iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

“as if I’ve ever stood in California and looked toward New York thinking yes, I understand distance now. Place your body at the bottom of a canyon—and you’ll see— at the bottom of a canyon, the scale is such the self…”

open.substack.com

Self, to Scale

on martian crust

010

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

There’s nothing to do. Only a full commitment to being. [If you’re also in need of this mantra, well, there it is]

000

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

I’m not sure when I became the strange woman that walks through the park petting trees but I’m not exactly mad about it. Isn’t it nice? How soft the leaves are as newborns.

100

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Spring seems like a good time to revisit this poem, originally published in a Plants & Poetry House anthology. If you haven’t heard of them and you’re a nature enthusiast, consider this a sign and go check them out!

010

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

my sister sent me this snapshot from inside my 8-year-old niece’s brain and I’m like: yes. the poetry gene lives on.

000

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

ever thought about how, like bark, our skin is simply a surface being lived in?

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

from “be here to love me at the end of the world” by sasha fletcher ☁️☁️

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I thought I’d have more to say about turning 35, but it seems the words are still marinating. And I’ve learned to let things come at their own time—which somehow always ends up being right. It’s how my poetry manuscript finally arrived: alive with a decade’s worth of words on my 35th birthday.

011

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

The absurdity of working for a mental health org that talks “well-being” while actively eroding it for employees.

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Friendly reminder that it’s a privilege to gain another year, and to invite age to show itself on your body.

010

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/12/2025

Friendly reminder that it's a privilege to be able to set an intention.

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 26/12/2025

Sharing this the day after Christmas feels right. Not a “holiday poem,” but a post-holiday poem—for the quieter hours, the softened nerves, the kind of comfort that’s always there, and the reminder that the giving never stops. It just lowers its voice. (Hope the holidays are treating everyone well!)

open.substack.com

Sky Wrapped in Bow

The physics of comfort (or: more gifts)

010

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

If the timing weren’t so uncanny, I’d question why it took me so long to read my favorite poet’s Nobel lecture. “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” — W.S. Permission to not convert everything into certainty. To keep the work alive by staying curious.

nobelprize.org

Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996 was awarded to Wisława Szymborska "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality"

030

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

First time adding a recording of me reading a poem and it feels like a big deal??? Somehow more vulnerable than the poem itself?? Be kind 🙈😅

paigeryan.substack.com

The Day You Dried Oranges

Because one day will be your last, and you'll be happy.

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

This story by @ambersparks.bsky.social is BRILLIANT. Sharp, witty lines that tug hard on a feeling, then abruptly cut it loose before moving on to the next. I’m not even mad about how it plays with my heart, because it’s a thrill—I’m feeling a hundred things at once—and I’m absolutely here for it.

open.substack.com

"Your Life in Parties" by Amber Sparks

"...your retirement party, the one they threw for you at the atrocious Italian restaurant. Surprise!, they all yell, which is so awkward because this isn’t a surprise party...."

1162

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

POV: using poetry to trick yourself into feeling something other than what you’re actually feeling 😅

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

I love how a why can age—how you can look at it years later and see all it's been through.

substack.com

I Write Because

I write because the world cracks me open

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

Would love to connect with others on Substack. Read my latest post here and follow along for more: substack.com/@paigeryan/n...

030

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

One could argue that the best part about writing is stumbling upon the past selves you’ve forgotten.

010

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

In case the news is a little much, here’s a tender poem to read instead.

open.substack.com

How to Steep a Winter

Leaves of last year’s trees

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

People need to stop saying “I didn’t eat all day” as if it’s proof of work ethic. It’s not ambition. It’s proof of a system that taught you to confuse self-neglect with dedication. And call it professionalism. (Wild how eating lunch during the workday still feels like a rebellion.)

000

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

This addition to my dining room. Never underestimate the power of a cool light source.

