meaning – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

The Climb

On my forty-sixth birthday, I see that human life cannot be understood only from where the person is standing now. During the climb, I know the grain of the rock, the doubtful foothold, the salt in my eyes. Then something catches me. I lean back, and the years open into a landscape. Earlier selves, worlds I have come to carry, a life I once lacked the imagination to picture: each changes what the others mean. Where their views meet, I begin to recognise the life that could only be mine. Each of us carries a world assembled in an unrepeatable way, still widening, still coming into view.

Bloom — is Result —

A flower is not merely decoration. In Emily Dickinson’s hands, bloom is result: the visible outcome of timing, endurance, hidden conditions and everything that had to hold before becoming could appear. At Midsommar, her poem arrives for me with thread, inheritance, memory — and the women who left something behind by hand.

Before the Highest Place

There are moments we remember not because they changed what came next, but because they briefly returned us to a scale larger than whatever was closing in. I did not yet know what the following days would bring. I only knew that, for one Icelandic evening, nothing required an argument from me, and the world was vast enough to hold what I could not yet name.

meaningA collection of 3 posts