Round sharing needs to be reviewed and reset for each new cycle; new rounds won't automatically be shared just because the equivalent round was shared in a past cycle. While you're there, check to see if you have added any new decision codes or material types which need to be shared as well.

And of course, if you have a custom Slate.org portal, review all the views and query filters to make sure that is ready for the new season too.

Here's to colleges and schools working together for students

!

So this month’s essay is my attempt to answer that question. The first thing that springs to mind is an easy answer – a small light in a dark hush, be it a candle or a star, invites contemplation and an appreciation of the otherworldly. When I try to stare into the void directly, the Other I sense recedes and will not be apprehended. But when I sidle up quietly and look slant in the distance, I can feel It beside me, robust and round, waiting generously. In those moments, far from being diminished, I am made whole, and I inhabit Wonder.

But those moments are few and far between, and don’t address what it means to invite Wonder to be your daily companion. At the same time, I’ve had an odd experience recently which I think might hold a clue. Many of you know that I am unapologetically an Autumn. From January through late summer I wait for the ‘ber’ months – that magical third of the year when I feel most alive. Others may spring clean, but I spend August deep cleaning and decluttering. I want to arrive in those beautiful fall months ready to be fully present to my favorite season. August is my personal Advent as I prepare my heart and my home for the harvest.

But this year, August has hit differently. While I am joyous about the arrival of my time, I’m also perversely sad. Four months is such a short time and I’m already missing it before it has even arrived. Psychologists call this sentiment anticipatory nostalgia. But I think of it as the Welsh concept of hiraeth: a longing for a way of life that is gone forever or perhaps never fully existed. For Welsh people it is inextricably linked to Wales, to home. But my hiraeth is lived forward. I am already wistful about an idealized sort of fall that may never fully materialize. And I recognize that this fall, the one about to begin, will be unlike any fall yet to come. I recently saw a post about a ‘last summer’ which said that every family has a last summer, the last one before things change in profound ways, and you never know when it is coming. Perhaps my sadness comes from knowing that this fall, like every fall before it, will be the last fall in which our lives look exactly like this.

Digging even deeper, I think of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem ‘Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.’ Poetry has always felt woven into my Welsh heritage, often expressing things I cannot find words for otherwise. This poem addresses a child, Margaret, who weeps over the falling leaves. Hopkins points out what she doesn’t yet see: she is grieving not the falling leaves but the changing of her very self. And while this is true of all of us, in my own case it feels more poignant this year because I sense that change is coming.

I don’t know how to hold all these things in my heart. But perhaps I don’t need to. Wonder begins with attention. On Saturday we enjoyed a beautifully crisp morning at our first festival of the fall season. When we got home, I spent a few pleasant hours removing overgrown summer annuals from my planters and replacing them with fresh plants in glorious autumn hues.

And on Sunday I tried a new recipe for apple cider donuts before my husband and I tackled some yard work together.

This is how I make space for Wonder, one small moment of care at a time. In return, Wonder gives me this gift: not an escape from the knowledge that everything is changing, but a way to participate in and appreciate each moment while it is here.

Compounding factor: There is no batch management in the reports module, so you must open each report individually to refolder or archive - meaning you never get to it.

Solution: Create shared views for reports, filter by updated date, and hide everything that hasn’t been updated before a date (I chose 9/1/2025, but you could pick another date or use a dynamic date like today - 1 year). Make that the default view for all users. Then copy the view and adjust the filter to include those older reports and pin this view so that if someone *really* needs an old one they can find it.

Result? A more streamlined report list #SlateFeatureFriday

BONUS: If this resonates with you, please take a minute to upvote the feedback request for batch management of reports!

1️⃣ Create a custom dataset to store all the details of your groups.

2️⃣ Create dataset-scoped fields to hold the characteristics.

3️⃣ Create a person-scoped field of type Related Dataset Row to link the two together.

4️⃣ Join from person records to your custom dataset to access the details.

Especially handy if an external vendor builds the groupings for you. When you ingest that data, all you need to store on the person record is the key field for the group

.

Ever glance at a report from Slate and wonder exactly when it ran? Not just the date, but the day of the week and where you are in the cycle?

