stopping to study the tiniest wildflowers; pausing to listen to choruses of bugs and frogs and birds; sitting on rocks to admire the view and feel the breeze; lying down in the grass to stare at the stars; and, always and forever, marveling at the trees. I kept weather journals and took photos. And wondered how I might create a life as a professional observer of nature. Not in any scientific manner, mind you … my goal was more visual and poetic, more solitary, still, and quiet.

Now fast-forward another several decades, to when we bought our cozy bungalow with a large, glorious perennial garden in the front yard and a “blank-slate” of a backyard — with a mysterious dry-stone wall laid across its middle — and then spent another seven (or was it nine?) years deciding “what to do with it.”

And then (finally!), we started planting.

For a long time, it was hard to look at our gardens without seeing all the work that always needed doing.

In the woodland garden we were slowly creating in the backyard, there was a period of five years or more where we were forever looking at it with a critical eye, planning what to put where and, of course, planting.

But once the garden no longer needed our constant attention, and when I started sitting right down on the ground to pluck weeds from the moss — or, better yet, sitting on the rock under one of the birch trees — I started leaning into my natural inclination to simply be in the garden. As I visited with the plants from near-ground level — working slowly, sitting quietly — the chipmunks and squirrels and bees went on about their business around me.

And as I watched them, the flights of imaginative whimsy I had spent years encouraging everyone (else) to take started gradually coming back to me, too, and tiny snippets of story ideas once again started playing like mini movies in my head.

They say you should “write what you know.” For me, that’s animal characters like the ones I adored when I was a book-crazy kid, the seasonal variety and beauty of our own gardens and the woods down the street (which I never tire of observing and documenting), and the weather. Which brings me full-circle, I do believe.

In honoring (instead of downplaying) my imagination, my child-like wonder, and my love of adorable details and tiny things — and in writing the sorts (and lengths) of stories that, in my heart of hearts, I have always wanted to write (the kinds I loved reading when I was a book-crazy kid) — I finally discovered my writerly bliss.