Pilgrimage: Inyo
With the supermoon and lunar eclipse last night and the Northern Hemisphere’s Autumnal Equinox this coming Sunday (at 7:43 AM Central Time, if you’re marking it exactly), we have the reminder and opportunity again to consider our place—as individuals, as…
Progression
Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015 (interior, looking east), Artist-designed building with installation of colored glass windows, black and white marble panels, and redwood totem, 60 ft. x 73 ft. x 26 ft. 4 in. ©Ellsworth Kelly Foundation.
Wild Optimism
In my mind, what re-wilding our backyard would mean was: Poor shorn St. Augustine would be replaced with robust ground cover; trees would be surrounded with friendly understory shrubs; ground-nesting birds (say, doves) and small mammals (say, bunnies) would find…
Witnessing, in Berlin
SHALEKHET (FALLEN LEAVES)Menashe Kadishman (1932 – 2015) 1997 – 2001 Sheet steel Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Dieter and Si Rosenkranz
Still Alive for Me
I fell in love with Georgia O’Keefe’s work at first sight, when I was about 16 years old. In the light and movement of her canvases, she captured not just her own experiences, but expressed mine, impressions and evidence and…
The Asking—and Responding
By themselves, Jane Hirshfield’s poems since her last collection—”Ledger” (2020)—would have comprised only a slim edition, but “The Asking: New and Selected Poems” (2023) is a hefty volume tracing the decades-long arc of a career; a curation benefiting from perspective; the revelations…
Finding It Within Ourselves
In the psychiatrist Bessel van der Volk’s popular and influential 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, he traces—in often excruciating detail—a range of his patients’ traumas and the ways in…
Springing Outward and Back
Although I love adventuring, exploring new places, and connecting with beloveds—especially when a road trip with R. is involved (and getting out of Texas along its northeast border from its center in Austin is itself about 375 miles, with even…
Our Skin as Our Life’s Map (Part One)
One of the best practices—according to our current understanding, anyway—for loved ones and caregivers of those with Alzheimer’s is to enter the world of the person with the disease. Instead of correcting or contradicting with facts that oppose what the…
Embracing Closeness
The past nearly three weeks have been marked by close interiority, the contemplations and conversations that arise from being confined—first, for me, with my second bout of COVID; then, with my mother’s hospitalization (not from COVID); throughout, other beloveds’ health…
Peace, Love, and Tacos
23 years ago, in the middle of a 15,000-mile road trip around the U.S. to find a good home for us, with my three young sons (ages 7, 5, and 3 at the time) and densely packed into my youngest…
Feeding the Soul
One of the women in my doctoral cohort noted recently that as her ability to articulate and write the academic portion of her thesis gained momentum, her access to inspiration and productivity within her artistic practice decreased, and vice versa.…
A Winter Solstice Nidra
As I’ve written and then voiced this nidra, my whole heart has been full of wishes to offer you a space and time in which to generate your own restoration and illumination, as you need and want and are able…
Living Ayurveda
Maybe it’s that I feel a particular and pressing need for nourishment of body, mind, and spirit during the darkest days of the year (and the coldest, even if here in Central Texas, “coldest” doesn’t always mean objectively “cold”), but…
Undimmable Illumination
If you had asked me when I was younger (starting when I was in early elementary school and continuing until not long ago) what superpower I would want, I would have named invisibility, the optic and sonic fading away of…
May You and Yours Be Well
Although there is some overlap between the research and artifact of my doctoral project on female aging and my welcoming you to the weekend with a few thoughts each Friday, I find at certain junctures that the split in focus…
Listening is an Act of Love
There’s so much deafening noise involved in conflict, violence, and destruction, anger boiling and exploding first in barrages of words and then of materiality, and in the midst of all this current fatal swirl in the world, I came across…
The Where and When of Walking
As I write this, it’s pouring rain outside, a kind of vertical sheeting with a force and volume that only became known to me when I first visited the American South and that is now—after decades living here, on the…
Weaving at Black Mountain College
When R. and I stopped recently in Asheville, North Carolina, on our way back to Austin along our 5,431-mile road trip in support of one of our sons settling into his new home, I took a few hours to visit…
May Every Child Know This Peace
Yesterday, R. and I walked along the perimeter trails of Cheekwood Estate and Gardens in Nashville, Tennessee, among sculptures in the hardwood forest and within the late afternoon light and gentle air of a southern autumn day, a salve to…
All the Places to Love
If a feeling in my bones and heart can be considered official it is this: I’ve spent too much time away from home this year. The last time at home was just a week in between trips away. I was eager and…
Moving Toward the Light
R. and I have driven from Austin to Laramie again, supporting one of our sons through a series of massive life changes, spending our days in parallel work—R. and I tucked into a small Airbnb house; our son at a…
Held by a Wide Blue Sky Against the Beautiful Face of This Earth
It had been just two days shy of eight weeks since I left Austin for Alaska—and then for Laramie, Wyoming, after a one-day turnaround that included needing to return to the airport to retrieve my luggage that wasn’t on the…
Before, Now
We were a little group of three yesterday afternoon—my granddaughter, one of my sons (not my granddaughter’s father), and me—in the beautifully curated children’s section of Second Story Books in downtown Laramie, Wyoming. My granddaughter found—on her own, and to…
Dulce Domum
Although R. joined me here at the residency this past Sunday morning, he continued his remote work until his vacation officially began on Thursday, after which he and I met up with a friend and former classmate from Skagway, J.,…
