Looking Forward: Hello, Neighbor.

It was a Friday night. My friend Ben was visiting from out of town, and we’d made plans to go out to eat in my neighborhood. As we walked, I listed dinner options---Thai, Korean, Italian, Japanese---but it wasn’t long before I realized I’d lost my audience. Half a block behind me, a wide-eyed Ben stood transfixed in front of the window of a neighborhood barbershop, one I’d passed many times before but to which I’d never paid much attention. “Let’s go here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous.

“Here,” he said. “Let’s go here. They’re watching the Pacquiao fight. Let’s join them.” Then, in response to my blank stare: “Pacquiao’s a boxer.”

Still several yards down the street, I proceeded to list the thousand-and-one reasons I thought this was a crazy idea. It would be rude, I insisted, to assume that this group wanted guests---judging from the music and the laughter that was coming from the shop, they seemed to be having a wonderful time as it was, without us. We weren’t invited, we’d never met---therefore we’d be intruding. And, I huffed, it was getting late. I was starving.

“We can do whatever you want after the fight, I promise,” Ben said. “Please can we do this? It’ll be fun. These people are your neighbors.” He paused. “Afterward, it’s your call, I swear. Anything you want. We can eat ice cream and watch ‘Father of the Bride’ if that’s what sounds good to you.”

Ten minutes later, I found myself seated on a bench in the front of the barbershop, in the center of a flurry of activity. Men placed bets in Spanish, swiveling in leather barber chairs. Couples salsa-danced to music on an old boombox in the back corner. Beer bottles were opened with cans of hairspray. Ben had joined some sort of raucous conversation with a cluster of Pacquiao fans; meanwhile, an old man pacing the front of the shop graciously attempted to explain to me the complexities of boxing. A girl in the corner about my age offered me a shy smile, a gesture of camaraderie.

“I told you this would be fun,” said Ben.

He was right. It was.

That was almost a year ago. I’ve passed the shop many times since then and have peeked in on occasion, but the barbers’ backs are often turned, or they’re too focused on their work to notice passersby in the street. Last week, however, I ran into the owner on the sidewalk outside a local bodega two blocks from my apartment.

I gave a cautious wave, thinking he might not recognize me; instead, I was met with a giant hug and an ear-to-ear smile. Despite our language barrier, we exchanged pleasantries: we were doing well, enjoying life, working hard as usual. Before saying goodbye, I told him I’d stop by again soon to watch another fight, punching the air awkwardly in a poor attempt to mime boxing. “Yes, yes,” he replied, holding me at arm’s length. Then he did something I’ll never forget.

“Look at you,” he said, beaming, “You’re wonderful.”

All my life, the cities I’ve lived in have felt like temporary homes. Growing up, my family moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu, and I knew that Santa Cruz, where I lived for four years in college, wasn’t a city I’d remain in after graduation. Now, though, for the first time, I’m beginning to get a sense of what it might feel like to be a part of a community. To settle in. To make a place my own.

And I’m realizing I don’t just want to exist as part of my neighborhood---I want to know it. More importantly, I want to know the people I share it with---and not just the ones whose lives look like mine. It makes me so happy to be able to say hello every day to the man across the street who feeds the pigeons every morning, to the bearded bartender next door, to the crew of barbers down the street, and the dreadlocked tattoo artist around the corner.

Two years ago, when I lived deep in a hipster-dominated pocket of Bushwick, someone plastered a sign over a chainlink fence that read, you are not your neighborhood.

Perhaps not. But aren’t neighborhoods largely a reflection of the men and women and children---the barbers, bartenders, artists, hippies, hipsters, and everything in between---who populate them?

We may only know each other well enough to smile and wave and say hello, but this makes us more than strangers.

This makes us neighbors. And together, we are our neighborhood.

Why Do We Live Where We Live?

Growing up, I always felt trapped by my surroundings.  Why had my parents chosen to raise me in the dry, geriatric filled desert of Tucson, Arizona instead of Paris, where I would’ve learned charmingly French traits like bike riding with a baguette or tying a scarf in several hundred different ways?  Why had my dad moved us to the agricultural hub of California, rather than Manhattan, where I would’ve become street-wise and savvy, ready to take on the world with my fast-talking charm and quick wit? As I’ve come to a point in my life where I get to personally choose where I live, I place a high premium on the cities that drew me as a child.  I’ve now lived in Berlin, San Francisco, and New York, with my recent move to London adding to my tour of world cultural hubs.  I spend four times as much on rent than my father does.  I’ve become used to taking over an hour to get from one place to another, walking a block, hopping on two buses and subwaying to meet a friend out.  I have not, since I left my parent’s house, had a backyard to call my own.  I compete constantly:  for jobs, amongst the best and brightest from across the country and world; for seats on public transportation and in restaurants; for space on the sidewalk; for tickets, for roommates, for a drink at a bar.

After we’d been in London for two weeks, my boyfriend Zack seemed agitated.  We were grabbing dinner after spending the day working from home.  “What’s wrong?”  I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.  “It’s just---this is the exact same day we would’ve had in New York.  We woke up, ate the same thing as there, worked in the same way for the same amount of time, are eating dinner at a different version of the same restaurant.”

As he spoke, I realized how much I’d expected my life to feel somehow different in London, as I had when I moved to New York from San Francisco years before.  I tried to put my finger on what, exactly, I expected the change to be:  my lifestyle would be the same (same job, same boyfriend).  The streets I walked would be different but they would lead to the same types of places---the grungy bar I like to spend my Friday nights, the cheery, rickety-tabled brunch spots of my Sunday mornings.  Yet, I needed the change of place to have a palpable, tangible effect on my life.  Otherwise, what was all of the effort and time spent living in the cities of my choosing for?

I asked Zack why he thought New York was, well, New York.  If it simply was the same bars, the same restaurants, the same jobs and (much crappier) apartments, why did people from everywhere want to be there?

“I think,” he said, “it’s because everyone wants to be there. No one accidentally just ends up living in New York. Everyone is there by choice.  Everyone in New York, then, is there for a reason.  There aren’t many other places in the world you can say that about.”

“So the people create the place that creates the people,” I said.

He smiled and took a sip of his beer.  “Something like that.”

Taken that way, I think the childhood me wanted to be the kind of person she saw living in the big cities of the world.  She wanted me to be somewhere by choice, somewhere for a reason.  If I can’t supply any other reason as to why I’m here, the simple fact that I want to be is, for her, enough.

How much do you think place affects your daily lifestyle?  Do you think the New York, big city idea of everyone being there for a reason is true for more rural or suburban areas as well?  Are you choosing to be where you live, or are you there for other reasons?

Having Two

A few years ago, when I was newly pregnant with Charley, my husband and I had our first real married fight. It was at the beach in Chicago. It was July and the water was frigid, but the sun warm. The beach was fairly crowded and in front of us there was a family of four. I don’t remember much about the fight, I knew there were important topics discussed, but I have thought of that family many times since. A funny thing happens when you become pregnant: you become hyper-aware of every mother, father, baby, and family near you. You scrutinize their every movement. Would I be a mother like her? With a baby carrier and no stroller, her hair long and unkempt? Or would I be like the mom over there with the shiny new stroller, and tapping away on her iPhone? You notice which mothers are thin again, which dress well, and become depressed by their small numbers. It must be motherhood, it makes you fat and haggard, you conclude, clutching your belly nervously. That’s what I was doing during our first fight, when I was barely pregnant and still wearing a bikini at the beach. I was silently inspecting the family in front of me. The parents were on their beach chairs; they had dark hair and looked relatively fit. The kids were cute, older, maybe just in elementary school, a boy and a girl, and they played and crawled in the sand quietly. The parents were talking, and occasionally laughing, but I couldn’t hear their words, the wind carried them away. Instead, I noticed their facial expressions and actions. The looked happy, but lurking there underneath the happiness was this tired, bored feeling. They were at the beach, but not really there.

