A Thimble Full

Apr 04, 2026

Poetry

Here’s Mary Oliver’s “What is There Beyond Knowing?”

Journeying

“The way I see it, each person’s understanding of the spiritual could fit in a thimble,” she says. “And each person has their own thimble.” I think of the black lacquer sewing box at home in Omaha. It belonged to my great-grandmother. In it is her thimble, her initials engraved on the inside. I imagine myself holding this thimble, my great-grandmother’s, now my own. It’s full to the tiny brim with water, like the limits of my own understanding, not just about the spiritual, a nebulous word, but about life itself.

For a week, I live at the edge of the Pacific ocean. The Villa Maria Del Mar retreat center overlooks Monterey Bay. My room is south facing with a view over the water. I open the window first thing and close it as my last act before heading home. All night the waves rise and fold and fall. They lap me, rock me, hold me.

During the day, I’m busy facilitating a retreat. We talk about and practice stillness. But I don’t feel still. I’m preparing and presenting. In my free time, I’m catching up, hiking, visiting a bookstore. I visit my room for fifteen-minute stints of quiet. I listen to the ocean. Then I’m up and out again, lanyard swinging around my neck, a piece of chocolate on its way to my mouth.

On the second day of the retreat, I decide to get in the ocean. The water temperature is such that the only people in it are surfers in full wetsuits. Nevertheless, I am determined. The ocean has rocked and soothed my shredded nervous system every night since I got here. I need to get closer. My friend M gets wind of my plan and hints that she might join me. We meet on the beach, both of us bouncing with fear and excitement. I remove the thick orange towel borrowed from the retreat center, bare legs registering the shock of wind and sun. Months have passed since they felt either. M and I take deep breaths and turn to the ocean. The water rolls towards us. It’s a cocktail of ice, salt, and sand. It flings itself at us. We scream, shout and let the water engulf us, let the tide scoop us up and carry us back to shore. Once there, our bodies buzzing with more than cold, we realize one dip isn’t enough. We turn and run to the ocean, over and over again, until our numb limbs, finally, steer us toward dry land and hot showers.

I return home to an ocean of grass netted with snow. An inland sea. I return to my life, where, mostly, I just stand in the dark and listen to the sound of my breath. I hold my thimble, one hand cupped to shelter it from the wind. The tide’s coming in. I can hear the rush of all that I do not know. It swirls around my ankles, covers my feet. A ruthless benediction.

Gardening and Making/Mending

By the time this newsletter arrives in your inbox, I will have completed my last radiation treatment. Hurray! After five weeks of daily treatments, I’ve gotten to know the radiation techs pretty well. We joke and laugh and catch up with each other, while they line up the blue sharpie marks on my chest with the lights on the radiation machine. What does this have to do with gardening you ask? Well, a couple of days ago one of my favorite techs, a woman about my age with short dark hair, cool tortoiseshell glasses, and a bone dry sense of humor, asked me what I did over the weekend. I told her I’d done some gardening. I had begun to trim back last year’s growth on a number of perennials as well as clear beds of weeds and leaves. When I said this, she replied, “yeah, but I always worry about disturbing the bugs too early.”

Folks, I have been gardening a long time. I should know better. I should know that all the unusually warm weather in March does not mean that the insects gestating beneath winter’s leavings and inside last summers stalks are ready to make their 2026 debut. I should know this. But I wanted dirt under my fingernails; I wanted scrapes and scratches and hangnails from gardening sans gloves. I wanted to kneel on the ground and feel it spongy beneath me. And I did. And now, thanks to my friend with the cool glasses, I’ve stopped. I’ve also apologized to all the tiny insects I might have disturbed (killed!) in my excitement and haste. I’ll be back. But not for another two weeks.

In the meantime, I should be doing some handwork. I’ve got plenty of projects going, and I did manage to finish most of one sock for my partner. There is, of course, the other one left to knit. But right now, reading one word after the other is more appealing than knitting stitch after stitch. All my library holds appeared, as they often do, at the same time. I’m working my way through the most appealing ones and returning a few with some questions as to why I requested them to begin with.

Despite the dearth of handwork, I haven’t forgot our Thin Space Handmade Item Raffle. This is a quarterly giveaway of a handmade-by-me item to one of my paid subscribers. A new item is coming at the end of April, adjust your antenna accordingly to stay tuned.

Upcoming and New

Thank you Kat Bucciantini of the Substack Unfurl and The Spacious Unknown podcast for taking time to chat with me about some of my spiritual journey. Here’s Kat’s description of our time together:

“Emily shares her journey from Evangelical Christianity through trauma, questioning, and her own ‘dark night of the soul’ to an embodied life of presence and self-compassion.”

FULL EPISODE HERE

Threshold: A Live Podcast

Join Julia Rymut and me for our next episode.

Spaciousness vs Spaciness: How to Navigate Times of Brain Fog and Overwhelm

Some of our most healthy and creative times are when we’re spacious and open. But at other times, that same spaciousness can slide into spaciness and brain fog. How do you ground yourself when you feel groundless? How can you stay spacious without becoming spacey? Join us on Monday, April 6, at 11:00 CST, as we try to locate the hazy line between these two states.

Join Live