You can build that right into a Slate query library. Here’s the five-step version:

1️⃣ Create a query library export on the system base.

2️⃣ Add a concatenated export.

3️⃣ Format the current date to include the day of the week alongside the date itself.

4️⃣ Format that same date as MMdd, then run it through a translation code to show the cycle week instead.

5️⃣ Drop the finished, fully formatted export anywhere you’d like, such as a report footer, and the report now datestamps itself in plain English.

One catch: this builds on cycle weeks, which we set up last season. New to the series? Check out Reporting by Cycle Week to get caught up.

I collect words.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve tucked away lines from poems, passages from books, and snippets of conversation that somehow captured a feeling I wasn’t yet able to express myself. The best of them return years later, revealing meanings I couldn’t have understood when I first encountered them.

One of my favorites comes from Mary Oliver’s poem Music.

Late summer, when everything is full of fire and rounding to fruition...

Every year, those words ring true for me again.

Here in Pennsylvania, the first harvests are beginning to come in. Sweet corn and tomatoes yield place to apples and gourds. Along the roadsides, Queen Anne's lace floats above the green tangle of late summer. The locusts sing through warm afternoons. The days are just perceptibly shorter. Everywhere you look, the landscape is holding both abundance and change.

It is a season of fruition. And yet, for me, it is also a season of beginning.

August 1 is my New Year’s Day.

It is the day the Common Application opens for another admissions cycle. The day I ceremonially purchase my first candy corn of the season. The day I retire my summer coffee mug in favor of one chosen especially for fall. Summer may still linger on the calendar, but my heart has already crossed into another season.

This year marks my fifty-fourth academic new year.

Fifty-four fresh starts. Fifty-four opportunities to wonder what this year might become.

A year ago, I wrote about four resolutions that I hoped would guide me through a changing landscape in higher education.

• Dream Big.

• Stay Grounded.

• Think Synergistically.

• Shine the Light.

Looking back now, I realize they were never really resolutions. They became my values. More than that, they became the questions I asked before making important decisions. Whenever a new opportunity appeared, they helped me decide whether it aligned with the leader I wanted to become. With the legacy I wanted to craft. Whenever the path forward felt uncertain, they reminded me what mattered most. Over time, they quietly transformed from aspirations into a way of moving through the world.

I stopped asking, “What should I do?” and began asking “Which choice best reflects the way I choose to live my life?”

Those values shaped conversations I never expected to have. They opened doors I never imagined walking through. Earlier this year, they led me into a new role as Executive Director of Platforms, Analytics, and Innovation. I haven’t yet spoken about that in this space because for me it isn’t about the title. It is about the work at hand. People sometimes ask how I feel about this new chapter. The honest answer is that I can scarcely contain my enthusiasm.

There seems to be an unspoken assumption that after nearly four decades in a profession, our greatest contributions are behind us. That experience naturally gives way to routine.

I have discovered exactly the opposite.

I feel more energized than I did twenty years ago.

More curious. More hopeful. More eager to wrestle with difficult questions and imagine what higher education might become.

Not because the challenges are smaller. If anything, they are larger than ever.

But because purpose has a way of renewing energy.

In just a few weeks, our campus will come alive again. Cars packed full of comforters, desk lamps, plastic totes, and those unmistakable blue IKEA bags will wind their way through campus. Families will make one last trip from the parking lot. Residence halls will fill with nervous laughter and introductions. Students who cannot yet imagine what lies ahead will begin unpacking not only their belongings, but the lives they are about to build.

Then we will gather for convocation.

I have always loved academic ceremonies. The rituals of pausing to acknowledge transitions seem to grow in significance with each passing year. Our new students will enter campus through the doors of Penn Hall, the very doors they will exit into the world just four years hence.

When I was younger, I believed academic ceremonies were for the students. Now I know they are for all of us. They remind us that education has never been a solitary endeavor. We agree, together, to spend a year asking difficult questions, encouraging one another, and believing that each of us can become more than we are today.

Perhaps that is true of every meaningful season in life: we arrive at fruition only to discover another beginning waiting on the other side. That is certainly how this year has felt to me. The resolutions I planted a year ago have borne fruit in ways I never could have predicted. They have become part of who I am as a leader.