Now, as a parent, I completely understand them.

We spent this past weekend with our five-year-old niece, which was a taste of having two kids. It was exhausting. Her energy was totally different, and the sweet moments between her and Charley were rare. Instead I spent most of the weekend feeding them (on opposite schedules) and mediating conflicts (seriously, I need a law degree for this). It was the constant, ‘she has this turn,’ ‘you have the next turn’ that really wore you out. So I finally understand the couple at the beach with their two kids. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy. Instead, what I didn’t see was all the work it took to get there. But perhaps the journey matters more than the destination?

On learning life from life

He aprendido la vida de la vida, “I have learned life from life.” These are the words of Pablo Neruda from the poem, “Ode to the Book,” in which he casts aside words on the page for the immediacy of experience. I’ve loved this poem for the longest time, and these words have never been truer for me than now. From the time I could read, I consumed book after book, in search of compelling stories, complex characters, and literary worlds that helped me reflect on my own. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I often arrive at the first page of a book in search of answers.

I am a lover of questions, and of questions that lead to more questions, but there’s a persistent corner of my consciousness that wishes books were Magic 8-balls. I haven’t shaken up one of those round, little toys in many years, but I sometimes open a book with a similar approach.

Whether it’s fiction, memoir, or poetry, I’ve been drawn to the title by a half-formed question in the back of my mind, and by the last page, a part of me hopes I’ll have uncovered a roadmap, a step-by-step guide to the challenges and questions swirling beneath the surface of daily life. Other times, I secretly hope that by reading about an experience, I’ll be prepared for it in my own life and never be taken by surprise.

But in this time of transition—of graduating and building a career, of moving to a new city, of preparing for a wedding—the voice of Neruda nudges me again and again to simply learn life from life. To learn by doing and making mistakes. To let go and allow myself to be taken by surprise.

This is, of course, easier said than done, but I suppose it is only with such openness that we invite in the possibility for our fears of the unknown to be unexpectedly swept aside by joy.

Looking Forward: Great Loves

I saw The Rolling Stones live for the first time at age eleven. Certain details, to this day, remain vivid: the crowd rising as the lights dimmed. The heat of a pyrotechnic explosion at the beginning of “Sympathy for the Devil.” The ground beneath my feet, sticky with beer.

One bit in particular stands out above the rest, however.

Returning home later that night, I was greeted on the front porch by sleepy-eyed parents. Buzzing, high on color and flash bulbs and drumbeats and leather jackets, I hopped back and forth in my tennis shoes and blithely declared, “I’m in love!”

My parents smiled. Music was a part of their history. I imagine it meant a lot for them to know it would be a part of mine, as well.

“I’m in love,” I repeated, “with Keith Richards.”

I referenced this moment once as part of a free-writing exercise in a college creative writing course. The prompt? Tell us about your first love.

The class laughed when I read my response, which was, of course, completely understandable.

But what I’d written was also the truth. I’d fallen in love.

To be clear, the object of my affection was not really Keith Richards (though he does still occupy a special place in my heart). I’d fallen in love with music---more specifically, rock and roll. The music of my parents’ generation. To employ half a cliché, it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship---and over a decade later, we’re still very happy together.

 Not all meaningful relationships occur between people. Family members, friends, and romances aside, some of the greatest loves of my life have been places, experiences, interests, activities. After all, what constitutes a great love? Is it heart-stopping? All-consuming? Is it deep, complicated, emotional, electrifying?

I’ve certainly experienced music in this way. Towns, cities, and neighborhoods, too: Tokyo comes to mind; so does the dusty, cacophonous stretch of street that was my home for a month in India. And writing? Don’t even get me started. It’s been the greatest love/hate relationship of my life.

These are things I’ve loved so intensely that they’ve not only become a part of my life, but a part of me. Along with a hodgepodge of other experiences, memories, destinations, and, of course people, they add depth, shape, color, meaning. They’re building blocks. Puzzle pieces.

They're not just a part of my story. In many ways, they are the story.

On Deserving

My sleep patterns change according to the season. At this time of year, as summer fades into fall and the days grow shorter and darker, I sleep deeply and long—but once the year has rolled around again, and light peeps into my bedroom late into the night and again early in the morning, I develop seasonal insomnia. Sleep doesn’t come easily to me in the springtime; even when exhausted, I feel the pull of so many things I’d rather be doing than closing my eyes. This year, as sunny days peaked around Midsummer, I found myself once again in the throes of my circadian sleeplessness. My mind seemed to whirl and spin, filled up with the promise of all that sunshine, leaving me spent and ironically too tired to do any of the things on the to-do list that called me out of bed again and again.

As the sun-filled days passed, I tried to unravel the layers of physical, emotional, and spiritual components to my lifetime of insomnia. I came up with many ideas: I didn’t feel safe; I had too much to do; I had a hard time convincing my irrational mind that I’d get more done if I also got more sleep.

And then, one afternoon as I lay on my couch trying and failing to take a much-needed nap, I thought: I don’t deserve to sleep. I don’t deserve to rest.

And that was an attitude I recognized. “Deserving” has played a large role in my life; I fight a constant battle with the insidious little voice inside me that is always fixated on what is fair and what is deserved. Because my energy is limited and must be parceled out in careful allotments, I find myself locked into a continual war with this voice of guilt over how I spend my time.

I don't deserve to rest, because I haven't done anything worthwhile today. I don't deserve to take it easy, because I have been lazy all morning. I don't deserve to have my husband make me dinner, because I ought to get up and do it, whether I feel well enough or not. Sometimes consciously, always unconsciously, I have a running tally always going in my mind. X amount of rest requires X amount of doing. If I have taken it easy today, I need to work extra hard tomorrow. If I have missed this many hours of church this week, I must make sure to go to all of them next week, even if I feel the same or worse. I must not do anything "fun" if I don't have all the "not fun" stuff finished, even if that means I will never have the time or energy for the "fun" stuff.

Since the winter of my junior year of high school, when I began this new life where my energy is so limited and I must live so carefully, I have been afraid. I've been so afraid of becoming that useless person, the one who just never musters up the willpower to get anything done, who always falls back on their physical failings as an excuse for checking out of life. This fear has clawed at me, ruled me, always dictated with precise care the doings of my day-to-day. It has made me feel enormous guilt when I fail to follow through on something I have assigned myself to do. It has made me hard on myself.

It has made me feel undeserving.

That summer afternoon as I lay sleeplessly on my couch, new thoughts came crowding in my mind.

What if it is okay to rest?

What if it is okay to take it easy when I need to?

What if it is okay to care for myself, regardless of what I have or haven’t done today?