Lingering
A month is a long time to be someplace without your family—your spouse, your children and their spouses, your granddaughter, now out of school for the summer, your siblings and their families—and your other beloveds in the normal rhythms of…
Developmental Stages
Thanks to a friend in Skagway who has lent me her car, I was able on Thursday to drive from Alderworks to the Dyea Tidal Flats with another resident artist; the two of us chose different exploratory paths once we…
Pilgrimage: Tracing Skagway
On Wednesday morning, June 7, I began the third installment of my Pilgrimage walking art series, Pilgrimage: Tracing Skagway. Starting at the north end of Skagway, Alaska—my childhood home and a town built on a river delta with streets arranged…
Panning for Gold
I’ve visited the site in Skagway where my family home was, of course: the house has been significantly remodeled to nearly unrecognizable; the surrounding wild woods built upon; the side street widened to include more than a third of the…
The Time It Takes
I have had an electrical current of anticipation running through my whole body for the past few months, since I applied for the Alderworks Alaska residency and even more so when I was accepted. This past Wednesday, as the seaplane rounded the…
From One Beat to the Next
I’m writing this on Wednesday afternoon, having just returned from a walk on which I was almost hit by a car. I’m less jangled by the near miss than I would have been had I been the driver, the incident…
Holding the Center in the Widening Gyre
I slept soundly during last night’s violent thunderstorm, not knowing until this morning—with his telling me—of R.’s leaving our bed at 1:20 a.m. to determine if the downpour had turned to hail. In my background awareness of the wild weather,…
Air, Water, Earth, Fire, and Spirit
I know I’ve accessed an idea that works for me when it produces waves of gratitude and a sense of connectedness and expansiveness as I further contemplate and apply it. One of these ideas is the notion of five essential…
“Thanks an awful lot.”
There have already been previews and reviews, a deep-dive segment on Studio 1A, and a bump in book sales, but there’s a lot more than nostalgic value for me in the movie “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.” Based…
Footsteps Along the Path
My life has been imbalanced lately in favor of submitting on time a significant project toward my doctoral program, and I am feeling the varied effects of the hours of isolation, the hours sitting at my desk, the hours—unrelieved even…
“Come healing of the spirit; come healing of the limb.”
I missed welcoming you to the weekend last Friday—and it was a long weekend! Easter weekend! There are times when there is nothing more to give, and it was one of those, but I thought of you—with longing, with the…
Back to the River Bank with My Water Rat
Although I read very few books more than once, R. and I are enjoying right now our annual spring reading of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908, but just as relevant now—if not more so—for…
Marching Forth
Our granddaughter is staying with R. and me this weekend as her parents attend a wedding away, and the three of us have been excited about our bonus time together since we first planned it back in the early fall.…
Scent Home
As a gift last year, my youngest daughter-in-law gave me a mason jar filled with dried, aromatic plants native to the area in southern California where she grew up—removing the lid releases the scent of her childhood home, evoking memory…
Spice/Trade
You know that I don’t usually use this space or time to discuss a retail product (other than books, or my own offerings), but my recent introduction this week to the six-year-old spice company, Diaspora Co., coincided with today’s failure…
Treading Water
When we were at the height of nourishing the adolescent growth of our three boys, I had a sense that I was spending all my time procuring, cooking/baking, and serving food. As with their infant growth, I could predict that…
Women Holding Things
I first found the multi-media and prolific artist Maira Kalman through her collaborations with authors that reveal other interests of mine: The Illustrated Elements of Style (with William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White) (2008) and Food Rules (2011) by Michael…
Lighting Our Way
When R. and I were in our 20s, we regularly worked 90-hour weeks to secure a present and a future for ourselves and the children we hoped to have one day. We had a breathless balancing act of hours in…
Pipping
It’s such a humbling, sobering wonder to consider how our bodies, minds, and spirits accumulate our experiences: the air we’ve breathed, the food and drink we’ve consumed, when we’ve moved or been still, lifted loads or stretched, how we’ve treated…
The Heart of the Matter
I recognize that my general befuddlement over football’s appeal and ignorance at its rules—borne of my abhorrence with its frequent damage to bodies and brains and its personal violence—makes me an outlier of an American and an especially weird Texan.…
Witness
Outrage in response to horror—to brutal, fatal abuses of power—is a justifiable, even a useful response if it results in a full measure of attempted personal justice and systemic change. But I don’t think having a nation of folks running…
A Winter Treat
Tonight, I started the process of customizing a yoga nidra for someone, and from this nascent shaping until the final deliveries (in person and then recorded) of the nearly hour-long form of meditation, it’s among my happiest things to engage…
Madness, Rack, and Honey
Have you noticed that when you follow the career of an artist or thinker who’s interested in constant self-development, the advancement of the particularities of their art or craft or science more than the commercial viability of their increasingly refined…
Finding Our Words and Voices
The earliest library I have a clear memory of was the school library in Wrangell, Alaska, where I first learned to read while my classmates were out screaming and running around on the (cold and rainy) playground or in the…
A New Year About to Bloom
You know I love tracing the arc of things, and that the beginnings—of a calendar year, of the next year of life, of an academic year—always thrill and energize me, the nascence and potential, direction and speed, choices of attitude…