And now, standing at the threshold of my fifty-fourth academic year, I find myself doing exactly what those first-year students will soon be doing: beginning again.

Perhaps that is the real gift of an academic life.

Every August reminds us that it is never too late to learn something new. Never too late to ask a deeper question. Never too late to become a better colleague.

Never too late to imagine a different future.

After fifty-four academic new years, I still feel the same quiet excitement I felt as a child wandering the school supply aisle, wondering which notebook would become the keeper of this year’s ideas.

The pencils may be metaphorical now, the notebooks mostly digital.

But the anticipation is exactly the same.

Late summer, when everything is full of fire and rounding to fruition.

Fruition is never the end of the story. It is simply another way of saying:

Begin.

This essay marks more than another July 1. It marks one full year of Joy Is a Habit.

Over the past twelve months, I honored that promise. Every month, I sat down to write, not because I considered myself a writer, but because I believed that reflection deserved a place in my life alongside action. That belief didn’t stay confined to the monthly essay. It became a weekly practice too. Each week, my AI thought partner and I sit down for the same kind of reckoning in miniature. We look back over the previous week and ahead to the next. We review my priorities, my calendar, and my decisions. We ask where my actions aligned with my values, where they drifted, and how I might spend my time differently in the days ahead. The essay and the weekly ritual are really the same habit at two different speeds: one a slow, monthly tending, the other a quicker, weekly weeding.

Those conversations have convinced me that a meaningful life isn’t built in dramatic moments.

It is cultivated.

Like tending a garden, it requires returning again and again to the small things. Watering what deserves to grow. Pulling weeds before they choke out what matters most. Choosing, in quiet and often unnoticed ways, the person we are becoming.

Then, last week, something happened that I’m still mulling over.

At Slate Summit, my colleague Ben Parsons and I gave a presentation about creating durable change through values centered leadership. Ben spoke about grief as a necessary byproduct of change, walking the room through three models for understanding how people resolve that grief and what those models mean for leaders. I spoke about a specific moment in our institutional life that caused real, fracturing grief for my team, how I led them through it, and how the resolution eventually became a Slate build for vendor, contract, and decision management. I walked the room through the design choices behind that build and how the pieces fit together.

We chose this material, out of everything we could have presented, because it was the one closest to both our hearts. I wasn’t nervous going into that session. What I felt instead was something closer to electricity. I knew what we were about to share had the potential to be genuinely transformative for the people in that room, and that knowledge brought its own kind of charge.

There was no performance to maintain on stage, because there was nothing I was pretending. I wasn’t managing an impression. I was telling the true story of something that had genuinely hurt, and showing the room what we built because of it. People who were in that session afterward said something different than the usual conference small talk. They didn’t ask about the architecture of the build. They talked about the grief itself, about a similar fracture in their own institution, about wanting to lead their own teams through it with the same care.

That response was specific to the session. But it wasn’t the only thing I carried that week. For the rest of the conference, I had a giant stuffed shark named Finn in tow, whom I’d jokingly appointed “Joy Ambassador.” Finn turned out to be a strange kind of permission slip. People who might never have approached me cold stopped to talk because of a shark. And once they were talking, the conversations went somewhere real. Across those separate moments, strangers and acquaintances alike said things like, “You have a reputation for kindness.” Others thanked me for the way I teach. Several spoke about feeling welcomed, encouraged, or simply seen.

For most of my life, I have described myself as analytical: a systems thinker who enjoys solving difficult problems. I still know myself to be deeply introverted. After returning home from the conference, I slept until mid-afternoon the next day, something almost unheard of for someone who normally wakes before dawn. The vulnerability cost something real. But it bought something real, too.

I keep thinking about a question that has nothing to do with conferences or shark mascots:

Where in your own life does authenticity come easily to you?

Not where are you the most skilled, or the most prepared, or the most polished. Where does the truth simply fall out of you, unguarded, because the stakes are too personal to perform?

