All Categories - travel far now

On writing with the 'intuition of the instant'

7/15/2026

“It is in order to give rise to a complex instant, brimming with simultaneities, that a poet shatters the simple continuity of shackled time.”

Continuity is a habit constructed through memories.
Facts are acts.
An accident lies at the root of every evolutionary attempt.

These ideas float to the surface when I read Gaston Bachelard’s writings in “Intuition of the Instant.”

We live on horizontal time, consequential, measured, narrative. But we experience life on the axis of vertical time, where each instant brims with the depth of poetic possibility.

A layer cake of experience.

Time casts it spell on you
But you won’t forget me
I know I could have loved you
But you would not let me!

In this moment, my head aches, my eyes are wet with waking, a black ponytail holder tied around my middle finger, caught up in the silver ring.

I pick at my scar, the one I made from scratching too hard and too long.

A tear rolls down my cheeks, not from sadness, but from a bad night of sleep.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

In this moment, my gold bracelets jangle at my wrists. The ones my mother insisted I stole from her at the nursing home. I had to tell a police officer she gave them to me the night before, when the meds had worn off and she remembered me.

In this moment, my stomach fat rolls over the lip of my tired black underwear. I’m aware of how I sit with one leg crossed at the knee of the other, feet hidden under the desk.

In this moment, the fan whirs, the sun paws at the windows, the low engine of the day hums just outside the house.

I can break into song this morning, or I can take a shower.

Stay hydrated or deflated.

The astrologers have sounded the alarm—it’s a good day to plant seeds that will grow into the vertical timeline of existence—upwards toward the heavens or deep down into the dirt, expansion.

If you want to sing out, sing out.
If you want to be free, be free.
There’s a million ways to be,
You know that there are.

On chasing octopus hunters and the stories they tell about ourselves

7/14/2026

SUN SINGED my skin for a story once while chasing octopus hunters in Zanzibar. They used to hunt them too early, before the octopus had time to reproduce, so the hunters agreed to close the seas for a season, and then signal when the hunters could come from them again.

I traveled from the city to the coast for the grand sea opening after a three-month closure, watched as the octopus hunters and their wives gathered with their spears and stones to make their captures.

I’d pitched a story about a regional obsession with octopus as a culinary delight for a food-focused magazine, never mind I had to learn that octopus are some of the most conscious creatures on the planet and the ethics of eating them are, to say the least, complicated.

I did the story—took photos of the octopus hunters slamming the octopus against soapy stones to tenderize them—marveling at their skill but also at the horror of the act. The women weighed the catches using antique scales they'd hauled from their villages, by foot or by riding on the backs of packed pick-up trucks.

This would be a haul that would feed their families for months—so many buyers in town—they’d have no problem selling everything they caught.

I suffered a terrible sun burn that day, walking barefoot in the sand along the coast with a heavy bag full of my recording equipment, notebook, and water bottle, talking to people. I headed back to town with a recorder full of interviews in Swahili I’d have to transcribe and then translate with a bit of a fake-it-till-I-make-it kind of attitude, considering the tight deadline.

I’d listen for the main story in this situation—men and their relationship with the sea—women and their relationship to their men—humans and their relationship with sea creatures, bright, heavenly, vulnerable.

I could try to list now some of the fun facts I learned about octopus but I’d be lying if I had them memorized. The weird thing about a reported story is that you’re also casting a wide net and putting a story together based on your catch of the day. I could spend months or years reporting the same story, and I still might not be able to deliver a TED talk about it.

I hated having to repeat the same silly story about octopus myths for the food magazine—how they’re considered an aphrodisiac—how farmers and fishermen on all the islands all love to joke about nutmeg and octopus flesh with the same ridiculous smirk on their faces—as some sort of smarmy but safe flirtation with their captive audiences.

But I did it anyway, mentioning it early on in the piece so I could move on quickly to questions of sustainability.

I wrote about octopus hunting the same way I pursued every other story in my long, strange trip as a reporter and writer—with deep love and huge curiosity about lives so different from mine.

