Start Where You Are — an illustrated journal by Meera Lee Patel

Meera Lee Patel (illustrator, innovator, gentle soul) entered my life through a quiet door, sending me glory in the midst of worry, kindness in the form of a small book, goodness in the form of a nest.

And then, this week, her newest creation—Start Where You Are: A Journal for Self-Exploration. It's a book of quiet urgings. It yields room to reflect. It asks us to breathe, to clear our minds, and to move forward.

It gives us the words of others, and it gives us Meera herself, who, in her introduction, writes:

I spent a lot of my years longing for the past or waiting for the future to arrive, confused about where I was and where I wanted to go.... I welcomed distraction. I ventured down various paths for the sake of going somewhere, even though none of them took me close to where I wanted to go.

And then.

By simply going forward, Meera says, she wrote, and is still writing, the story of her life.

I don't know how your summer is going, but mine is somewhere between cataclysmic and silent. Or maybe both things at once. I don't know where you are in your life, but I stand at the bottom of a mountain looking up, bewildered and saddened and determined to push on.

Meera's book whispers, Push on. Push on. It's as lovely as she is. It's now available from Perigee (Penguin Random House). It's another Meera gift.