What if it’s okay to cherish my body, even if it means letting go of some of the expectations I have for myself?

What if I deserve these things, not because of something I have accomplished or as a result of how clean my house is, but simply because I am a precious soul? What if we are all precious, not because of what we have done, but simply because of who we are?

What if we are all deserving of love? Of rest? Of joy?

.   .   .   .   .

In the months that have passed since that summer afternoon, I have felt my thinking gently shift. That voice—the one that harps so much on deserving, and tries to tell me that I do not deserve to rest—is still there; I suspect it always will be, somewhere deep inside my heart. And, all too often, I find myself listening to that voice, giving it leave to shape my thoughts and feelings about myself.

But I like to think that I’m making progress. I like to think that, in the last three months, there have been a few more times where I gave myself a little grace, a few more times where I reached out for peace and happiness in my life regardless of what I had or had not accomplished. I like to think that I’m a little closer to being able to claim these things for my own, to let go of what I can’t do and live abundantly with what I can.

Because you know what?

I deserve it.

Artist Envy

Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside someone else’s creative world? Are you a photographer who wishes she could write? Or a painter who wishes she could dance? Sometimes I am a writer who wishes she could paint or sing or sculpt. Of course, I realize I can learn about other media by taking a class or simply experimenting on my own. And often this sort of experimentation facilitates a kind of creative cross-pollination, in which trying out a new medium allows you to see your most familiar medium in a new light.

But sometimes I just get a little restless with the joys and challenges of working with words, the material I’ve been wrestling with since I learned to put pencil to paper. I begin to wonder whether life would be more exciting or whether my stories would be more effective if they were told through music or visual arts or dance.

I often feel this tinge of artist envy when I catch a glimpse of some of the interesting and beautiful spaces in which other artists sometimes work and the worn, tactile objects they use. For example, I love this book, Inside the Painter’s Studio, by Joe Fig, and I can’t wait to dive into Jennifer Causey’s new book, Brooklyn Makers.

Most of the time, I love that writing requires so little from the tactile realm—simply a pen and paper or a keyboard of any sort. Chalk on a sidewalk works too, or a finger tracing out letters in the sand. I love that I can write almost anywhere, as long as I can muster up the presence to hear the sound of my own voice inside my head.

But after a long stretch of arranging and rearranging letters on a page, black on white, line after horizontal line, I can’t help but daydream about the lives of artists whose creative worlds are made up of vibrant colors, infinite shapes, and rich textures. I can’t help but fantasize about artists whose days are brimming with sounds and movements far more diverse than the tapping of fingertips at a keyboard.

Similarly, when I received this collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges as a gift a couple of years ago, I was confused at first, then shocked, then delighted. Borges is renowned for his brilliant, imaginative fiction, and I had no idea that he identified primarily as a poet throughout his life. Although poetry and fiction are, of course, crafted from the same material, I was surprised to learn that this author, who was so beloved for one form of his work, seemed to have left his heart in another.

How about you? If you are an artist or maker or creator of any sort, do you work in one medium, or multiple? Have you ever dreamed of switching lives with another artist for a day, or trading one format for another?

Grunge and the Goddess Girl

By Rhea St. JulienImage from the cover of In Utero

At the tender age of 12, I got my period, fell headlong into rock and roll, and unwittingly had my heart broken by the girl of my dreams. Let's start with the body. In a few short months, my skinny frame had grown a layer of downy brown hair over it, my thighs had thickened so fast I had stretch marks, and menarche arrived with such a torrent of muddy red blood that I was sure I had shit my pants. It was just my luck that I was wearing white jean shorts, at the mall, on the way to 5.9.7 from Claire’s. I tripped over my own feet rushing to the bathroom, and got the nib of the pencil I was carrying stuck in the side of my leg, which I can still see in there, 19 years later. It’s a permanent memento of that day, as if I don't already have a reminder every single month.

When I showed my mom my shitty underwear in horror, she threw a pad at me and said, "That's blood. Use this. Shower every day." That was about it. No big "Welcome to Womanhood" speech, no talk of the dreaded word "menses". My mother's unsentimental approach belied how she felt about all things woman-related (including me): they were a hassle. So, I figured it out like I did everything else, with my girlfriends. We tried to fit tampons up there, not knowing to take out the applicator, and having it all kill so bad we gave up and stuck to pads, even though they bulked out our cut-offs.

The one friend that seemed to do just fine with all things lady-bits was Lauren D'Agostino. Her long blonde hair shone as she ran full tilt down the soccer field, leaving all the boys and a few of us girls feverishly fawning in her wake. No matter how close I came, I could never catch her.

We spent hours, the two of us, in her huge attic bedroom, dancing to The Doors and Ugly Kid Joe, trying on outfits for the school dance and talking deeply about our families. The other girls in our clique could not for the life of them understand what Lauren saw in me. I was a perennial misfit, a “freak”, who got straight A’s but also had a permanent seat in the vice principal’s office. I was too everything: too smart, too wild, too loud, too poor, too fast. When Lauren dipped her Venus hand in my direction, inviting me into her inner circle, the collective population of my small town middle school took an inward breath, “HER?!” The girls we shared our lunch table with, who I can just call “The Melissas”, were positive I had stolen my place in Lauren’s BFF photo album from their shinier, worthier visages.

But there I was, despite all odds, feeding horses on her father’s farm and sipping hot chocolate he brought us in steaming paper cups. What no one understood was that since I wasn’t a friend that Lauren needed to keep up appearances with, she could really be herself with me. She was so buttoned-up in the lunchroom, attempting to keep her Queen Bee status, but with me she let herself go, trying out head banging and dressing up with me and another friend like Huey Duey and Louie for Halloween instead of a “sexy witch” like the Melissas.

I knew that I adored her, but I had no idea that I was actually in love with her, until, without a word of explanation, she dropped me. The Melissas were triumphant, noisily whispering throughout the halls about how Lauren and I were no longer, how one of the Melissas (whose name was actually Mary) had dethroned me, and how pathetic I was after all.

Absolutely certain this was all a misunderstanding, I ignored them and called Lauren’s personal telephone line, repeatedly. I imagined it ringing, pink and perfect on her trundle bed, and willed her to answer. But she never did. I wrote long missives about our friendship and how much I missed her, reminding her of all the fun times we’d had together, but there were no return notes from Lauren in my locker. She never spoke to me again. The following year, she headed off to a private Catholic school, so I blissfully did not have to see her beautiful face any longer, and be reminded of my unrequited love.

The truth is that while Lauren may have been more of herself with me, I was less and less of myself with her. I was so desperate to hold on to her that I contorted myself into her mold, pretending I liked 50’s-style boy-girl sock hop parties and banal trips to the mall, like the fated one where I bloodied my underwear for the first time. So, once Lauren broke my little 12 year old heart like a slinky stretched too far, I was free to explore my darker tendencies.

I found myself in Mystery Train Records, eyeing cassettes and CDs through my growing-out bangs, which I had to keep tossing back with a flip of my head in order to see the cover art. Music, particularly the “alternative rock” that was pouring out of Seattle at that time, fed the painful part of me that was sore over losing Lauren, and humiliated over proving the Melissas right. If had to be a loser like they thought I was, I was going to fucking rock out.

