The quiet hum of late afternoon

There is a particular quality of light that arrives in the last hour before dusk — especially at the end of winter. It pours through the window at a low angle, stretches across the wooden floor, and makes the dust motes visible. I’ve been trying to pay more attention to these small, almost invisible moments. The ones that don’t make it into photographs, but settle somewhere in the memory.

This blog is a small space for those fragments. No algorithm, no curated feed — just words and the occasional image. I’ve been reading Vesper Flights again, and Helen Macdonald writes about noticing as an act of resistance. Against haste, against numbness. I’d like to think of this place as a kind of noticing.

silence & interruptions

Last week I took a train to a small coastal town. I didn’t have any agenda — just walked along the pebble beach, sat on a bench, and watched the gulls squabble over a forgotten sandwich. It sounds trivial, but I came back with a strange sense of clarity. The kind that only arrives when you stop trying to chase it.

“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” — Swedish proverb

I’ve been thinking about attention spans, and how mine feels like a shallow stream these days. Notices, notifications, the endless scroll. But the afternoon on that bench was different. I didn’t check my phone once. I just watched the tide and the light shift. It reminded me that depth isn’t something you can manufacture — you have to let it find you.

I tried to capture that feeling in a quick sketch on the train back — the diagram above is my crude attempt. It doesn’t look like much, but for me it holds the memory of that low sun and the salt smell.

small rituals

Since that day I’ve been trying to reintroduce small anchors. A cup of tea without looking at a screen. Writing three things in a notebook before bed. Not as a productivity hack, but simply because these small rituals feel like returning to a room you’ve forgotten you loved.

• morning: open the window for five minutes, whatever the weather.
• midday: step outside, even just to stand on the pavement.
• evening: read one poem aloud. (Right now it’s often Mary Oliver).

It’s nothing revolutionary. But it’s mine.

a short code interlude (because why not)

This blog is hand‑written HTML, and I like the simplicity. If you view the source, it’s just plain markup — no frameworks, no databases. In a world of over‑engineering, sometimes a plain file is enough. Here’s a tiny CSS snippet I use to keep blockquotes honest:

blockquote {
    margin: 2rem 0;
    padding-left: 1.5rem;
    border-left: 4px solid #b9ad9c;
    font-style: italic;
    color: #3f3a33;
}

It reminds me of the early web — when a personal page was just a personal page.

I’ll end with a line from a letter I received last week, handwritten by an old friend: “Keep making your small, quiet things. They matter more than you know.” So this is my small, quiet thing. Thanks for reading.

— E.