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…
Two-Step Christmas
I love sitting in our dark living room with the Christmas tree as the only source of light, with the glow from the mix of small white and colored twinkle strands threaded through its fragrant Frasier Fir needles, both gently…
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
My father-in-law’s service this past Monday—just four days ago in this weirdly long week—was a gorgeous tribute to his life, both of all that was said and sung and of all the many who were gathered to speak and listen…
In One Calendar Year
One thing that fascinates me about families is what we construct for connections, the ways in which biology and choice act as through lines for creation and continuity. I look at the lucky wonder of R.’s and my three sons…
“Why shouldn’t they have it, if they want it?!”
Three beloved women spoke to me today of needing to follow last week’s Thanksgiving (over) indulgences and holiday sugar storm fronts with this week’s taking themselves in hand—intermittent fasting came up, bone broth, scales. What delighted me most was what…
Exercises of the Heart
I’ve been deeply aware lately of the flexing required of my mother/sister/daughter heart. As my life continues to accumulate annual holidays, it arranges them in comparison and contrast to each other, one November and December layering onto the others, the…
Life’s Arc on One Bench
On what should have been a very short subway ride yesterday morning from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the Dumbo area of Brooklyn with my friend and cohort member K., we stood in front of a seated elderly…
Where the Charming Things Are
Three years before Maurice Sendak published his own authored-and-illustrated now-classic children’s picture book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” he provided the line drawings for Ruth Krauss’ “Open House for Butterflies,” originally copyrighted in 1960. I found the reissued slim hardcover…
Native Habitats
If you asked me if I love to travel, I would probably respond with an automatic yes—but I don’t know how accurate that is anymore. When I was in college and scraped together the fare to fly to spend Christmas…
Just a Glimpse
On my more than hour-long walk yesterday along a windy ridge line of miles of sidewalk between vast suburban neighborhoods, I saw just one other pedestrian. I passed elementary school children exploring their live oak-shaded playground and middle schoolers with…
Grit and Polish
My maternal grandmother was a full-time working mother throughout her three children’s whole lives, from the time she graduated from high school until she retired from her pink-collar job (in a role that we would call now an administrative assistant…
Spanning the Divides
Two people’s stories have inspired me this week because of their persisting against the odds; their expanding the possibilities for all of us; their receiving recognition for their efforts and the quality of their productivity. Their work and their attitudes…
Girl Power Pep Talk from an Older Sister
A treasured friend reached out to me today with a reminder of her and her daughters’ visit to our home here in Austin six months ago. Both R. and I had a hard time getting our heads around the six…
This is Not Just About Marriage
I chose to read this book because of what I know and love about other work by Ann Patchett, and for what I thought I knew about its contents, given its title. But—this is not a memoir of a marriage,…
“I get by, with a little help from my friends.”
Maybe I jinxed myself by posting on July 2, “first day of vacation and goals achieved”—or maybe/probably it was just the incubation period of the BA.5 variant of COVID-19 that one of the many folks on the planes and in…
A Little Earthing, Maybe
I meant to let you know last week that I wasn’t planning to send a welcome to the weekend on Fridays as I usually do (or, you know, as I sometimes wait to do until Saturday) during July, because R.…
Civics
I’ve wrestled with writing this since I started yesterday, which was after the Supreme Court’s (insert any number of superlative and negative adjectives here _________) decision. Among other suggestions for access to inspiration and the construction of content, the writing…
Multi-Generational Mermaids
According to 23andMe, one of my nieces and I share 23.11% of our DNA along 45 segments; given the variety of ways that families form and ours has, I know that my granddaughter and I are about 0% biologically related.…
The Sky Above
After just a few years, it is possible to wear shoes out to the point of their not being fixable, even to a skilled repair person. Materials of the footwear collide with materials of the earth—its built and natural surfaces—enough…
Resilience
Talking about resilience can be tricky: It’s so much better when centered in the resilient others that one has observed and admires and then applied to oneself than it is as prescription for those who are suffering, which can devolve…
Lined Up
I spent most of yesterday at my desk in the corner of our home’s primary bedroom, reading interviews with people in Uvalde and opinion pieces about the overarching situation and recitations of statistics, memorizing the faces of the children we…
A Grandmother’s Story
If the protagonist of a story indicates its intended audience, then Glenn Halak’s children’s book A Grandmother’s Story (Green Tiger Press, 1992) is odd—and my finding it among the free books our local library was giving away in a shelf…
Breaking the Age Code
True confessions: I haven’t yet completed reading this book—Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long & Well You Live, by Becca Levy, PhD—but (more confessions), as with all books I read, I have already skimmed…
“Every single drop of it.”
