And wondering why it is so difficult for me to accept that I have faith – that I am honestly an optimist who pretends to be a pessimist. It’s almost as if I hold dire predictions in my hand, fingering them like talismans against the worse happening.  

The blackbirds are singing in the dark. I keep expecting that should mean something, but it doesn’t. The blackbirds just sing.

She can count the meals she leaves outside her roommate’s bedroom door.

Then the counting begins again: 9 days without symptoms. Then, another 14 days of quarantine because they share an apartment. 

Temporal degrees of separation.

 What do we do with this time now, counting backwards before we can start again?

It makes me aware how vulnerable my center is. Just above my belly button, a hollow burning. Some kind of hunger.  

I eat frozen grapes.

And that is seriously not helping. 

Life doesn’t need to be exhilarating. I want to crawl in from under, away from all the chatter – and listen for the background noise. Just floating, attentive to the rise and fall of the water in a tiny lake. The sunlight glowing through my eyelids when I tilt my head up in the breeze.

My great grandfather died 99 years ago from the Spanish flu. That was the beginning of what there is of family history, as my grandmother told it. He died when she was 9. When she was 10 her mother sent her to work for – and live with – strangers. By 12 she’d been sent…

Someone on Facebook asked today how people define kindness. I do believe that kindness is this: It is touching base, and offering nothing but the reassurance that we are not alone in the world.

Touching base. And expecting nothing in return. 

Again someone asks me why I haven’t written a memoir. If I have ever thought of writing a memoir. Again. Sometimes I feel like my life story is a bullet point list. Some points are facts. Some points are legends. Or lies. The spaces between are huge leaps of faithlessness. The first fact is that…

After two weeks away from home, I take the mornings slowly. Coffee. Wool socks. The chimes on the meditation timer that prompt me to move from one asana to the next. I am trying to turn softer.  – But all this quiet – juxtaposed against a background noise of fear. I think I’ve convinced myself…

I’ve been thinking about what it is to have faith in things. In gods, people, ideas… in science. It’s as though a capacity for faith is a requirement for human civilization. A faithless polymath won’t get themselves to to the next county, much less the moon. * I’ve been thinking about the myth of the…

To deny someone’s experience of pain is to deny their humanity. But more than that – to deny something the possibility of experiencing pain it is to deny the possibility of sentience. 

Maybe our concept of an anthropomorphic fallacy is all backwards.

I sometimes wonder if it is because I focus on details. Miss the forest for the trees, the face for the line of an upper lip.

The shape of a life for the single trauma. 

It was never about the running. It’s the rhythm of running. The point where the body recognizes the pattern and takes over to drive itself forward, the mind un-clenches, and life is simply momentum for a while.

People I love were robbed yesterday.
I don’t know how to help make them feel safe again. 

My first thought is, “Come home”. 

This is the innocence of children, who will eat dog shit.
We ignore that part.

This is how we filter our desires through nostalgia. Or whichever spell book we choose – whichever guru, god.

And we never learn enough for a reckoning.

Sometime the other is the object of a different kind of desire.

But I did watch them rise from the spongy ground. I came out of the trailer to watch them – the blades of grass cutting my bare feet, and the clammy evening pinching the skin on my arms. The world was liminal. As was I.

Leaving childhood: leaving the unexamined wholeness of the world.

Maybe that’s all that is needed some days – the sliver of ginger added to the soup bones that will simmer for hours, and hours.    

My husband and I had our first date on this beach. And intended to get married here, but the roof on the chapel caved in two weeks before our ceremony. We laughed, and on our wedding day, I walked down an aisle that I had never seen before.

Maybe that was a good thing.