The View from Here
When you’re a passenger on a motorcycle, the main view you have is the back of the helmet of the driver, the nape of his neck, the edge of his haircut; in my case today, the haircut I last gave…
Structures, Sanctuaries, and Sandcastles
My mind was scattered and sticky this morning during meditation, unwilling to let go of what it landed on, which was images, one after another, of my Greek godlike dad—who became Papa to all of us once he was a…
Witness Walking
Although I’m glad that I opened a bit of space in my writing calendar last month, I’m happy to be returning to this Friday rhythm of welcoming you to the weekend! Thank you for giving me the time, and for…
Stages
Two women this week—one friend already beloved and the other someone I’m just getting to know—spoke to me in entirely different and unrelated settings of major disruptions in their lives and families of origin when they were nine years old…
Elemental
R. and I went to our neighborhood pool today, for the first time since a dip in late September or early October of 2019, when we were oblivious to what the next spring and summer would mean for quarantine and…
“Come healing of the limb.”
You know how tasks—really, any behavior—can be transformed by the intention we bring to them, where the most mundane movements can become an elevated experience through the thoughts and feelings and desires we attach to and reap from our efforts.…
Celebrating the Summer Solstice Together
This year, the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere falls on Sunday, June 20 (the same as Father’s Day), at 10:32 p.m. Central Daylight Time, marking the moment when the North Pole is at its furthest tilt toward the sun…
“A little frog work maybe.”
Wow, I missed my granddaughter, M., during our year plus of quarantine separation. (I also longed for in-person time with her parents, my oldest son and daughter-in-law, but they hadn’t spent as many hours the previous year snuggling next to…
Wishes Come True
We had planned to spend the last daylight hours of every day of this working vacation exploring the miles of trails here in Bentonville, Arkansas; we looked at the weather forecast before leaving Austin, though, and decided not to even…
80 Human Years
Right now, I’m basking in an abundance of love and bursting with gratitude: My birthday buddy middle son flew home a few days ago for a two-week stay, and today we’re 25 and 55 years old. There’s ample sunshine and…
The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment, Comfort, and Connection
You might be thinking, “Hygge?!” Yes, back on November 25, 2020, the New York Times published an article, “Danish Hygge is So Last Year. Say Hello to Swedish Mys.” And Louisa Thomsen Brits’ slim treasure of her own evocative photography,…
Dukkah
You’re on the right track for a pretty wonderful homemade condiment if the first step of your recipe involves gathering fresh rose petals. Fallen blossoms littering the ground is one of my favorite conditions in the natural world: I get…
Separation Anxiety
Although my husband and I were considered fully immunized more than a month ago—two weeks after our second Moderna dose—this morning really seemed the end of quarantine for us, as our youngest son (now fully immunized himself) got behind the…
At an Intersection
Yesterday, on my way driving to pick up a few more ingredients for my oldest son’s 27th (!!!) birthday dinner, I waited at an intersection in the lane next to a mom in a minivan, with two little guys—one maybe…
Salvation Rolls
You know how I feel about toast, and great bread in general occupies a similar place in my heart and psyche—artisan or homemade or just the corner bakery, you know, if you’re in France or Italy! (Perhaps another time I’ll…
DEAR Day
The children’s book author and former school librarian Beverly Cleary passed away last month, on March 25, at the age of 104. Her birthday, April 12, is also National Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) Day, established years ago both to…
Easter
If you celebrate a Christian Easter, I am joining you this Holy Week. It’s a profoundly personal holiday for me, and this is part of what it means: the possibility for renewal and redemption through grace and abiding love. May…
Growth Mindset
I remember feeling an enormous degree of embarrassment and shame over the marks on one particular report card when I was a kid. I was in kindergarten, and even though most of the checked boxes were in the column of…
Tender Resilience
When you’re the oldest of six children in your family of origin; when you are by nature an obedient and reliable person; and when your parents set you up as a gold standard, a parental assistant, and a rules enforcer…
World Sleep Day
Today is World Sleep Day. You may not have had it penciled on your calendar. You/I may only be aware of it because of a marketing campaign by some mattress or pajama or supplement company from whom you receive emails,…
The Secret to the Universe!
My dad was a middle and high school science and math teacher. He liked to say, “Life is a multi-variable equation,” by way of explaining life’s complexity and also its solvability, because there were few problems by which he felt…
Vernal Equinox Practice Together
In many ways, from last spring to this has felt like one continual winter for us, and perhaps for many of you. Although I went for long walks in the heat of the Texan summer (which I love, as you…
How is the body?
