Esther Sharp's Blog

PART 1: THE EARLY CALL OF MOUNTAINS

As a kid in Western Washington, I used to point out the car window at the mountains we passed and ask my mom to let me out of the car “to just run up them really quick.” You know. While she was at a stopli...

There is plenty to leave in the fire, and I feel no desire to carry it out in my arms by recounting it again.

This is what I choose to hold.

The year was my first ever dedicated workroom for writing and art.

The year was a tandem writing weekend with Jo March vibes.

The year was a new baby arriving in the family.

The year was a fox I playfully painted in the midst of burnout that is now worn on apparel and printed on mugs.

The year was water I carried up to the attic to drink and make tea.

The ye...

“That isn’t hard with the rope.”

If I had remembered my headphones, I wouldn’t have heard the com...

I found the river I’ve been craving since coming back to West Virginia, and a soul sister met me halfway for some fem in nature time.

It went a little something like this.

Arriving at the river that somehow felt like both of our favorite rivers from childhood (in separate states,...

As a child my body was simply and purely the vehicle of my own experience: legs to run me faster towards my destination, to pedal me faster on my little purple bike in the cul-de-sac with the mountain looming over it. I didn’t think about whether my legs were perceived as the right or wrong shape, I didn’t know legs could have rightness or wrongness yet.

I experienced safety in my shelter, but every once in a while I would sense predators outside. News stories, little girls missing. Was I too...

This was not The Moment mentioned in the text, but it’ll do.

This piece is the least linear thing I’ve ever written, which seems richly fitting. (And if you've ever hung around my writing process, it's also saying quite a lot.)

For the past several months I have been challenged by a special variety of writer's block that isn't an absence of words or thoughts, but an overabundance of them. Picture a herd of cows trying to get through a very narrow door, or logs being sent down a narrow part of...

There are people who are shocked to hear I was a conservative Christian.

There are people who are shocked to hear I’m not.

At various points of my life, I have had people I loved stop talking to me for either reason, which feels like a very bizarre life accomplishment. To adapt a Joni Mitchell song, I’ve looked at estrangement from both sides now: from “you’re too Christian” to “you’re not Christian enough.”

In the midst of such divergent condemnations, there was a long and (I now see) necessar...

One thing leads to another, but we honestly have no idea what those things will be. This can be a stressful truth or you can relax into it and laugh with joy at how things link.

Here’s an example for you, if you wanted one. Or if you were wondering how I came to be traveling across the US for the last month, or if you just like a weird story.

This is the story of how unpainted horses led me to pack minimal belongings and hit the road.

Of course there were things that led to the unpainted horse...

The view out the window while I wrote this AM—if you stare at it long enough you can kind of see it as a mountain range, a glacier, and a river.

St Paul, MN — We are a mixed collection in this coffee shop today. Two couples on dates, three working on laptops, one reading, one man whose carer led him in by holding his hands and walking backwards to maintain eye contact with him. One of the couples has silver hair, they are on their first date. They have successfully navigated biographical det...

Dear me and everyone else:

You were born. You don’t remember choosing to be.

Here you are. You start waking up. You start learning things from people who learned them from other people, who accepted certain ideas, who may be passing along something they have never examined. Or maybe they examined it, but you don’t.

Your consciousness is becoming informed. You ask Why? and someone tells you Why. For the most part, you are satisfied with that.

You grow up. You start realizing that some people wer...