That Fall, Nirvana released In Utero, and I got on the Kurt Cobain train right before it was blown to pieces by his shotgun. With Heart Shaped Box on repeat, I yelped along, “Broken hymen of 'Your Highness', I'm left black/Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back”. I couldn’t consciously conceive of the fact that I was wishing I had broken my dear highness’s hymen myself---I sub-knew it. The fact that I didn’t just miss Lauren or want to be her like the Melissas did, but actually wanted to be in her, and rub my hands up her blondy legs was never stated, not even in my reams of diaries. Instead, I howled along to Hole, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots in my room 3 streets away from Lauren, hoping she would hear me, pick up the phone, and ask me to crawl back into the folds of velvet-girl goodness that I was nearly received into.

Days undocumented

I was a child of the pre-Facebook, pre-Pinterest, pre-Skype, pre-plus-one-and-like era. Our mode of digital anticipation involved waiting for someone's screen name to show up as Available on AIM or for someone to sign into MSN Messenger. Those were the acronyms that felt relevant to us. Beyond the availability of our friends to chat and the esoteric lingo that came with those conversations, we gleaned insight from carefully-crafted Away messages. Nobody was just "Away" back then, and---because we were 16 and, no matter how much self-importance we could muster, we were not quite busy---nobody was just "Busy" either. We populated Away messages with song lyrics and quotes, inside jokes and pointed messages full of the truths and feelings we could not utter face to face. In the past few weeks, I have felt the need for an Away message to hang on the door of my life---preferably one with a witty quote or Green Day lyrics for the full throwback and nostalgia effect. For the first time in four years, I am no longer living out of a suitcase. I own shelves. I have put nails in walls. I have shared coffee with people with the confidence that we will all still be right here tomorrow . . . and in 13 days, and in 4 months. My universe has been flooded with the kind of permanence of which I once dreamed.

Permanence makes me quiet. It is my love of "process" that has fueled my embrace of transitions with relative peace. I am intrigued by the little shifts: the packed box, the new photo on the wall, the coat hanging in the corner, the new bakery from which I buy muffins in the morning. Those become the markers of a new chapter, punctuated by a different routine, marked by different milestones. I document the process of moving, the process of saying goodbye, the process of making a home and then disassembling it as though it were made of Legos. The photographs freeze those transitional moments in time to remind me that life is not just the story of neat heres and exciting theres, but of clumsy in-betweens.

This time, there are no photographs of transition. My silence has been born out of impatience: an impatience to find a place for everything, and for me, and to have those places feel anchoring enough. I have not pointed the camera at the new corners that make a home feel like me, nor have I written about the new batch of muffins. I feel firmly planted here, bound to an address, magazine subscriptions, and a barista who knows my coffee order. I own possessions that make it impossible to pack up and leave into the night. Nobody left lightly with three coffee makers in tow.

Once an embracer of process, I am now embracing the photos not taken, the words not written. I am living in a blank away message, waiting for the lyrics to populate it, and for new processes to appeal photogenically to a pair of eyes perpetually in love with novelty. Inspired by Kim and, inevitably, by the 1990s.

Looking Forward: Snapshots.

One of the best gifts I’ve ever received was a stack of paper about an inch thick, held together with a large metal clip and titled “Me, Hallucinating All Night Long.” It was a book, written by my dad, presented to my brother and me one year for Christmas.

It was the story of the first forty years of his life, he explained, but it was written in the form of a list. More specifically, it was a collection of captions to photographs that had never been taken—an autobiography made up of small moments.

There he was, for example, eating peanut butter and jelly on corn tortillas while living in the basement of an art museum. Listening to the radio while cutting ocean sediment in a research lab and hearing news of JFK’s assassination. Playing Pink Floyd’s Hammond B-3 organ in his living room one chemically-enhanced evening.

None of these “captions” were more than a sentence or two long, but each was so vivid. It was like watching a slideshow, like looking through a collection of yellowed snapshots—which I guess, ultimately, was the point.

I’ve always joked that my dad—both my parents, really—have led Forrest Gump lives. Their pasts—much of which center around their mutual involvement in the music business – are full of spellbinding stories, outlandish characters, and seemingly endless adventure. Growing up, I thought their lives sounded full and glamorous. Deep. And big.

I used to think that the biggest moments in life occurred on a large scale—marriages, births, career milestones, deaths. But, paging through my dad’s book recently, (I have it with me here in New York), I was reminded that more often than not, it’s the smaller moments—the tiny details, the random ones—that hit me the hardest, that make me the happiest, that leave me thinking, I need to remember this.

And lately, as I’ve been pushing myself more and more to try new things, to embark on new adventures, this has only become clearer to me still. Two weeks ago, for instance, I found myself sitting on the roof of the Turkish Baths on a stormy afternoon, slathered in mud and eating watermelon in the rain. This is one of those moments, I remember thinking.

A week later, I sat in the front seat of a delivery truck and rode two hours out of the city for a freelance job deep in the wilds of New Jersey. A friend sat perched on a milk crate in the back, wobbling all the way. We drove through small towns we’d never heard of. Got lost in the woods. And this is one, too, I thought.

Sunday night, I watched a friend’s band perform at a loft apartment littered with candles. Everyone sat on the floor. Above us, airplanes drifted over an open skylight. And this. Definitely.

These are moments that make me smile as I wait for the bus, wash dishes, daydream in coffee shops. They’re tiny, but they’re special. They hold weight, and magic, and stories.

Someday, I hope to be able to fill a book with them.

Kicked Out of Our Flat the First Day? Jolly Good Times!

The flight from New York to London is exactly long enough to get enough sleep as to be considered a night’s worth, and exactly short enough that this should be considered a travesty. I arrived at 9 am London time, better known as 4 am New York time, approximately 6.5 hours after I settled into seat, secured my neck pillow, sleeping mask and blanket---my arsenal of “I’m sleeping---don’t screw with me” devices. Zack met me at the airport with a rose, my name hand drawn on his phone. We picked our cat up at customs, where she was, if not content, remarkably nonplussed for having just crossed the Atlantic in a vibrating steel underbelly. We hopped in a black cab, which, because of the wondrous feats of British designs, fit all of us and my three bags nicely. (Fun fact: due to fold up chairs in the backseat area where I was storing my luggage, they all also are capable of carrying five people. Take note, NYC taxis.) We arrived at the flat Zack had found for us after three weeks of searching: a cheery, sunny two bedroom we’d be sharing with a PhD student in Kensington, an area you’d probably recognize from the quintessential, I’m-in-England montage in many movies. The streets were curved and lined with leafy trees; the houses a stately white, encircled with small wrought iron fences. It was, in a word, lovely. It was, in two words, too easy.

It was noon when disaster struck. In New York, people were just waking up, stretching their arms to the sky and inhaling the scent of coffee and street cleaners and the wisp of autumn that had recently begun to show itself. In London, Zack received a phone call. “It’s the letting agent,” he whispered to me after answering his phone. Zack had been subletting from the PhD student for the past week he’d been staying at the flat while waiting for the letting agent to call him back so we could officially sign the lease. I nodded and tried to keep my eyes open as Zack’s went wide. “What do you mean cats aren’t allowed?” he said. “I explicitly asked. I was told the landlord was 100% fine with that.” I looked at him questioningly and he held his pointer finger up. “The landlord doesn’t like men either?” Zack said into the phone. “Well, that’s just creepy.”