“How is the body?” my (gifted!) meditation teacher asked of us on our Zoom call this morning, as a prompt for our circle council. How is the body? Her use of an article and not of a possessive opened up…
Convergences
On January 20, at the end of a long, emotional (Inauguration!) day, I got a text from a friend, that he had heard there were leftover and expiring COVID-19 vaccine shots being administered on a first-come, first-served basis to those…
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
It seems absurd, really, when you’ve grown up in Alaska and lived in Chicago—among other northern and wind-chilled places—to feel that ten days of a hard freeze seem interminable and that they’re shutting down normal life, even “normal” pandemic quarantine…
Mon Coeur
Valentine’s Day, 32 years ago: My romantic life was mostly a disaster (see earlier “Toast” post for some oblique details—things had continued along those trend lines), but I love love, and Valentine’s Day always feels a bit like Thanksgiving to…
The Razor’s Edge
Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir—I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death—is a wonder of attention, of interest, of expression. Through the intensity of her calm and compassionate focus on the 17 events and her curiosity about their emergences and…
Temperature Scales
My husband and I were in Brisbane, Australia, for a few months near the end of 2017. Although he worked in a downtown office full-time Monday through Friday, we used the weekends to explore as much of the east coast…
“Somehow we do it”
It wasn’t the only time I was the target of bullying by that particular group of boys, and it wasn’t the worst incident over the years, but that summer day (was I 10 years old? 11?), as I rode my…
You Were Just Here
Making the bed in the morning soon after waking is a deeply pleasurable and renewing ritual for me, a direct and physical engagement with the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness for my beloveds and me. I love making the…
Dangling for Peace
It’s been nine days, and on every single one of them, I’ve needed to spend five minutes dangling to lower my heart rate, elevate my perspective, and offer the connective tissues of my entire body—head to toe—a sustained opening and…
Toast
My middle son and I spent Wednesday afternoon glued to NPR, circling around each other in the kitchen, as horrified as we had been on 9/11—although then, I sheltered him from all the details of destruction, distracted him with activities…
A New Year!
Blessings for 2021! I love all the new beginnings: the calendar New Year, my birthday (conveniently located—for the pacing it allows—in May), the start of an academic year (August/September, here in the U.S.), including new books and unmarked notepaper, maybe…
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
After hearing an interview on NPR with Wintering’s author, Katherine May, I listened to the audio version during my 3-mile treadmill walks. I was so enraptured by May’s emotionally and tonally wide-ranging memoir that I planned to share her little…
Perfect. Moment.
We have a thing we do in our family, a thing we name: Perfect. Moment. The way it works is that we’re going along, and then all of a sudden, there’s a crystallization of time, of sweetness, and we call…
Focus on the Flame
The hours of daylight are shrinking in the Northern Hemisphere, and the sunshine that does reach us comes in at a cooler, weakened slant; the temperatures are sinking; the holidays across faith traditions are marking the season with lights: If…
Marsupial Mammals
In addition to being (clearly) a placental mammal, I may have a latent marsupial gene—if not in actual fact, then certainly in sensibility. I carried all three of my children well after their overdue gestations; we strained the weight limit…
Tenable Program Available in January
2020 has been a challenging year by so many measures, one of them the balance between our desires for health and our cravings for pleasure in response to the uncertainties, anxieties, and new burdens this year has presented. An article in the…
Wrinkles in Time
When you’ve used your dining table as a desk and your kitchen counter to process the incoming mail, then you have company over for dinner (in the years Before Coronavirus) or the least-excuse “holiday” to celebrate, and you dump all…
Getting and Spending
I’m kind of amazed at and mystified by people who head out into stores (well, especially this year, in terms of in-person efforts) or even online to shop, shop, shop their way through an entire day of the deals of…
Creative Inspiration
In my perpetual desire to expand my understanding, taste, and skills, I’ve read hundreds of home design books; of all of them, Erica Tanov’s Design By Nature: Creating Layered, Lived-In Spaces is my current favorite. It’s a treasure trove of…
Giving Thanks
If this were a normal year, similar to the past seven years or so—obviously, it’s not, but let’s imagine for a moment—all my family members who live in Austin would gather at my husband’s and my house for the Thanksgiving…
The Real Scoop
My husband and I raised three sons, all in their 20s now, and we’ve been quarantining since mid-March with our middle and youngest ones. Living again with three men—all six feet tall or above, all athletic, all non-picky, hearty eaters—has…
Wise Trees
Reverence and wonder are two of my favorite states of being. Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, in their gorgeous Wise Trees, elicit both conditions in their textual and photographic portraits of 50 trees around the world which/who are remarkable, not…
What a Sledgehammer Taught Me
Immediately after I graduated from college, I joined my general contractor dad and one of my sisters on a construction site in Atlanta. My dad and his team of us two young women renovated a space at the edge of…
Making the Most of It
A Bradford Pear is considered a junk tree, short-lived and brittle, prone to breaking in unpredictable ways. We had one, planted by the original owners of our house nearly 20 years ago when it was built, and what a glory…
“If you don’t stretch, you won’t know where the edge is.”
Back in May, I was listening (as usual) to NPR by way of KUT here in Austin and heard an article about Sarah Little Turnbull, who immediately became a new hero of mine for her life-changing, life-saving, wide-ranging accomplishments (the…
“When someone shows you who they are . . .
In the words of Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Today, Friday, October 30, is the last day for early voting in Texas; Tuesday, November 3, is election day. It’s not complicated:…
Green Soup
Samin Nosrat, goddess—of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, which I consumed in whole-book form right after it was published—just gave me a glorious upgrade to my standby green soup (from Anna Thomas’ recipe in Love Soup, which I have loved and…
Breath
“I’d gotten a fair share of gasps from friends when I told them about the experiment,” James Nestor recounts, in the first chapter of his most recent book, Breath. “‘Don’t do it!’ a few yoga devotees warned,” me among them…
