November 01, 2026 A Little Walk, a Little Lightness

It’s November 1, 2026, and I am currently taking a little walk outside. I believe this place is called Biltmore Village.

• Unedited
• Recorded with the iPhone 13 mini’s internal microphone
• Recorded in the Just Press Record app

My husband and I just spent the night at a hotel because our kids—well, we all went trick-or-treating last night. Yesterday was Halloween, and they went trick-or-treating with their friends. We got together with lovely families, lovely families, and had a fabulous time.

And then, God bless them, one of the kids’ parents had them over to spend the night at their house.

We live a little bit far away from in town, Asheville, North Carolina. We couldn’t just leave the kids and drive all the way home, which is around an hour, so we decided to stay at a hotel while the kids were there. Which was amazing.

Mind you, our children at this time are 15 and 18, and their little friends—their friends are right around the same age. They’re just so cute and so lovely, and we felt very comfortable doing something like that.

After we went to pick up the kids, we came to work out at the Y. I say “we” because Daddy is the one who really wanted to get a workout in. Both my kids are currently at the YMCA doing steps, walking on the inside track.

I came outside because it is just stunning. Like, absolutely stunning out here right now.

It is about 55 degrees. The trees have already changed colors, and they’re already losing so many of their leaves. I would say probably by the end of this week, we’ll have naked trees everywhere.

It’s still that beautiful vibe. It’s cloudy, and it’s rained. It’s not raining, but it’s rained. Oh my goodness, it is just absolutely delightful, and I am thrilled.

My child is requesting access to an app. That’s going to have to wait until I’m done recording.

A pause here, just because I wanted to make sure that I was actually recording.

So, it’s absolutely gorgeous. I love it, and I’m feeling very grateful.

I decided to participate in—I believe it’s called NaPodPoMo. I always get the name wrong, so I’m going to do my very best to get the name right and get behind my voice every day for the month of November.

Because I miss the power of simply recording and putting something out. I miss the power of sharing everyday moments.

I miss the community. Around 20 years ago, there were a lot of storytellers. And when I say “storytellers,” how would I say it? I don’t even know how to describe it. There were a lot of people just turning on a mic and sharing what was going on. It was like an audio blog, I guess, but everybody was sharing audio blogs.

That is an airplane above me. I’m just using the internal microphone for my iPhone 13 mini. I’m not using any external microphones outside of the one that’s built into the phone, so you can probably hear noises around me.

Anyway, I miss that.

I want to participate in this way: to tell stories, to share my life, my thoughts, things that are going on, and possibly even occasionally add other work that I’m doing at the same time.

I will be talking a little bit more about NaPodPoMo and Jennifer Navarrete, who is the person who started doing this way back. Way back, y’all.

I don’t think I’ve ever participated in this specific experience for this month. I did participate in this experience for video around 2008, 2009, and I think 2010. I did a little snippet of video, like a minute-ish of video a day, in the month of November for those three years.

It was such a lovely experience, but I’ve never done a full 30 days with audio.

So this is what I’m doing, and I’ll be sharing. I hope that you guys will listen. If not, that’s okay, because I’m also doing this for myself, so that I can go back to just the basics, right? To capturing that audio and letting you know where I am.

By the way, I’m outside walking, and going back to the feeling of gratefulness—holy crap. I have that feeling of lightness again that has been missing for such a long time.

Really tuning back into just being in my body, being present. I guess it really is a feeling of thankfulness, of being so grateful to be alive and to have the blessings that I’ve had and the privilege.

As much as the world and my life are, for sure, financially difficult and unstable and, yeah, absolutely stressful in so many different ways, there is a level of internal freedom.

The wealth within, of love and support and people I love, and seeing beautiful relationships and wise human beings and actions, is vibrant and alive, even within the darkness and the chaos.

I just want to take every moment to be thankful for that.

So I hope you come back and hear what’s going on, and we’ll see what kind of stories we get into in the month of November 2026.