I suspect that wherever that place is for you, it is trying to tell you something about the work you are actually here to do, even if it doesn’t look like your job title. For me it turned out to be standing in front of a room of peers, electrified rather than afraid, telling the truth about a hard season and what we built on the other side of it.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened all at once. It was the fruit of hundreds of small choices made over months and years: choosing to teach, choosing to encourage, choosing to listen, choosing to make room for joy, choosing, imperfectly but intentionally, to live according to values that matter to me. But the fruit wasn’t the conference, and it wasn’t the compliments either.

The fruit was this: a room full of people showed me what it looks like when action and values converge, when there’s nothing left to manage because there’s nothing left to hide.

Where in your own life is that convergence already happening, even quietly, even without an audience? And what might it mean that those are the moments the world responds to most?

This is not that essay.

I traveled to Philadelphia for the CampusESP Summit last week so I wanted an audiobook for the drive. It’s been a grueling last few months at work – anyone in enrollment can understand – so I decided to give myself a break from my ever growing to read list and select something instead that would be balm for my tired soul. I chose an old friend as my companion for the journey: Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner’s last novel. I’ve read it many times but this was my first time listening to it. For those unfamiliar with the book, it traces the history of the friendship of two academic couples from when they met as young faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s throughout the rest of their lives. It is a love song to the liberal arts and to the academy, and it asks important questions like what makes a good life? And in seasons of deep change, what endures?

As the miles flew by and I listened to Stegner’s elegant prose made even more resonant by hearing it aloud, I immersed myself again in the lives of Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang. I travelled with them to Battell Pond, the Lang’s compound in Vermont that is a touchstone for both couples. As I explored the place through Larry’s recollections, I was transported to my own childhood trips to Maine to visit my grandparents at the cabin where they spent a month each summer.

The rented cabin on Damariscotta Lake was simple: one floor, one bath, two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen divided by a double-sided fireplace. There were bookshelves filled with old classics like Swiss Family Robinson. The cabin nestled in a grove of balsam at the edge of the lake, but the lakeside itself was cleared. There was an old stone outdoor hearth that we never used, a dock for my grandfather’s Boston Whaler, and a boathouse built from wood worn silver by age. Over the door to the boathouse was a whale carving which must have begun its life as a brilliant turquoise but which had weathered to a gentle sea-glass blue well before I encountered it for the first time.

I remember the smells and sounds of the place: the scent of linseed oil which permeated the cabin and which is instantly comforting to me to this day. The balsam tinged air, refreshing and heartening. The soft scup-scup-scup of the lake against the dock when the wind picked up. And the cry of the loons as they sang us to sleep, haunting and otherworldly.

The pace of the days was gentle. We spent long hours out on the lake using only the trolling motor, indolence punctuated by moments of intense activity when a largemouth bass would nibble on one of our lines. We read – books from the cabin’s bookshelf, and books from the local lending library which allowed summer people a seasonal card. We ate simple food but enjoyed old New England treats like penuche. There were occasional day trips like the once a year pilgrimage to Pemaquid Point Light, my favorite place on Earth, but for the most part we were contented to be home. And it was enough.

Looking back, I see that those days in Maine imprinted a map upon me. I learned that beauty need not be extravagant to be profound. That a day could be measured not by how much happened within it, but by how fully it was inhabited. That weathered things often possess a grace unavailable to things still trying to prove themselves. The cabin, the whale carving, the loons, the books, the lake itself - all were teaching lessons I would spend decades learning how to name.

The themes remain resonant today: simplicity, intentionality, and a belief that things which Time has distilled to their true essence hold a deeper beauty than anything flashy or new.

As I grew, my high-school self – deprived of Maine since my grandfather’s passing – crafted a vision of a good life. I remember saying emphatically that the only things I would need to be happy were good friends, good food, good music, and good books.

In the intervening years, I’ve joked about that, saying that 3 out of four isn’t bad. Those who know me in real life know that I am not a particularly social person, and the kind of deep and enduring friendship like Larry and Sally shared with Sid and Charity has mostly eluded me.

But now I wonder: what if my young self was wiser than I credited her?

Look at what I said earlier: I chose an old friend to accompany me on the journey. The concept was right; the lexicon was incomplete. I was thinking of friendship strictly in human terms. Yet some of the most enduring companions in my life have been books, ideas, places, and questions. A beloved novel returned to at precisely the right moment. A poem whose meaning unfolds slowly across decades. A memory waiting patiently for the next link in the chain that will illuminate why it mattered all along.