I often came to a story with a perceived sense of injustice and hoped to unwind it, pull back several layers, reveal something new or different to consider about the situation—but I never knew where the story was going before I told it.

The story emerged from the anguish of having to find one out of the voices and observations gathered in its name.

To even arrive at the exact location where the octopus hunters gathered in that coastal stretch of Mtende, I had to know who to talk to and who to trust to get me there, as a foreigner with enough Swahili to send a wink or two to the men in charge.

But that still didn’t guarantee I’d get the story behind the story or ever hear the actual laments lingering in the hearts and minds of local fishermen who’d agreed to the temporary octopus hunting ban in the first place. Some were quite angry about it—I’d heard about turf wars out on the sea—but it would be hard for anyone to discuss this with me that festive afternoon, with so many gathered under large cliff rocks to take their pick from the pile of dead octopus in blue buckets.

Why am I thinking about this now?

Because I haven’t reported a story in a while and I’m missing what it feels like to throw myself into an unfamiliar scene and start talking to strangers. Doing this work doesn’t come easy for everyone but I’ve always loved it, even if it makes me somewhat nauseous and nervous at first—I love moving through the beginning of a story and seeking out those whose eyes tell me they’re ready and willing to talk.

Those are the best stories for me—the kind where I’m not needing to convince anyone that it’s safe to talk—the kind where the conversation doesn’t expose anyone’s secrets.

I’ve also reported stories on subjects where sources have questioned whether talking to me was the right decision. Stories about refugee rights and domestic strife. And while I can say I did everything I could to manage those stories with as much care as I could muster, I often wonder too whether I would talk if I was on the other side.

When you’re the one asking the questions, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s at stake when you’re asking them. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might pitch a few stories and what I’d do differently this time, knowing what I know now about how stories get bent into a specific shape, depending on who’s funding them.

“Listen for the story, not to the story,” professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot taught in an ethnography class at Harvard. She loved to talk about the difference between the two and I didn’t quite get the nuance until I was stranded in the middle of a story, wondering how to tell it without becoming a part of it, too.

It would take me much longer to realize that every story we tell is about ourselves—through the looking glass of an octopus perhaps, but still.

On grocery lists, preferences as references, knowing what our people love

7/11/2026

GROCERY LISTS are acts of love. On the fridge, my daddy’s lists still hang from magnet clips in his signature ink, black with red underlines. The red marks the details that mattered most: he wants the Butternut not the Wonder; the Snickers, not the Twix.

Daddy was flexible and open-hearted about a lot of things, but he had his preferences, like we all do, and trying to meet them as his caregivers, the ultimate calling.

Preferences are references—the way he wanted this but not that. He didn’t want just one beverage with his meal, but a whole lineup of choices: hot chocolate (Swiss Miss), apple juice (Jewel Signature), instant decaf (Nescafé), diet cola (Pepsi or Coke will do).

My sisters and I joke lovingly that his last words to me may have been: “Don’t forget the R.C.”

We didn’t forget the R.C. daddy! We bought a case of it for you.

When that R.C. case arrived on our doorstep, by the way, some of the cans had punctured and dried out—the cans remained in perfect form, just empty now of liquid—and it sort of felt like our daddy had sipped on these colas as he made his cosmic transition.

A magical thinking kind of explanation, to be fair, but one that still makes sense to me and my sisters, who also marveled at how and why this case of cola had arrived with so many empty cans.

Knowing what our people love takes a certain kind of attention that seems to fade if we don’t practice it—noticing the little things, a trope, for sure, but one that binds us like rope from one heart to the other.

I knew when I went to the store to select stuff for my daddy that I was on a mission to deliver his favorites and make him happy—Manischewitz and Kedem, please.

When he could no longer drive, when the victory was getting him onto the porch to perch like a tired king on the block where he’d lived for fifty years, these small but significant requests became my most important quest—to get it right, to make him happy, and of course, to not have to make a return trip to the store.

