“…the wheeling seasons brought the year around…”
—Homer, The Odyssey
3 years ago I built a little widget for the sidebar of this blog that displays posts that were published “on this date.” I love checking it periodically, and I find that certain times of year I circle back around to certain topics (natural, given how seasonal our lives are) and certain days in the year are “hot spots” with especially good posts.
Today is one of them:
A current online trend is posting 2016 photos as a kind of nostalgic exercise. I get the decade lookback, but 2026 doesn’t feel like 2016 to me — it feels more like 2018. On this day in that year I was writing about soup.
A year after that I was writing about what we do with good teachings by people who do bad things.
A year after that I was posting my favorite D.W. Winnicott quote about hide and seek:
The full quote is actually this:
“It is a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek in which it is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found.”
—D.W. Winnicott
He’s describing a child’s development, but I think the sentence could describe the life of an artist.
I wanted so badly to write a book called Hide & Seek, but it never turned out quite right. The first time I tried to write it, the result was Keep Going. Then the second time I tried to write it, the result was Don’t Call It Art.
I don’t think I’ll try to write Hide & Seek again. But I’m still really interested in this question: How do I hide and still be found?
Skip forward four years, and I was writing about gardening metaphors, which, in a way, contain the answer to the hide & seek question: we have planting seasons and we have harvesting seasons.
And to wheel back to just one ago, I was posting about a new mix, “Nurturing Your Inner Child.” I love that mix and just listened to it the other day. I’m currently working on a followup, the first mixtape of 2026.
And back to it I go now…