Hello, friend. My name’s Aberdeen, and I’m glad you’re here. It’s always a little crazy to me that people would stumble onto this page from some algorithmic alleyway and choose to stay awhile, but I also get it. I’ve found corners of the internet that have become home. I’ve heard something in certain strangers’ voices that feels familiar and I’ve followed it until they’re strangers no longer. I hope that might happen for us too.

About Me

I’m a poet, a writer, a collector of quotes and a lover of many things, like baseball and U2. (Now I sound like your dad.) I love the ocean. And I really love New York City, which has been my home for the past six years. I studied theology in my undergrad, and you’ll find a lot of theological musings here. I love metaphor and ice cream, and while I’m more comfortable stuck in my head, I’m learning to embrace being embodied (ice cream helps).

This year, I published my first poetry collection, Velocity: Zero, and seeing it in people’s hands has been pretty surreal. You can find it on Amazon. If you read it, I’d love to know which poems spoke most to you.

About This Substack

This substack is mostly a place to share my poetry and accompanying reflections, with the occasional prose piece here and there. I blogged on Wordpress for years until that become so last decade, and I made the jump to here.

I write a lot about faith. Sometimes I feel sheepish about that, but I just keep coming back to it like a homing pigeon.

In some ways, it’s easy for me to believe. I’m a naturally spiritual person. But in other ways, faith is the hardest thing in my life. There have been times—it is still a time—when all I wanted was for someone else to stand up in church and holler, “Is this Christian thing super difficult for anyone else??” I want my writing to be the yes to that question, a question that I think haunts a lot of us. In the spirit of improv, I want my writing to be the yes, and—yes, it’s hard, and it’s beautiful. Yes, it’s wrecking me, and it’s healing me.

I also write about places and how they shape us, and people and how community matters, and nature and how my morning walks are saving me. And I share my book and movie reviews—you can follow me on goodreads and letterboxd too.

Oh, and the name: There was a stretch of months where the phrase “awaken” or “wake up” appeared everywhere I looked. It’s not just that I’m an early riser (no judgment if you’re not, I just got lucky genes) but that I can’t bear the thought of getting to the end of my life and realizing, as Henry David Thoreau said, that I haven’t lived. That thought, coupled with this quote from Ephesians 5:14, drive so much of how I live and what I write about:

I don’t want to doze this life away. I don’t want to miss the wonder of what I’m living in. I don’t want to be blind to Christ’s light shining on me and on this aching, luminous world. I want to keep asking: What is this life I’m living? Both life as a grand metaphysical thing, and this life, my life—in this particular time and place and body. And what do the answers to all that compel me, compel us, to do? How then shall we live?

If you’re down, this is a place to ask those questions together.

About You

So I come to you, internet friend (maybe real-life friend too!). This is the part you’ll have to fill in. I really am so grateful you’re here, and my messages are always open if you want to chat. I want to hear the questions that pound through you like the tides. I want to read the quotes that made you gasp out loud in public. And of course I want to trash talk the Boston Red Sox with you too.

Here’s to staying awake together.

~ Aberdeen