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

“Never be sad when you can be funny instead—unless you can be funny and sad, which is even better. Slipping on a banana peel? Hilarious. Slipping on a banana peel while already downtrodden? Art.” Finally, a sentiment I can get behind 😅

171

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

Death, dressed in its Sunday best. Painted in watercolor. Served almost sweet. Jenny George’s collection stuns in its balance—heavy / light, above / below, grief / grace.

000

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Words that have been marinated for 30+ years must be read! (Just ordered your book and am very much looking forward to reading it 🙃)

120

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

The curse of being a poet is: every word is guilty until proven innocent 🤔 😅

030

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Writing poems is just: uses word I’ve known forever → panics → googles definition.

030

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Quite possibly my favorite philosophical question to date 😂

030

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

I picked strawberries last weekend, and halfway through the field—I had a moment. Here’s a poem about remembering what joy tastes like 🍓 “…I eat another, then another, again and again, each more ferociously than the last…”

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Rebecca Solnits “No Straight Road Takes You There” is currently keeping me sane. Read for good perspective on solidarity, mutual aid, community, and pleasure/leisure’s ability to be a safety net.

Picture of a page in a book that reads: They formed a group they named Common Ground and chose as their slogan "Solidarity not charity," a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's statement "I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people."

Picture of a page in a book that reads: “To put it more directly, what is mutual in mutual aid is not in the goods and services delivered; it's in the underlying belief in the deep connections between those who give and those who receive.
It is a deep belief in and commitment to inseparability: that my well-being is inseparable from yours and that, in caring for yours, I care for myself and, more than that, for the larger whole that is us, because we are in this together. That is, we are not mutual because of the exchange of aid; we aid each other because we are already mutual. The word mutual is often used in this context to mean sym-metrical, as in a symmetrical exchange, a relationship of reciproc-ity, but mutual aid in the sense that ASS and Common Ground practice it isn't exactly this kind of mutual. It is more like the other meaning of the word what we have in common before and beyond exchange: mutual friends, mutual feelings, a mutual fate.”

Picture of a page in a book that reads: “This means recognizing the indirect, long-term, and incalculable benefits of actions. One source of my thinking is anthropologist David Graeber's writing on debt, in which he notes that the old idea was that traditional societies bartered, awkwardly, until money smoothed the transactions. He makes the case that, instead, goods and services circulated in complex ways that knit people together as a community; the transactions were never finished in the way that a cash transaction is, and neither were the relationships. Money is, in his telling, specifically a way to terminate a connection, while the other models of circulation strengthened and perpetuated the connections.”

Picture of a page in a book that reads: Organizations spring up suddenly—but, to use a fungal met-aphor, just as mushrooms are only the visible, fruiting bodies of the larger fungus that was long there, underground, so emergent disaster mutual aid often arises out of networks that have long ex-isted. In ordinary times, those organizations may exist for other reasons—as church groups or friendship networks; in extraordinary times, it turns out that the pleasure and leisure produced a safety net that can catch us when things fall apart. In those times of crisis, these networks often expand suddenly in ways that matter afterward. Other times, an emergent organization is like spores on the wind that may land in new places, sowing new life.

2328

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

I don’t remember where I got this copy of a talk Thich Nhat Hanh did at a correctional institution but it’s full of nice little meditations on poetry and life.

Q: Would you explain something about your poetry?
A: My poetry is something that happens throughout the day. When I water the vegetables or wash dishes, poetry is born in me. When I sit down at the writing table, all I do is deliver the poems. Poetry comes as an inspiration, and is the fruit of my mindful living. After a poem is born, I may realize that it helped me; the poem is like a "bell of mind-fulness."
Sometimes you need to reread a poem you have written because it takes you back to a wonderful experience — it reminds you of the beauty available inside of you and all around you. So a poem is a flower you offer to the world, and at the same time, it is a bell of mindfulness for you to remember the presence of beauty in your daily life.

020

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

You know a poetry book is good when…

050

Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Awe thank *you* traversing the forest of my words 🫶

010