Same went for takeout orders—our daddy loved menus. He used to study them with glee—and, on occasion, make his orders clear. Polish with mustard, no onion, a side of chili, one tamale, a chocolate shake—daddy! You got it.

Was he supposed to eat all of this fatty goodness? Probably not, but his days had narrowed into such sharp focus—jazz and joy—and without much further ado, we tried to get the man exactly what he wanted—and, being good-natured and generally easy enough to please, meeting the mission always made everyone happy.

To know what our loved ones prefer is a superpower of sorts—knowing, itself, is a kind of love, and getting it, another. And it’s not just that the thing appears in real life, but the way it shows up and how.

I wish I could say I was pretty good at noting these small preferences that make my people happy. Most of the time, I try to take note. But I haven’t always been this way. I remember watching those newlyweds game shows where the host quizzes one person about the other’s preferences and think, wow, those are really hard questions, I am not sure what my boyfriend’s last meal would be!

But as I’ve gotten older, I’m learning that preferences reveal themselves through proximity.

There’s a lot of talk right now about the burden of caregiving for our elders, a lot of lament about how all this care falls on women, a lot of rage about why this country does so little to make it possible to give our elders the care they deserve after having worked so hard for so long. All of this is true and needs a major reset—I’m all for this.

I also want to talk about how caring for my daddy as he declined was the greatest honor and gift. I realized—only after he made his cosmic transition—that helping him die was part of him raising me. That when we care for our parents, we’re letting them parent us in this final act, allowing them to teach us what death looks like from the inside out.

Death lives inside the circle of life. That’s an idea I heard recently somewhere online and it’s stuck with me, the notion that death and dying are not separate or outside of life but within it.

Knowing what my daddy wanted and needed in his dying days helped me learn how to live better and with more love, and I’m grateful, even if those years with him were sometimes difficult and exasperating, and not at all what I expected.

Not everyone gets this experience—the decision to care for our aging parents is fraught with questions about capacity and commitment—I would never begin to assume that what worked for me and my sisters would apply to anyone else.

I’m still in the house where my daddy died, where we all lived as kids, where he spent his final years as a retired school teacher, ESL instructor, and infinite jazz man. There are traces of him everywhere—we still have a can of R.C. out for him, and a Snickers, in case he comes to visit. And I still see his Nutella jar in the cupboard (don’t judge me; we’ve let go of a lot, but I’m not ready yet to let go of that).

And when I see those grocery lists in his handwriting on the fridge, I feel his presence still, and his preferences, and remember him through the details. Daddy, yes, we’ll get you your cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide! It’s on its way, never mind and don’t worry.

Now go practice your piano, go play that jazz.

On inching toward fiction and writing toward a unified self

7/9/2026

SHE SLEEPS FLAT on her back with the sound of a man’s voice leading her through a meditation. It’s a low, deep drone that lets her fall asleep before she ever reaches the Akashic records.

Hey, I also sleep flat on my back and listen to meditations narrated by men with low, deep voices, usually before 10 p.m., my new bedtime when I turned fifty.

Point of view is the point, isn’t it. She shies away from fiction—calls herself an essayist instead—easier to hide behind the fact that fiction is farther than truths she’d rather reveal in third person.

Hey, I also shy away from fiction, and call myself an essayist! But for me, it’s not because fiction is “farther than the truth,” but rather, because I write through a voice that tells me to start with my own story, is that not writing, too?

Perspective takes patience, but not the kind that lets you visit every single perch before you land on your own. She gets up every morning to write, but it’s never a short story, why not? She knows enough about the shape of stories to tell a few of her own by now, but she still doubts her capacity for make-believe.

Hey, I hear you. I’m here, too, you know. Listening to you shift into third person, trying it on a like a too-big coat found at a thrift store in the desert, where you can barely imagine how said-coat reached this part of the world, where it never gets cold, except at night.