The friendship I imagined at sixteen may not have looked exactly as I expected. But perhaps I was describing something real nonetheless.

Kierkegaard said that life is a reality that can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward. So often in my life I have had the experience of something from memory arising and finally understanding why it mattered. Of recognizing it for the first time.

And so this essay is instead about recognition. Or more accurately, re-cognition: to know again. Stegner begins his novel with an excerpt from Robert Frost’s poem I Could Give All to Time:

I could give all to Time except—except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with?

And so the central question I now ask is this: When facing or creating change, how do we know which parts of our maps need deeper understanding, and which need revision?

I don’t have an answer to that question. But I take comfort in the words of my old friend Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Perhaps that is why this essay remains unfinished.

I began wanting to understand why it is so difficult to think differently. Instead I found myself reflecting on books, places, friendships, and the quiet recognition that some truths arrive in our lives long before we possess the language to understand them. I have come to suspect that not every map requires revision. Some require only a deeper reading.

And too: there are surely other maps I carry whose significance I have not yet recognized. Meanings I have inherited but not fully understood. Questions I am still living.

If Rilke is right, perhaps that is as it should be.

Credits:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

TS Eliot: Little Gidding, last of the Four Quartets

Map image: 1934 map of the Damariscotta–Newcastle region, courtesy of the Maine State Library's DigitalMaine collection.

Søren Kierkegaard: The observation that "life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" comes from his journals and papers and is quoted in numerous translations.

Robert Frost: I Could Give All to Time, Yale Review, 1941

Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet (translated by M. D. Herter Norton); available online via Project Gutenberg Canada

I write these words on the eve of my 37th May 1 in higher education admissions.

May 1 has always been a threshold.

It is the moment when one cycle closes and another begins. We turn from seniors to juniors, from pursuit to reflection, from momentum to measurement. It is, in many ways, a referendum on a year’s worth of work. And then, almost immediately, it asks us to begin again.

I think back to my first May 1 in the profession. I was a newly minted college graduate fresh out of an admissions internship, full of energy and conviction as I set out to tell the story of a place I loved. It was a time of transition in our field. We were moving away from an era of gatekeeping and into one of active recruitment. The language of funnels and yield was beginning to take hold. We were just starting to ask what it might mean to personalize outreach, to move beyond broad messaging toward something more tailored.

In those early years my ‘CRM’ was a shoebox filled with contact cards. Each card represented a student I had met, usually face-to-face, often more than once. I organized them with colored sticky dots folded over the top: a red dot for a student who felt especially engaged, a green dot for a particular academic interest, and so on. It was simple. It was limited.

And it was deeply human.

We had relationship at a scale a person could hold. We knew fewer students, but the ones we knew, we actually knew. The work was grounded in conversation, in presence, in a genuine attempt to understand whether a place might be right for a particular person. That first May 1^st brought not just the end of a cycle. It brought a particular kind of joy and satisfaction in seeing that the work I had engaged in with such care came to fruition in ways that bettered the lives of students I actually knew. It sounds lofty, and it was. But it was also clear-eyed, steady, and true.

Today, our systems are exponentially more powerful.

We manage tens of thousands of records. We segment, filter, and customize in ways my early-career self could not have imagined. Our tools surface patterns in the data, deeper and more predictive than any human eye could see.

But patterns are not people. Our systems bring us to the edge of connection. It is up to us to cross the threshold and make connection into relationship.

That is the tension I feel most acutely on this May 1.

Let me be clear: I am not nostalgic for the past. I feel it every day: the work we do now creates possibilities for future generations. The complexity of the systems we’ve built and the ways they help us see what was once invisible create a kind of progress I would not want to relinquish. Traversing this uncharted territory is a grand adventure that brings its own kind of exhilaration. Our systems can help us find students who might otherwise have been overlooked. They can surface possibility. They can point us toward connection.

But they cannot create belonging.

And belonging matters, because the context in which students are making decisions today has shifted in profound ways. We live in a world that promises instant, personalized responses to nearly every need while at the same time producing a deepening sense of isolation for many. Students are navigating unprecedented levels of anxiety, disconnection, and uncertainty about where they fit.