We had, we were told, 36 hours to remove ourselves from the flat before the landlord returned from his vacation, a trip to Poland taken out of the same fondness for Slavic women that caused him to ban Zack and others of his gender from the building. In New York, I would’ve been settling in front of my computer to read my favorite blogs before starting work, a full pot of tea and maybe a cat by my side. In London, Zack sighed and rubbed his temples. “Looks like we’re going apartment hunting,” he said. We are a couple with a cat. In the world of expensive, competitive apartment shares, we are what is considered “highly undesirable.” Like dating, highly undesirable is often met with highly undesirable. Any flat that looked halfway decent didn’t want us, leaving us with the kind of flat who might fart at dinner before ditching you with the check, the kind of flat that’s really hoping to make enough money playing the lottery to move out of his mom’s basement someday.

And then, as fate would have it, we hit the jackpot. On our way back from seeing a flat the size of a New York closet (and most New Yorkers don’t have a closet, so do that math) we walked by a place Zack had checked out the week before. The landlord was sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes. An affable Greek immigrant named Chris who’d been married to his plump, baklava-pushing wife for thirty-five years, Zack and Chris had stayed on the stoop chatting for hours last time he visited the apartment. “Come in, come in!” Chris said. “I’ll take you and your girlfriend on a tour of the whole building, show you all of the renovations I’ve been doing.” The top flat, the one Zack had been previously looking at, wasn’t finished being renovated yet, but he showed us the rest of the flats, which became progressively nicer as you went down in the building. The final one had floor to ceiling windows, a balcony, hardwood floors, granite countertops. “Here’s the thing,” Chris said. “I have to be honest with you. Since Zack came to look before, I’ve decided to sell the building. So I can give you a flat, but it must only be for 2 months, until I sell. But if you choose to stay---I can give you this apartment at a discount, and you can move in tomorrow.”

Zack and I looked at each other. In my tired brain, I tried to calculate how much of a discount we would need to be able to afford the apartment. “Can you do half off?” Zack said.

Chris laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.” He shook his head and then reached his hand out for Zack to shake. “Welcome to the building.” In New York, it was those few early morning hours where the city is still as much as it can be, the streets silent and houses dark and sighing with sleep. In London, the world was waking up.

Stormy Weather

The storms rolled in purple violet, and I thought about death. I was driving from Jekyll Island into Savannah, Georgia late at night. It was like driving in the tropics, the humidity caused the road to steam and everything felt green and wet. My brother had just moved into his first apartment with his girlfriend, and they needed furniture. I loaded my car up with as much as I could and drove through the night. I thought an hour long drive by myself would mean I could blast the radio really loudly. Instead, I sat in silence and listened to the deep Southern storms rumble. The rain came down in thick gray sheets. It was beautiful, and I was scared. Years ago I was in a car accident. I was the passenger, my boyfriend was driving, and we were on our way to snowboard in Wisconsin. It was late January and a huge snowstorm had blown in, and the roads weren’t even plowed. However, being young and naïve, we forged ahead with the trip. He was driving a little fast, but I never wanted to nag, so I kept my head down and did the crossword. I had already taken off my snow boots in preparation for the three hour drive. At one point he went to shift lanes, and we hit ice and started spinning. Even in those long, slow moments of spinning, I never thought we would crash. It seemed like we would just fishtail or spin forever. Instead, we bounced between a semi truck on my side, and the median. The last thing I remember is wheels coming at my side of the door, and thinking I was going to die.

I didn’t, obviously. We hit the median and stopped, and miraculously were alive. The entire back of the car was smashed in and every window had blown out. I reached up and had blood dripping down my face. Luckily, I only walked away with a few scratches and my boyfriend was fine. I found shreds of glass in my boots for months afterwards. The experience stayed with me, and it wasn’t even the inclement weather or the blood. The part that stayed with me was how quickly it could all change, just shifting lanes.

I thought of the accident that night driving to Savannah in the rain. I was in a much better car, a larger SUV with solid tires. And I was the driver, I knew to slow down and put my hazards on. Never had I been so grateful for a sensible trucker driver in front of me, while all the other drivers sped by. There were still moments I worried I would skid, and start hydroplaning. It was those moments that I thought, this is it. I knew there was no turning back in my life. I wasn’t magically going to be twenty-two again and not get pregnant. Charley was here, I was married, I was a mother, this was the way it was going to be.

I suppose you could say that was when I decided to have another child.

I got pregnant a week later.

This Mother's Work

I'm more than happy to introduce a special guest contributor this week: my cousin Michelle. As children, we spent summers, holidays, and many a weekend together. Now, as  adults, we unfortunately see each other much more sporadically, as Michelle currently lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Program Director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative in Azerbaijan. Impressive, huh? Michelle writes about her mom here. My aunt, or "Annie T" as we call her, holds a special place in my heart, too.  She and my mom were night and day, but as sisters-in-law, they shared a deep respect and love that bypassed any and all differences. Personally, I'll be forever indebted to my aunt, for the love and support she has shown my sisters and I since my mom died. Clearly, commitment to family was one thing my mom and aunt shared in common. And with that, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did.

By Michelle A. Brady

There’s a picture, stashed away somewhere in a drawer or closet at my parents’ house in Rochester, of my mom and I relaxing in our bathing suits and inner tubes at my grandparents’ old cottage in the Finger Lakes.  It’s the summer of 1982 and I’m five years old.  I haven’t seen the photo in awhile but I remember that we are smiling and laughing.  A couple months later, that September, I carried the picture with me to my first day of kindergarten.  I cried the entire morning, missing my mom, and feeling perhaps, that our five years of intensive mother-daughter bonding were about to end.  Years later we would recall that day and joke, because as an adult it seemed I was always eager to get away.

Over the years my mother and I have laughed and cried together, shopped, danced, and traveled together, and yes, at times yelled and said hurtful things to each other.  Despite our ups and downs and growing pains, I am forever indebted to her for one thing in particular, because without it I would not be the woman I am today.  This one thing she gave me above all else was the example she set as a working mom, laboring tirelessly along with my dad, to provide a better life for me and my brother.  That example, and the values it instilled in me, has made all the difference in my life.

I never thought it weird that I had a mom who worked full time.  From kindergarten onward, my mom went back to work, remaining at Eastman Kodak Company---along with my dad---until retirement many years later.  I stayed with baby-sitters and at after-school latch key programs and, quite honestly, never thought twice about it.  In fact, I have positive memories of using these morning hours at the baby-sitter to watch cartoons: G.I. Joe, Jem, and Transformers, in particular.  I ate snacks in the afternoon at latch key and finished my homework while waiting for my mom to pick me up.  And when I was older, I’d arrive home to an empty house and immediately call my mom to inform her I’d arrived safely and that yes, of course, I would get started on that homework right away!

Having a working mom, though, often proved to be a major lesson in organization and planning ahead.  When I was in junior high, my dance lessons really took off.  This required cross-town transportation to dance class right after school, in order to be dressed in my leotard and tights with hair pulled back by 4 p.m.  More school days than not, my paternal grandmother was tasked with this responsibility.  Like any doting grandparent, Grandma Kay arrived on time everyday in her Cutlass sedan, smoking a cigarette and carrying a Wendy’s large chocolate frosty, because every budding ballerina needs some carbs before a workout. Hours later, my mom would arrive at the dance studio with dinner and a ride home.  I would often collapse into the seat, sweaty, exhausted, and not too happy with her efforts to catch up on the day.  Yet she paid for the classes and costumes, supported me at competitions and recitals, and even joined a mother-daughter tap class to spend more time with me.