In a slim volume of just 62 poems with cover art from her painter mother, Ada Limón manages to articulate the wonders of the world and voices—especially in three specific poems—the texture and flavor of issues at the core of…
“Time for a Little Something”
What constitutes the perfect food? There is, of course, no one answer nor even a short list, especially given the wide range of contexts—budget and availability, geography and culture, lifestyle and stage of life, hunger level and health needs—in which…
10,000 Hours
R. and I have lived on this cul de sac, in the house we’re in now, since November of 2015, the longest we’ve lived in one home since we married in July of 1990. One of the South Asian families…
No Words for This
A woman I have known and admired for years told me today that she has a rare and aggressive cancer, that she will soon receive surgery to remove it, that her body will be forever changed by this experience, both…
Art as Teacher
My mind today is almost entirely on tomorrow’s solidarity walk. (Please join us at noon, if you’d like—the details are in the post/email on March 5.) I first learned about the transformative power of art—both in the making and sharing…
Walking and Breathing
A reminder of the invitation to you—and everyone you want also to invite—to gather next Saturday, March 19, at noon, at the boat launch on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake, where we will engage in arts activism as…
Pilgrimage 2: Solidarity of Care
At noon on Saturday, March 19, 2022, I am going to walk the second installation of my Pilgrimage art series, Pilgrimage 2: Solidarity of Care. I am grateful to my Transart Institute cohort; our conversation yesterday relative to art and the…
“Could Have”
As a response to grief, I understand the impulse for keening. But I’m much more likely to withdraw in silence, the pain caught in my throat, until conscious breathing loosens tears. I seek poets’ words to unmute and articulate my…
The Widening Gyre
I walked for two hours in the middle of the day today, and the temperature dropped about twenty degrees during the walk, as a dry north wind pushed the warmer, humid air southward and gathering clouds obscured the sun. I…
Black History Month MasterClass
February is Black History Month here in the U.S., and R. and I have been further learning from a 10-hour, 47-minute course divided into 54 lessons, “Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love: Lessons from Influential Black Voices,” which MasterClass…
The Extended Mind—and Heart
Last weekend, I participated in the monthly intensive for my doctoral program. Zeerak Ahmed led a two-day workshop, “Critical Immaterial Art,” and she created the space and the assignments for each of us involved to produce art pieces outside our routine media.…
All Seven Letters
R. says that one of his happiest memories of time with his mother was when the two of them settled into a long Scrabble game on Sunday evenings throughout his last couple of years of high school. Both of them…
Learning through the Cracks
The thunder that woke me this morning sounded more like earth being dynamited—a deep rumble, followed by a throaty explosion, then the smack of catapulted rock hitting hard ground—than it did like sky being electrified. Even as I write this,…
A Nidra for You
As we move into these last few weeks of the holiday season and 2021 itself, my whole heart is full of a desire to offer you support and nurturing; tonight, I’m providing a free link to the last segment of…
Lines
A few weeks ago, I was out and about on errands, one of which required me to sit and wait near a long checkout line, in full and close eye contact with everyone who moved forward in the line, so…
Granola
There are many areas in my life in which I am reliable, consistent, compliant with the program; I floss every night, for example, without exception. When it comes to eating plans, though, I’m a bit more…flexible. As with, say, granola…
