THE LATEST READ:
Squashing Dreams, Going Cold, and What I Learned From RBG
When was the last time you exhaled?
I started holding my breath in late February.
Breathing, this thing I’d done daily and mostly unconsciously since I came screaming into the world, was suddenly dangerous. Not only was it dangerous to myself, but I learned it could be perilous for others. So, as I passed people in the newly widened aisles of the grocery store, I found myself, quite literally, holding my breath.
My metaphoric breath followed suit, and soon I was holding everything close: my emotions, my money, even my dreams. By spring I was in a state of almost spasmodic contraction. This wasn’t the 2020 I had imagined when I sat down in January to write my intentions for this trip around the sun.
Sometime in May, after months of being painfully clamped down and drawn in, the exhale came in a convulsive torrent. My burning lungs just couldn’t keep holding, and anything resembling flow or balance had been missing from my life for far too long. In this moment of exhaling, Andrew and I decided to move ahead with the solar install we had been planning pre-Covid, I began re-envisioning what our retail shops would look like in this strange new world, and my literary agent and I decided to shop a book deal for my fifth manuscript.
But while I began once again acting like a living, breathing human, I wasn’t feeling it. During the summer months as I got a (spectacular!) new book deal, created a private label line for Herbiary, and watched The Illustrated Crystallary release to tremendous Instagram fanfare, I disguised the tepid beating of my heart with big smiles and excessive use of touchdown emojis.
And then RBG died. read more…
Recent Posts
This is How We Heal
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a picture of her son’s hand. His index finger was swollen, angry, and bruised; painful even through the small screen of my iPhone. Her note said he’d been up most of the night, pained tears running down his little face. This...
read moreFinding Strength in Our Root System
Spring brings wind... ...and wind brings change. I’ve been thinking about the wind. I’ve even re-watched a little bit of Chocolat (remember the voice-over in the beginning? About the North Wind? Yum.). There's a romance to knowing the names of the wind. Each name...
read moreThe Dance of Duality and Why I (Sort of) Believe in Unicorns
Do you remember the first time you saw a picture of a unicorn? Maybe it was one of those pre-Raphaelite remakes with a lovely woman cradling a unicorn’s head in her lap (no layered symbolism there!) or a cartoon in which the unicorn shoots rainbow hearts out of it’s...
read moreWhat to Do When the Madness Overwhelms the Magic
Australia is burning, Puerto Rico is quaking, the polar icecaps are melting, and koala bears are reportedly headed toward extinction. What can we do when the madness of the modern world overwhelms its magic? We can seek kinship. Rewind to a cafe in Ireland. There’s a...
read moreTwo Simple Steps to a Sane Holiday Season
"Rule number one: Don’t be an asshole," I announced. Two hundred people tittered and my teaching assistant hopped up to write Don’t Be An Asshole in big letters on the white board. In the past few years, the conference I taught at had become a force for social justice...
read moreHow to Become a Different Kind of Soul
It’s the time of letting go, the season of releasing. No longer held tight to branches, leaves swirl and twist with new found freedom. At night, the owls whisper of winter; the earth sighs and exhales after a season of productivity... As the year winds down, we face...
read moreEXPLORE CATEGORIES