I've always kept things. Quarters (Pennsylvania mint, for obvious reasons) and stickers as a kid, then ticket stubs, maps, wrappers—whatever could fit in my keepsakes shoebox.
Now it's matchbooks, photographs, screenshots, books, and small things I bring home from trips. I take a lot of pictures of signs. Sometimes they feel oddly relevant. Sometimes they're just really good signs.
In college, I worked in Special Collections, wearing gloves to handle and scan old photographs documenting the university from its earliest days through generations of change. I loved seeing familiar buildings and places through the eyes of people who had been there long before me. Different lives, different decades, all unfolding in a place we shared. I loved that job.
I spent thirteen years in banking, where I collected something less tangible: ways to figure things out. How to ask better questions, learn something unfamiliar, make sense of complicated information, and bring people and ideas together. I still use those skills, just in different places.
These days, I'm making more room for photography, watercolor, beads, and Bikram yoga. I like returning to the same 26 postures and discovering that the experience is never quite the same twice. I'm also curious to see what I can make with everything I've collected.
Some of it is here. I'm still sorting through the rest.
Behind the name
प्राञ्जलि / Prāñjali
PRONOUNCED PRAAHN-juh-lee · FIRST VOWEL AS IN ‘FATHER’
With hands joined in reverence.
I’ve always understood my name as devotion. The Sanskrit describes the gesture: hands joined, held in respect or prayer.
In older texts, it accompanies an approach to the divine, or a bow to a teacher. For me, that carries a sense of surrender to something greater than myself.
Those hands can also hold an offering: flowers or water. I like that connection. A prayer can be something you say, something you offer, or a wish you keep to yourself.
Kālidāsa, Kumārasambhava 2.30
Traditional invocation to Patañjali
Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa 2.100.1