And I also get up every morning to write, but not because I want to experiment with short stories. No, I want to get closer to myself, that is the main reason, and also because for decades now, I’ve called myself a writer, but get self-conscious about the fact that I’ve never managed to publish a book of anything—except when I was eight years old and launched my own publishing company, it was called Lichtenstein Press, Inc.

Her habits include frequent trips to the library, the grocery store, and the post office, a tedium trifecta that brought her peace during the pandemic, at least, when her daddy was still alive, when her daddy needed her and these trips kept her on a track that kept looping her back to care giving and taking in a back and forth kind of way, more taking than giving, though it wouldn’t appear that way from the outside looking in, would it?

Hey, I also took care of my daddy when he was dying! I also love the library! I even joined the board when I first moved back to my home town and wondered how to ground myself down enough to stay for a while when my daddy needed me most.

It was my sister who found him lying in the snow that one time when he tried to take out the trash and slipped and fell and gashed his hand and then got frostbite. We were so worried he’d never be able to play the piano again but there he went, healing his hand and playing the piano until the very end of his days!

And hey, I like the post office, too. And I make frequent trips to the grocery store because though I make lists, I’m always forgetting at least one item, the most essential one!

She insists on reading others’ worlds and worlds to define her own, which is part of who she is and always was but never quite owned it in the way kids these days do so through social media, no. She loved books, but not enough. And she loved writing, but not enough. And she loved community, but not enough, to make a carousel about it, or a reel, to be real, and to be fair, she was part of the generation lost to woods and ferris wheels.

Wait, hello? Hey! I like reading, writing, and community! And I’m also part of a lost generation, but I’m still walking in the woods and I still believe in ferris wheels as symbols of whimsical possibility. You can’t make a character out of me—naught may endure but mutability—that’s a quote I memorized while studying for my English major exams in college. We wrote those essays by hand in a little blue notebook!
I used blue ink, too. The left side of my hand, smudged in blue like a bruise—the English major’s wound.

She resisted habits for many years but one day she woke up and realized she needed them to survive. It wasn’t gradual, this recognition, it was a mountain-top epiphany, and once she saw herself in the mirror telling herself this fundamental truth, she had to abide by it with the fervor of a convert, a delirious devotee to ritual and routine.

This shift in consciousness took a toll on her relationships. She could no longer roll out of bed and honky tonk all day with the best of them, ending up at a random Thai buffet on a Tuesday with her mother. No, she had a schedule that kept her cleaning and preening in ways she couldn’t recognize yet in herself but still welcomed like a gust of cold air after an oppressive heatwave. She thanked god.

Wait, wait, wait. I am thanking god now, too, in ways I wondered possible when I was younger. And I’m also leaning into ritual—like bread-making on the sabbath—but that’s a path I don’t take too seriously, I still want spontaneity, I still live for surprises, I still want invitations from strangers for coffee in their dimly lit living rooms, with goats peeking in through the side door, wondering what we’re both doing in there! Can I have that and also that?

A monk’s life and also a punk’s life?
A fisherman’s life and also his wife’s life?
A traveler’s life and also a gardener’s life?
A storyteller’s life and also a life of pure witness?

She closes each short story with a few notes taken in pencil, her preferred writing tool.

No, I prefer a black ink pen.

She thinks, that after reading for an hour each morning, she’ll fill herself up with ideas as fuels to get her through another summer day.

Me too, me too!

She sits down to write with incense burning to her left, the big green tree to her right, and hopes that walking the tightrope of a sentence or two will take her to the end of an hour feeling more hopeful about herself as a writer.

Hey, it’s all about perspective, right? Remember that short story you just read, “Point of View,” by Lucia Berlin? This whole weird dialogue of sorts came from that, you know. Don’t try to hide it, we both know what’s going on here. We’re experimenting with form and function, fiction as a farce and a force to be reckoned with, borrowing truth to sacrifice at the altar of stories. Don’t keep third-person-ing me!

