Still Lining Up Milk Jugs

Thoughts on the second year of weekly posts

Today’s letter is a moment of pause as I reflect on completing a second year of writing Illustrated Life. Thank you for being a part of this community, for holding and sharing space, and for believing in the value of documenting life.

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A Mark in the Sand

This is not a loop. It is not a retracing of steps, a recircling. Or it may be a circling, always a few steps off, an ever-widening or narrowing spiral.

This week marks the end of my second year at Substack, the second year of weekly posts for Illustrated Life.

It has been a powerful year of weaving words, and I am beyond grateful for this space and for those of you who have supported and encouraged me in this year, those who have made me feel seen.

This is a space about creative life, the keeping of illustrated journals, and the beauty of personal projects and series. This is a space dedicated to doing what you find personally meaningful, even when it means walking away from the crowd. This is a space tucked mostly out of sight, almost invisible, not hidden, but often only seen by those who find their way here in the dark.

Sometimes people stay only a short while, but I keep the light on.

I think my heart broke in this last year in lots of little ways, some that have been public and some not. I have glued the cracked shell together with a mix of determination, resignation, loneliness, sadness, anxiety, and hurt. There are other things sprinkled in, eternal things, and a base, but it’s a proprietary blend. It’s organic. It came oozing to the surface, reaching and spreading and nestling into cracks and fissures. It filled in spaces large and small, hairline cracks and gaping chasms. This glue may or may not hold, and so I follow along with needle and thread, a mending pile always at my feet.¹

It is strange to look back now and think about last February writing a post about milk jug luminaries, a blend of color and light and humble roots. Then there were 100 days of comic affirmations, meditations on the pattern of a hospital floor, and then, of course, a splintering, hard decisions, unexpected turns, and a lighthouse under construction. But there were also months of tracking morning light and a series of drawings of my mom in December. There was folding, endless folding, the whimsy of Victorian notes, and hope in the sending of postcards and letters. There were 52 weeks of diary comic lists. There were lots of crows. There have been some bears, but that project is one I hope to open wide this year, along with a reading of Proust, and some visual tracking as I begin the difficult process of winnowing my shelves and reducing what I carry.²

Through the year, I didn’t miss a week. The Illustrate Your Week prompts showed up every week, and I showed up every Sunday with a post.

I don’t know how to not be me.

I’m not totally sure what that means for the future, but whatever thread it is that I’m constantly using to stitch things together, held me in place here this year. Deep down, I believe this thread is infinite.

It’s a vulnerable thing we do, those of us who write this way. It has its rewards, and it has its fears and doubts, hurts and sorrows.

When I look back on the last year, I sometimes think maybe I’ve written some of my best pieces, and they are now buried in the rolling stream, forgotten beyond the echoes in the babbling brook that runs in my head. I sometimes fear that maybe everything I write is just a big word salad, everything tossed together, metaphors twisted and layered, the crunchy bits falling to the bottom.

Even as I enjoy twisting the kaleidoscope, I worry that maybe there’s only so far I can go, that maybe the surface is all there is, and that all that is left is repetition. I worry about sound over substance.

I put this post off a little bit, the writing of it. Partly, I needed to make sure that the postcard prompt (number 5) was finished. Partly because of the milk jug luminaries, which I loved and love as a symbol for what I am doing here, tucked away in my tiny space with windows and no doors, with pens and ink and no stamps. I cling to the whimsy of the metaphor, luminaries on the path that I light in case someone straggles near, luminaries made not from copper or iron, but from simple plastic jugs, semi-opaque, luminaries I light to warm the darkness.

I put off the writing because I thought there would be a lighthouse. A few photos have fallen free recently. One is in a patchwork frame, curiously blue and pink³, and embellished with embroidery and French knots. The photo is of me in front of a small lighthouse, not a real one. I hadn’t been able to identify it, but then it could be like a roadside dinosaur, something untraceable miles or years later.

Looking at the photo again this week, I noticed the signs just off the edge, words that are blurry along the periphery but that clue me in. The Marginal Way. I don’t remember this little lighthouse, but those words tell me where it is. Those words remind me that someday, I will return. Those words seem apt for the decades of writing and making art in the margins that followed, a reality I didn’t know then. Those words seem now to be the label on the map I am living, a map populated by loneliness.

I put off the writing. Maybe I was instinctively, subconsciously protecting myself. I don’t know that I realized that stopping to at least take a cursory backwards look at the last twelve months of posts would be reflective in other ways as well. Already the forgetting is underway. Of course, I should have thought that through.