In that environment, the work of admissions is not simply to inform or to persuade. It is to help students feel seen. To help them imagine themselves in a place, not as a data point, but as a person. To find the kind of belonging that will allow them to engage with the possibilities of who they are becoming, and the joy that comes from crafting a life of purpose.

So I find myself asking, on the eve of this 37th May 1:

What is the work asking of us now?

Our systems bring us to the edge of connection. Do we remember that behind every record is a person making one of the first truly consequential decisions of their life? Do we resist the quiet drift toward efficiency at the expense of presence? Do we understand that we have the choice to deploy these systems and this connection in ways that are either empowering or exploitative? Do we own both the power of our systems and the responsibility of our humanity?

The choice for connection is ours to make. If we own that choice and do not abdicate it, the joy that is an expression of true relationship will infuse our work.

May 1 will come, as it always does. The numbers will settle. The next class will begin to take shape. And we will step forward again.

The choice, as always, is ours.

April is a time of visit days.

The campus fills with accepted students and their families, walking paths they have never walked before, trying to imagine a life that has not yet begun. Above them, light moves through the leaves, flickering and shifting.

There is a particular kind of energy to it, hopeful, uncertain, a little frayed at the edges.

And then there are the mothers.

Especially the ones for whom this is the first child, or the only one, about to leave.

They are trying so hard to hold everything together.

They are feeling joy and pride and frustration at the way their children are still behaving like children, and something like awe at the ways they are already becoming adults. They are aware, viscerally aware, that a vast separation is at hand.

And I can see them, sometimes, building something like a wall around themselves. Not out of coldness, but out of love. Out of the need to keep it together for their children, for their families, for the moment.

Sister, I see you.

I see the way you bite your lip. I see the way you hold the smile. I see the flicker of doubt that crosses your face, and the pride that seems to rise from every corner of your being despite it. I see your awareness that this most fundamental relationship, the one that changed you from yourself into a mother, is shifting beneath your feet.

And I want to say to you, I know you.

I know you, because I was you.

I remember feeling that my heart, my skin, my very body could not possibly contain all that I was feeling. The excitement and the dread and the worry and the pride, all of it co-mingling, indistinguishable from one another.

I remember wanting, somehow, to hold it still. To keep it from spilling over.

What I did not know then, but know now, is that nothing was being lost.

That even when things felt uncertain, even when the landing was not perfectly smooth, what mattered most was not control, but care. That if my child landed in a place where they were seen as a person, where they were held, challenged, known, there would be space enough for them to grow.

What I know now is that the only way through that season was not to contain it, but to allow it.

To let the love and the fear and the pride and the grief move through me, rather than trying to seal myself against them.

To be, in a way that felt terrifying at the time, permeable.

Because it is only in that permeability of heart and soul that the fullness of the experience can be felt, not just the ache of it, but the joy.

And perhaps this is not only for them.

Perhaps the message I find myself offering, quietly and inwardly, to these mothers each day is also the one I am still learning to receive.

Because I, too, am standing in a season of change.

Not one that can be neatly named or marked on a calendar, but one I can feel nonetheless, subtle and insistent, reshaping the contours of my days, asking something new of me.

And again, the instinct is to brace. To hold. To gather everything in and keep it from spilling over.

But what I know now, what I am always learning anew, is that the life I most want is not one I can hold tightly.

It is one I must remain open to.

It is only by that same permeability of heart and soul that I can meet what is coming, not just with endurance, but with joy.

✨

Two ways to do this in Slate:

1️⃣ Quick method
Ask your favorite AI tool for the DATEDIFF between two event dates. Use the result in days. Then filter each column using “today minus X days” to get equivalent timing across cycles.

2️⃣ Pattern method
Build translation codes that map calendar dates to your event timeline. For example, GAD-10, GAD-09, etc. Then export registration dates and apply the translation code to compare daily registration patterns across years.

Neither method is fully evergreen and both take a bit of setup. But for high-impact events, this can give you a much clearer picture of how things are really tracking.

Remember! this sky

heartrendingly clear. Give thanks:

blue blessings and breath