She’s learned to shut out the voices of doubt when she there’s a ceiling fan blowing cool air on her freckled shoulders. She’s learned that every small detail is a chemical for the cocktail that creates a bond between writer and reader, writer and self, writer and world. She’s learned how the third person and the first person are in love with the second person, you, and you have a choice about what to do with all three of us.

I have to go now, but I’m really excited to read what you say next about her—this character and her habits, this character and her particularities and preferences. I can tell you really love her, how you pay such close attention to what she does and thinks.

I have an essay collection idea for us—a series of essays on life as a verb. Each essay would be devoted to just one—humming, breathing, dreaming, eating, cooking, writing, sleeping, waking—is this a good idea?

Maybe you can go first.

On living life as a traveler, far away and within

7/8/2026

TRAVEL FAR NOW, my life’s motto. I’ve used the phrase as my social media handle for so many years that I can no longer remember when it began. But it reaches far enough back to a time when I was still traveling great distances—from one place to another—as casually as walking around the corner to the convenience store.

To travel far and do it now was my mission when I was younger. It began with a high school semester in Jerusalem, on a leafy campus among other Jewish teenagers from around the world. It was 1993. A few students had visited Israel with their families from Sarajevo, never to return to their war-torn country.

I came back to Skokie with wide-eyed wonder, having caught a glimpse of a world pulsating with stories that made my heart leap off cliffs of curiosity. I wanted more of that feeling. I wanted to devour it whole and emerge on the other side standing on a mountaintop of self-awareness.

Travel does not quite work like that, though. I was still me wherever I went, however far.

I had the privilege and honor of traveling farther still, this time to Kenya with a student group from liberal arts colleges. My heart-mind kept leaping through new hoops of self-awareness. I fell asleep in Swahili fishing villages thinking I finally belonged somewhere. I woke up with a coastal consciousness, feeling sure I'd been here before.

In my twenties, I threw myself into learning languages—Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Swahili—and wherever I went, I spoke with the naïve but courageous abandon of someone who believed that if she tried hard enough, she could talk herself into knowing every alphabet. I thank everyone I met for the patience and grace they showed me—this kind of eagerness can get irksome, I realize now.

Every time I returned home believing I knew something about the world, or about my place in it, I only wanted more. To go deeper, farther, harder, for longer stretches of time, to turn myself inside out, to test the limits and edges of a self inside a culture.

I asked questions. I took notes. I kept hundreds of journals detailing the conversations that flowed from an open-hearted approach to reaching my next destination. I said yes to invitations for coffee. I counseled lost pilgrims at bus stations. I danced at strangers’ weddings.

Travel far now, I kept telling myself.

For a decade, I lived at the edge of other worlds, on an island in the middle of an ocean. I could not swim, and I often felt more fear than trust in the waves. I learned to live with the sun and its demands. I learned to live with unpredictable weather, unpredictable patterns, unpredictable people, and their needs. I learned to recognize the pain in the pit of me as anxiety.

As I got older, I realized that this motto—this mandate to travel far now—was as much an inner journey as one that might fling me toward other shores. The pandemic gave me time to learn again how to rhyme with rituals and prayers. Like so many others, I began a spiritual trek that led me to the doorstep of the Christian mystics.

Simone Weil and Thomas Merton lit a match or two. The saints came marching home to me: the ones in Naples, the ones in New Mexico, the ones sleeping in the grottos of quiet Wisconsin towns.
I wanted to spend more time on the trails within. I needed the quiet and sunlight reserved for contemplatives. I hungered for space and time to divine a future that did not require another ticket or passport.

I was so tired, I am still so tired. My body doesn’t cooperate with schedules or sudden changes in them, the way it used to bend into any shape necessary to meet the demands of the trip.

So I got going—traveling far now within—at the speed of self-trust.

I learned how to time travel through vintage objects: the kind that transport us with the pull of a string, the tug of a rope, the spring of a button. These are objects that hold the cellular particles of a larger truth. I trade in their stories now, a memory merchant of sorts—a term I did not invent, but one I have adopted for the particular ways I spend my days.

