Voyages and Visions

I wrote a short memoire from my May 2025 tour of the Orkney Islands and my visit to Stenness standing stones. It's also the story of some devastating news I received at the time. Rituals often help me put distance between myself and events I'm not ready to deal with, and at the same time, they can add purpose to life when it doesn't make sense. And sometimes I get a little nod from the universe in return.  Ritual at the Stones

Read through for an inspiration from my June 2025 trip to Scotland:

 I added a new poem called "Nascent Spring" to my  Poetry  page. I was writing a poem at the end of 2024 about the downtime in the last weeks of a year and the uncertainty of what will happen in the future. I realized it worked well with the idea of springtime rebirth in another poem that I had started recently, on an evening walk through Phinney Ridge. I combined them through water imagery, which is a reoccurring theme in my poetry and heart.

 I've created a page for poetry I wrote from around 2010 to 2020. I had a couple saved digitally but a few were tucked away in old journals. It was fun to mine them out and see them again! Poetry

Today has me thinking fondly of the short escapes I've made to various places in the world. Perhaps one day I'll make a more permanent venture, but for now I've posted some travel memoirs about my magical trips to  Chile , the  UK , and  Ireland . I try to take an international trip every year, and something tells me I'll be planning my next one soon.

Welcome to Voyages and Visions, my blog for fiction, poetry, and travel writing. Earlier this year I was walking near Green Lake in Seattle and I was struck by an image that inspired me to write a story. It's been through a few iterations, but I'm ready to put it out there. It's a folk horror tale, so I'm posting it on Halloween. The Cardinal by Megan McNelis Link also appears in my profile or at  https://ulientroon.blogspot.com/p/the-cardinal.html