While my mom was busy with my dance lessons, my dad was similarly busy with my brother and his hockey and lacrosse activities.  During the winter season---which is excruciatingly long in Rochester---my mom would often cook chili on Fridays, a low-maintenance meal that could simmer all day and be ready when we arrived home late after my brother’s hockey game.  In typical pre-teen fashion, I didn’t appreciate this practical dinner choice in the least; in fact, I hated that chili. So one Friday, knowing my fate for dinner, I “came down” with the stomach flu at school.  This, of course, required my mom to leave work early and pick me up at a school.  She was calm and quiet as we drove home, seemingly concerned about my well-being.  But within just a few minutes of questioning, my mom had me confessing that no, I was not actually sick; I just didn’t want chili for dinner that night.  In hindsight, I’m sure my mom didn’t appreciate having her work day interrupted like that, but she never said a word to me. And I never did eat the chili again.

So many of my childhood memories are connected in some way to my mom, and especially, to her role as a working mother. When I look back on it all now, as a 35 year-old single woman, living out my dreams halfway around the world, I realize the extent to which it has affected me. My mom gave me the example of a working mother who handled stress at work and paid the bills at home; a mother who cleaned the house and organized everyone’s schedules; a mother who was tough and forceful when necessary, and equally conciliatory and compromising; a mother who did all of this while remembering every detail and splitting responsibilities with my father in a gender-equal way.  Above all else, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of organization, multi-tasking, and motivation, and along the way, saw the rewards of goal-setting, hard work, and investing in education.

I haven’t told my mom nearly enough how much I appreciate the example she set for me.  So I will tell her now, and then again the next time I see her in person.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me what is possible, and for selflessly paving the way for me to realize my dreams.

Autumn's Dying

By Joy Netanya Thompson Growing up in Los Angeles, I am accustomed to hearing transplants and tourists informing me that my fair city does not experience the four seasons. I always nod in agreement, but with a smile that hides something I know and they don’t: we do have seasons here in L.A., but they are subtle and nuanced, a familiar rhythm to the native who knows the scent of fall coming in on the heels of August, the sight of jacaranda trees celebrating the summer solstice with brilliant purple confetti, the majestic oak trees’ stately look of determination as they stand bare and waiting through winter.

Autumn is the most discreet of Los Angeles’s seasons. Though the scorching heat of summer does not often subside until late September, the fall-fragranced breeze always dances into our days in late August, preparing us for darker mornings and cooler evenings, accompanied by frothy pumpkin lattes and hearty dinners. Even now in my late twenties, these subdued signals of autumn are enough to give me the same butterflies I’ve felt since I was a child anticipating a new school year.

We are just entering September and the autumn breeze arrived last week to sweeten my bike rides through tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood in Pasadena. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not starting school in a few weeks, and those anticipatory butterflies only fluttered for a moment before I shooed them away. In June I finished graduate school, and this summer, which started with a glorious month of resting, celebrations, and vacation, has ended on a long monotonous note of job-hunting in a sweltering apartment.

As the seasons prepare for their quarterly changing of the guard, my tediously long days become almost unbearable, and I itch for change not just in the weather, but in myself and in my life.

Yet this is how the seasons save us, and shape us. If I am still unemployed come October, the crisp sunny days cartwheeling toward pumpkin patches, football games, and changing leaves—and eventually, turkeys and giving thanks and even the distant twinkling lights of Yuletide—will lift my heart and give me a sense of movement, even as I sit at the same chipped wooden table in my apartment, hunched over the same sluggish Macbook and searching for jobs.

We need change, and the seasons are a release valve for our need, as well as a chance to surrender to this facet of our humanity with grace and glory. Often it seems the whole year is leaning forward toward summer, with visions of cookouts, beach trips, and watermelon dancing through our heads. But by the end of that yearned-for season—those long dazzling days of sunlight and draining heat, of thinking up ways to fill the endless hours between the tireless sun’s rising and setting—our mouths are dry and dusty with their thirst for change, for relief from the unceasing heat and light.

What’s interesting about our turn toward fall is that we are so desperate for change we actually choose to embrace death. That’s what autumn is, really—if not death than dying, a quick trot through crunching leaves and golden sunlight to winter’s deadness. Our desire for change is so fervent and ingrained we are willing to exchange the eternal bright glory of summer for the crimson decaying glory of autumn and, inevitably, the dark, dead, iced glory of winter. Our souls are seeds and they beg to be buried in the silence, away from the light. Our souls are squirrels, instinctively busying ourselves through autumn so we might survive the meager portion winter will dispense.

Yet somehow autumn, with its first signs of death, gives us a shiver of new life, an echo of what is on the other side of our winter’s death. Even as children, we couldn’t help feeling excitement at the prospect of the school year, although it meant the lowering of summer’s flag of freedom. We busied ourselves accumulating school supplies, reading lists, rumors about our new teachers; we buried ourselves in schoolwork and activities. Now that we are grown, we realize that every fall we learn to surrender as squirrels and seeds do: to burying and being buried, to hibernating and waiting, so our souls might feed on the change that is their food, and so in the soft light of springtime we might produce new life—green tendrils shooting forth from the rich soil of our being, promise of hope and nourishment once more.

Reclaiming Ritual

What do you think of when you hear the word ritual? For the longest time, I heard negative connotations in this word, and especially in its adjective, ritualistic. I thought of rituals alternately as repetitive actions that lose their meaning over time or as grand gestures imposed by institutions and lacking in personal resonance.

“Ritual” called to mind the things we do just because we’ve always done them and the things we do because we feel we have to. But if there ever was a reclaimed word in my vocabulary, “ritual” is it.

During college, I was awestruck by the richness and diversity of the rituals I encountered. There were the communal and fabulously sensory rituals, like the colorful festival of Holi or the mournful sounding of the ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah.

And then there were the small, personal rituals that one only encounters in the lives of others when living in such close proximity. I always wanted to be one of those people who eats the very same thing for breakfast every day, but was consistently thwarted by my curiosity about the daily special in the dining hall.

I fell in love with the rituals of others and often tried to incorporate them into my own life. Some of them stuck and were transformed over time into the familiar repetitions of my own chronology. Others fell away and remained as strange and beautiful and unfamiliar to me as they’d always seemed.

Through the process of trying on new rituals and examining old ones, I learned so many things about ritual itself. I learned that sometimes it’s possible to choose our rituals, and other times, our rituals choose us. I learned that repetition can build layer upon layer of meaning, rather than diminishing it. That each time we enact a ritual, it offers a window onto the different people and places and ways of being that enveloped us each time we enacted it before.

I wrote last week about nighttime worrying and waking up happy, and I couldn’t help but notice a thread of ritual in the comments. There were recommendations for tea drinking and shower taking, reading and writing—small rituals that are close to my heart. This left me wondering about what ritual means to you. Do you find comfort in repetition and familiarity? Or do you prefer newness, spontaneity, and change? What are the rituals—carefully chosen or accidental—that shape your life?

