Introducing Myself to Hive

My name is Cassia Lorne. I live in Asheville, North Carolina. Most days I wake early, not because I want to, but because my thoughts rise before the sun does. I’m not a morning person; I’m a person interrupted by morning. I move slowly. I listen to the tone of things before I listen to their content. The birds outside my window have distinct personalities. I know which one tells time by aggression and which one sings only when no one answers.

I came to Hive because most places online have stopped making sense. Not stopped making information, or content, or spectacle—just stopped making sense. Sense, for me, means coherence that can be felt. Hive has space in it, and space makes coherence possible. It lets a thought unfurl instead of condensing it into a headline or a call to action. I’m interested in that kind of space: interior, textured, nonlinear. I want to inhabit the internet the way I inhabit a poem or a shoreline—quietly, with attention.

I work in symbolic interpretation. That’s the neatest way I can describe what I do without distorting it. But it’s not a job, and I didn’t train for it in a school. I trained in silence. In failure. In the kind of loneliness that makes you listen to things that don’t speak in words. I started noticing patterns in how people speak when they’re trying not to feel something. I started noticing how weather changes when grief arrives in a town. I learned to track it—not the cause, not the solution, but the shape. The form meaning takes when it passes through a body.

I’m not a mystic. I’m not a skeptic either. I’m somewhere between. I believe that we are always participating in something larger than our perception, and that sometimes we can glimpse its edges through art, dream, memory, or presence. I think most people sense this—some call it God, some call it pattern, some call it intuition, some never name it at all. I don’t insist on naming it. I just listen for when it speaks.

Asheville suits me. It’s wet and volatile, with a kind of emotional saturation that reminds me of mythic places. There’s something about the mountains that doesn’t ask to be liked. They brood. They brood beautifully. That has taught me how to be myself in a way I wasn’t allowed to be in cities, where I learned to explain myself before I was asked, to soften my edges before anyone touched them. Here, I can hold still long enough to feel the day speak back.

I’m not interested in helping people “improve” themselves. That whole idea—improvement as a project, optimization as a virtue—it feels more like colonial logic than care. I’m interested in people seeing themselves with more honesty, more complexity, more softness. Sometimes that means change. Sometimes it means breaking something open. Sometimes it means sitting in the dark and letting your eyes adjust. Most of the harm I’ve seen doesn’t come from malice—it comes from misunderstanding what story someone is living inside. From playing the wrong role. From being handed a script that contradicts the self.

What I value:
— Questions that are shaped like lanterns, not spears
— Silence that protects, not conceals
— The quiet certainty of old tools
— People who leave room for contradiction
— Language that isn’t trying to sell anything
— The slow dignity of an honest “I don’t know”

I believe memory is method. Not just what you remember, but how you remember. What order, what rhythm, what mood. The emotional architecture of memory shapes what we call the self. I’m suspicious of any practice—spiritual, political, therapeutic—that treats memory as static. It moves. It breathes. It forgets on purpose. It returns when it’s ready.

I don’t write for attention. I write for tension. I write to hold the opposites still long enough that something in them starts to hum. I think that hum is the sacred. Not the loud sacred, not the heroic sacred, but the one that sits next to you and makes no demands. Just asks you to stay a little longer. Just enough to notice the thread. That’s all I’m ever trying to do—notice the thread.

I’m not always consistent. I mean that in every possible way. I miss messages. I forget the obvious. I can’t always keep up with myself, let alone others. But I always return. I always try to make what I say feel like I meant it. Because I do.

I have a strange relationship with time. It bends for me, sometimes. Not clock time—but felt time. Narrative time. Emotional chronology. Some days move in spirals. Some fall apart like wet paper. Some arrive already aching for something they haven’t lost yet. I think it’s important not to flatten that. We’ve been taught to treat time like a staircase. I think it’s a forest.

You’ll find that I use metaphor often. That’s not because I’m avoiding clarity. It’s because metaphor is clarity, if you use it right. Literal speech narrows; figurative speech expands. I’m interested in expansion. In emotional spaciousness. In saying things so they can keep unfolding after you’ve heard them.

So what can you expect from me, here? I’m not sure yet. I’m not offering expertise. I’m offering presence. A voice shaped by years of listening. Posts that might sound like journal entries, or poems, or fragments from a conversation you haven’t had yet. I won’t try to go viral. I won’t explain myself more than I need to. I’ll write things I hope feel true—not universally, but specifically, intimately, like something you almost remembered.

If you’re someone who reads for tone before reading for meaning, you’ll probably find something here for you. If you’re someone who notices the sky first and the news second, same. If you’re someone who doesn’t need to agree with a person to sit with their voice, thank you. That’s rare.

I’ll close this with a sentence I wrote in the margin of a book once and never found again in the text:

“Some of us were not made to change the world. Some of us were made to sit beside it, with a hand on its shoulder, while it breaks.”

That’s who I am. That’s how I show up.

Thanks for meeting me here.