The posts are a timeline.
The writing is a timeline and a time capsule.
The writing is the weaving of thread.
The writing is with ink and thread.
There is gold in the filament, pressed in place and finger worn like sea glass, rough edges wearing down as I roll the thread again and again between fingers, worry stone, touchstone, and lifeline all in one strand.
The writing is the weaving and the connecting, the tracing of contours, the mapping of dots and coordinates, the searching for stars, and the prayer in the dark.

At the end of this year, pivotal in so many ways, even in my writing, I know that I will keep going.

Thank you if you have been here and have found something of value in the posts over the last year.

“Circles, like the soul, are neverending and turn round and round without a stop.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Favorites from Year Two

In preparation for today, I put together a curated list of posts from the last year. With more than 100 posts in the year, and more than fifty Sunday posts or separate essays, there were a lot of words.

I went through and picked out the posts that stand out for me, for one reason or another, from each month. If you are looking for a guide to reading the back catalog, this might be a good place to start. You might have chosen others.

I don’t know that I can keep up the pace that the last year represents. There are weeks when I am discouraged as I wander around the halls and look around the cafeteria before taking a spot at an empty table. There are weeks when I wonder why I continue, even as I know that I don’t have it in me to stop. There are weeks when I think about the abyss that would rise up around me if I didn’t at least have this.

I don’t know what this next year will bring in terms of my writing, but I know there is still so much more I want to do here. I started this Substack with a really clear goal, or maybe a pair of goals, and it’s turned into something very different. It’s grown and expanded, and I’ve reinhabited my written voice in ways that likely saved me this year. Given the space, I can’t help but write my way in and through it. What I am building here, this repository of words, is something I love. There are still things I want to explore, but there will always be words.

As I finish up this post, it is raining outside. We had almost no rain in the last month, which is beyond unusual. Right now, the rain is soft and yet diffuse. I can see it coming down between me and the curtain of trees. I am sitting in a dark room, in a house with the heat turned almost off, in a jacket and covered in a weighted blanket, which I love, a fresh cup of coffee propped on the arm of the chair next to me, and the rushing sound of the wet traffic on the street below. Not much changes, day-to-day or week to week or year to year. Except when it does.⁴

"Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining." — Anne Lamott

I had finished this post and was taking an editing break sifting papers and books on a shelf and ran across these panels my grandmother cross-stitched. I haven’t seen them in years, but they literally fell into my hands. Strange how things like that happen.

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Weekly Bits and Pieces

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 6 (2025)

Related posts:

• A Year in Review (2024)

• Milk Jug Luminaries: Looking Back at One Year on Substack

• The Lighthouse Keeper and Other Updates

• The Splintering as One Passes

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Made It?

Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

It is a new month, and I hope you have a project in mind or something you want to try. What’s one goal you have for the month?

I’ve seen some beautiful work shared by those keeping illustrated journals. It is always wonderful to see the pages you share. I hope you follow each other. Laura shared her recent pages here. Bri shares beautifully illustrated quotes and reading notes.

As a general reminder: I draw with a small group on Sunday mornings (9AM PT) for an hour via Zoom. If you are interested in being part of a casual group, please let me know. I would love to hang out and draw.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are ©️ A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

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1. There are so many perforations, rivers of glue thickening the walls. The heart is sculptural, an amalgamation and pastiche. Heart walls can thin. They can thicken. They can shrink or enlarge or stiffen. The ways in which metaphors have become intertwined and enmeshed with science and health in the last year have surprised me. These moments of overlap come up suddenly, without warning, and in ways generally invisible to the reader, but everything is connected.

2. My lineup feels like one of hibernation. I might disappear as I drift deeper into the quiet. I haven’t settled on a 100 Day Project yet, and I am tempted to revisit last year’s project.

3. Really?

4. I don’t think I’ve wallowed. You might disagree. I thought I might wallow, but I think I’ve paddled. I thought I might spin off more about this process of grief and mourning and loss and sadness and regret, but I didn’t. I felt the pressure to sublimate, the same pressure that kept me quiet for many years. I felt the truth that there wasn’t room for me. I swallowed my words, cloaked them in different ways, and followed along with thread and patches. It doesn’t mean I don’t still have things to write. There is a wolf at the door that I have to face. But overall, I think and hope I navigated, not wallowed.