All alone, together

I got the shocking call last Sunday afternoon.  She told me that he jolted awake suddenly in the pre-dawn hours and just as quickly he was gone.  This prince of a man, this decent, loving husband and father had died.  Out of nowhere.  WHAT?  Weren’t they just . . . ?  Didn’t we just . . . ?  I struggled to process this dreadful information.  I wanted to rail against God.  I wanted to offer some words of comfort until I could get there, something trite, like “This is part of God’s plan, it is beyond our understanding.”  Of course, I didn’t believe that.  My rage would be directed at the ether.  My efforts to soothe would be built on a false premise.  I don’t believe there is anyone up there or out there. It is precisely at times like these that I desperately wish for some kind of faith.  There are people all around me who have a version of God.  This God provides a structure for living and dying, solutions to complex problems, answers (or diversions) where there are none.  I don’t have anything close to this.  I was never very good at science but it is all I have.

I used to hedge a little more when talking about this highly sensitive topic.  This was for two reasons: I was concerned about offending anyone and I had some mildly superstitious notion that I would leave the door open, just in case I should have occasion to call God into service in my own life.  As a younger woman, I talked of feeling “spiritual” and that I could imagine “a force greater than myself” in the universe.  I never really had any idea what I meant when I discussed this.  I thought it made me sound less off-putting to others but mostly, it made me less terrified of having no guiding light.  I would describe how we are “all connected,” relate experiences like seeing something extraordinary in nature and how this could grant access to the sacred world.  The truth is, I have seen the sunset over the Pacific, a baby moose in the Tetons, Halley’s Comet and a human child emerge from my own body.  In each case, I have thought, ‘What an absolutely stunning miracle . . . of science.’

The older I get, I am increasingly convinced of the randomness of life.  I do believe that everything always works out in the end, in the sense that we learn to cope with whatever circumstances bring.  What I mean when I say things like, ‘I am exactly where I was meant to be,’ is that it requires an active acceptance of chaos to get from one day to the next.  This is more of a mantra than some philosophical statement about a grand plan.

I challenge anyone to explain to a woman who has just lost the center of her life and the father of her young children that all will be revealed.  NO.  There will be no reasonable explanation and if the logic of it is outside our comprehension, then it is useless anyway.   What we can know for sure is that she will move forward very slowly, moment-by-moment, until it is less and less surreal.  The heavy boulder of pain will eventually be massaged into tiny pebbles that rattle around in her mind.  New rhythms will develop and her children will grow.  She might create a novel iteration of a family, not because this was all supposed to happen just exactly like it has, but because she will simply handle what she has been dealt.

For a long time, I wondered whether this lack of a divine center meant that I was a lost soul (lost brain?).  But I can tell you with conviction what it is that makes me found.  My family and friends (also considered family) are at the core---I live for them and with them in this life, in the here and now.  I do this not because it is written or commanded or foretold.  I do this because it is right and feels good and creates community.  I don’t need to understand the meaning of life to know that when someone is ripped from it too soon, it creates a searing pain.  I don’t require the threat of hell or a judgmental God to treat people with kindness.  I know that I should “do unto others” because I, myself, have feelings.  I also know that nobody is perfect and that when I fail as a human (often spectacularly), the person from whom I need to beg forgiveness is the person I have slighted.

In the tradition of my Jewish culture (and yes, for many people, Jewish religion), in the New Year we do a self-assessment and make a commitment to do better in the coming season.  One rationale for this is to ensure that we are inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.  The warning here is that God will only allow those to survive who have done good, been of service and been authentically sorry for ways in which they have harmed others.  This begs the question whether the people who have died this year somehow weren’t all they could be?  And you see how it begins to break down.

I do appreciate the concept of personal inventory, making genuine apologies (at least once a year) and being intentional about your humanity in the year to come.  This year I hope to focus on being even more available to this most treasured friend that has experienced devastating loss.  I won’t talk to her about God and providence.  I will talk to her about how powerful his presence was and will continue to be in this life.  I won’t talk to her about fate.  I will tell her that I know he is gone too soon and that nothing about this is just.  I won’t be equipped to provide any enlightenment.  But I will visit the kids, get down on the floor with them like he did, and keep his memory fresh for them.  I will do this because I love her and I loved him and this is what people do.

Sacred Space

  The Pyramids in Egypt

The Prairie in Kansas

The Ember fort in India

A Buddhist temple in Thailand

A deserted home in Bangladesh

Almost every Art Museum and Library I’ve ever visited

When the air stills and my blood tingles and my soul hums with recognition.  Sacred Space.  Sometimes it is religious space, a spot that has heard the prayers of generations. Sometimes it is ancient space, which has stood for centuries.  Sometimes it’s the home of beauty or knowledge. Sometimes its nature.  All have the same effect on me.  Like Christmas Eve mass when I was little with the sound of bells chiming and prayers in Latin---it is mystical and so much more than I can fathom or comprehend. It is incense and still air.  It’s a particular scent. It’s the sound of wind in the grass.  And I feel it in my bones, an overwhelming urge to stop and just exist.  Breathe the air and Be in the moment.  Absorb the time and the place, letting it seep under my skin and into my veins until it becomes a part of me, something to keep with  me, in me, forever.  Commit it to memory and not just to film. Pause in acknowledgment of that which came before.  That which brought me to this place, this time, this moment, this existence. Practice Gratefulness.

I call it Sacred Space.  You might call it something else. The name is not important.  The acknowledgment of its existence and the opportunity to experience are what matters.

Isla Negra

Every morning, on a remote shore along the Chilean coast, in a small house overlooking the sea, a bulky man blew his trumpet while observing the ever-moving sea surface. This man was Pablo Neruda, the most famous poet from South America, and the place where he chose to spend the later part of his life was Isla Negra, a tiny hamlet an hour’s drive from the capital, Santiago. In 1939, when Neruda started to compose Canto General, he felt the need of a new shelter. He found Isla Negra, a precious spot unknown to most people, on a newspaper ad. The place, a lot with a tiny stone cabin that back then looked more like a wreck, was sold to him by an old sea captain, and it slowly became the poet’s own boat . . . anchored on land.

And soon “the house was growing, as people, as trees . . .” African sculptures, Chinese prints, Buddhas, compasses, maps, old paintings, and even a skull. Ship’s figure heads, shells, nautical decors and more than a hundred bottles the poet bought in the flea markets in France. Neruda loved to surround himself with collected objects, remains and relics from the past, while growing dreams about the future.

“The wild coast of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous oceanic movement, allowed me to surrender with passion to the venture of my new song”.

Rambling and creative architecture, quirky collections of world art, and a stunning ocean view. In the house of Isla Negra Neruda found the perfect place to write, and put together an important part of his literary work. The poet’s appetite for life was endless. He indeed described himself as omnivorous---“I would like to swallow the whole earth, drink the whole sea".

Neruda hoped to leave the house as a heritage to Chilean people (“I don't want my heritage of joy to die”), but sadly that refuge wasn’t far enough to escape Pinochet’s oppression. During a search of the house at Isla Negra by Chilean armed forces at which Neruda was present, a soldier asked Neruda if he hid weapons or something threatening in there. The poet remarked: "Look around---there's only one thing of danger for you here---poetry."

Sonnet LXXX by Pablo Neruda

My Love, I returned from travel and sorrow to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar, to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses, to the night that circles through the sky.

I ask for bread and dominion for all; for the worker with no future ask for land. May no one expect my blood or my song to rest! But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon, the barcarole, on the fluid guitar, till my head lolls, dreaming:

for all my life's sleeplessness had woven this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies, watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.

Looking Forward: Dream On

There’s a pivotal moment in The Wizard of Oz, in which a bewildered Dorothy, clutching Toto and gazing wide-eyed around the kaleidoscopic world of Oz, exclaims breathlessly to the dog, “I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Then, with a big smile: “We must be over the rainbow!”

I had an experience like this a few years ago, waking up my first morning in Warkworth, New Zealand. I had just arrived to work on a small, family-run organic farm as part of a month-long solo excursion that occurred during the year I spent between New York and Los Angeles---the one rife with wondering, worrying, and flailing, that I referenced in last week’s post.

I slept in a tiny wooden cabin tucked away in a corner of the farm, heavy with trees. Outside my window were acres of rolling green fields---the sort I thought only existed in movies. Cows meandered in distant pastures; nearby, a flock of chickens awaited breakfast, chattering affably in their pen. Sitting up in bed, taking it all in, I felt worlds away from the smoggy, sun-bleached haze of LA, the crowded sidewalks of New York City.

It was heaven. I may as well have been over the rainbow.

I spent my days cleaning chicken coops, weeding the vegetable garden, hanging laundry to dry in the sun. I learned to make jam from the bruised flesh of overripe strawberries. Bake bread from scratch. Milk goats. I discovered the joys of pavlova, feijoa wine, and a curiously sweet breed of lemon called a “lemonade”.

I spent seven days living in a trailer in the front yard of a family whose diet consisted solely of raw foods. I flew in a tiny plane to Great Barrier Island, where, in exchange for washing dishes in the kitchen of a local inn, I accompanied the resident fishermen on afternoon sailing trips and ate crayfish with bread and butter by the sea at sunset.

I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t working. I rarely had access to a phone or computer.

But in between the planting and the cleaning and the fishing and the cooking, I was doing something.

I was collecting stories. And I was dreaming.

The disappointment of the previous months behind me, I spent many nights awake---in my cabin, in my trailer, in my bunk---making lists of things I wanted to do when I got home, places I wanted to visit, goals I hoped to achieve. I made plans. I thought about what I needed in life to be happy. I was alone (and sometimes lonely), but the quiet gave me space to think, and the time to prepare for resuming life on my own back in the U.S.

“It’s important to give yourself time to dream,” my dad said to me once, when I fretted over the fact that many of my friends were moving ahead with their careers, starting grad school, living in new cities.

These days, while I don’t have the time or the money to leave the country to do so, I find myself slipping into daydreams frequently---on the train, on the bus, on walks home at the end of the day. Focus, I often tell myself in instances like this. Don’t get distracted. There’s no time; you’re too busy. 

But sometimes what I need most, I think, is time to be distracted. Time to dream. It isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. Dorothy's dreams took her to Oz, over chimney tops, past the rainbow. Who knows where I'll wake up next?

Thinking about that is my favorite daydream of all.

Making the Choice

Early this spring, during my morning of chores and yoga, I watched a documentary about a young woman with cystic fibrosis—the same disease that I have, although hers was much more advanced—preparing for a lung transplant. It was a tough film to watch, but ultimately uplifting. And, for that day at least, it changed the way I thought. An hour or two after the film had finished, I grabbed my keys and headed out to my car to run an errand. As I slid behind the wheel, my mind still on that morning’s documentary, I thought: I’m so grateful that I don’t have to maneuver an oxygen tank; it’s so nice to be able to move freely, without worrying about tubing and concentrators.

Immediately on the heels of that thought came another, much less happy one. But I don’t want to have to be grateful for that, I heard myself saying. I may not be on oxygen, but I still can’t walk very far without getting tired. I still can’t live a normal life, or do normal things. It’s still not fair.

And in that moment, before enough time had passed for me to so much as put my key into the car’s ignition, I had an instant of crystal clarity. This is my choice, I thought. I can choose to be grateful, or I can choose to still want more.

.   .   .   .   .

For several years, I have struggled with the unfulfilled desire for motherhood. I have always been that girl—the one who loved babies and children, the one who used to imagine a family of six or eight or ten, the one who considered twins an exciting challenge. It was hard for me, as a teenager, to realize that my disease and the fragility of my body would make both pregnancy and motherhood difficult; it has been even harder, as an adult, to wait through years of poor health, delays, setbacks, and infertility for the child I longed for so desperately. All around me, my friends conceived and mothered with ease and grace, while I was left childless and wanting.

Again and again, as the frustration and the anger and the pain drove me to what I felt like was the absolute limit of my endurance, I came back to the same truth.

This is my life, and I cannot change it.

I can only choose whether I’ll be happy, or unhappy.

.   .   .   .   .

 Years ago in mid-October, I was admitted to the hospital through the emergency room, after several days of chest pain that had ultimately grown so severe that I couldn’t even sleep. I felt like my nightmares had come true—I had to pull out of classes mid-semester, had to watch my life be completely disrupted by the unexpected turn of events.

For the two weeks that I spent in the hospital that autumn, I found myself feeling an anger I had rarely felt before. It isn’t fair, I thought over and over again. It isn’t fair that this had to happen. It isn’t fair that my life has to be different. It isn’t fair that my future is clouded with uncertainty, and I have trouble seeing past my thirties. None of this is fair.

And yet, when those weeks had ended and I was left trying to pick up the pieces of my life once again, I felt truth sinking into my heart. Fair or not, this was my life, and it was out of my control. The only thing I could control was the state of my heart: would I continue to fight the things I could not change, or would I choose to be happy anyway?

.   .   .   .   .

Late this summer, I watched with disbelief as two pink lines appeared on the pregnancy test on my bathroom counter. After such a long time of waiting, it didn’t seem real; for weeks, I felt like I was on a roller-coaster of joy and hope and fear and disbelief. And, to my surprise, dissatisfaction. Here was my dream come true, the thing that I had wanted for so many years—and yet, somehow, I couldn’t let go of my feelings of jealousy and frustration. I found myself clinging to the idea of what I had originally wanted, wishing that this blessing had come into my life years earlier. I couldn’t stop looking with envy at my friends, their homes already filling with children, so much further along this path that I was only beginning to walk.

Last month, I walked along the North Carolina coastline, trying to reconcile my unexpected feelings of frustration with the incredible joy that this pregnancy had brought into my life. And, as the warm East coast waves lapped at my feet, I came again to the understanding that I have come to so many times before:

It’s my choice. I can allow myself to be consumed in anger and pain and jealousy, dwelling on the things in my life that have not gone as I wanted.

Or, I can choose happiness. I can choose to go where life takes me; to be content with the ups and downs, with the life that I have, rather than the life that I might have wanted.

.   .   .   .   .

This choice—the choice between being happy and being unhappy—seems to confront me at all angles of my life, in good times and in bad. And every time it does, I am struck all over again by the power of this simple truth that so many wise men and women throughout the ages have known:

Ultimately, my happiness is all up to me.

How will I choose today?