I have not been on a plane in a few years. The last time I traveled overseas, I went to Italy in a heatwave and swore I would never do that again, at least not in July.

But of course I will travel again.

I am called to Kano, called to the deserts of New Mexico, called to the shores of Michigan. I am a double Sagittarius. I will see you in Vermont or Venice before too long.

Still, I remind myself that rest stops on the inner roads are gracious and spacious. I like it here inside myself, where the days are long and the nights promise a big, fat moon for a lamp to guide the way.

Once, I drove from Chicago to Vermont in a day and stopped only once for coffee at a gas station so close to the finish line that it barely counted. I never want to drive that far alone again—unless it is within.

Reading is another kind of travel. We all know this. When I read a book about a road trip, I want to get in the car, take my dog for a drive, and never return. I used to play a game with an ex every time we reached a new town. The game was called “I Could Live Here,” and we would spin tales about the alternative lives that might unfold if we stopped and stayed awhile.

Because we spoke those lives into existence, I sometimes think some version of them carries on in ribbons of reality in the places we merely passed through. I cannot be certain of that. But I know there is still some part of me alive in the places where I lived longest. If I return—no, when I return—my body will click back into the grooves I once made with my being in that space and continue the living I did there.

Travel far now, out there. Travel far now, within.

I am still finding words to explain this motto—this orientation, this philosophy—but maybe I do not need to explain it after all. We are all travelers together in this world. We are all just passing through, aren’t we?

On quiet conversations and listening for love

7/6/2026

QUIET CONVERSATIONS between the sheets or on the streets, direct messages or tree telepathy—we’re trying to say what we mean. We’re trying to say what we feel as if no one’s watching, ready to pounce, ready to cancel.

Whisper chambers, talk tunnels, prayer portals—we’re speaking to each other in code and conducting ourselves with electric conduct, hoping to get the message across to one another.

I love you. I trust you. I am not afraid of you. I will protect you. I will defend you. I will care about what you need from this world. I will see if I can get it. I’ve been thinking about you. I wonder how you are. I care about you. I care about your family. How have you been lately? No, but really?

If we judged the state of things based on what we read or saw on social media, we’d have no choice but to conclude that the world is indeed too much with us, with all this getting and spending, laying waste all our powers! From the looks of it, we’re battling each other with swords of ultimatums, granting crowns of conversion and ribbons of righteousness to the winners.

But then it’s the Fourth of July, the most wobbly holiday on the calendar, and not one I’m super jazzed to celebrate—especially not these days. Still, my older sister just loves the thrill of fireworks. So we drive to the local park, the one behind the elementary school, and the whole place is alive with the silhouettes of families playing on the jungle gyms and talking in the grass.

Buckets full of babies, kids chasing each other in circles, shrieking, young moms lounging on picnic blankets, young dads throwing their toddlers up high in the sky, catching them with a giggle midair.

Yes, there’s all the insanity and violence of this country bound up in these celebrations. There’s also just the fact of families enjoying the first blast of cool air and fog after a long stretch of oppressive heat.

And so we say our hellos and coo at the babies and look up at the boom-blast of fireworks that never quite make their debut, their view obscured by trees and clouds that cover their glow.

And so we walk back to the car and startle at the neighbors who insist on trying again: one more blast in the driveway, one more rocket launched toward the out-there darkness all around us.
It’s late when we get home.

Black cherry stains on my fingertips. Fresh corn on the cob still sits on the stove, covered in salted butter. Half a loaf of challah still on the counter from my recent ritual of bread-making for the Sabbath.

I choose to believe there’s still space and time to be ourselves—however misunderstood and confused we all are by the current state of our nation—and there’s still time to make more of it, space and time, to be ourselves.

Later that night, I can’t sleep.

I scroll past the photograph of white nationalists marching through the capital: a young Black woman alone in a sea of white men who have nothing but mangled hate in their hearts for anyone who doesn’t look like them. It’s disgusting, and I have nothing beautiful to say about it—no words of reconciliation or diplomacy. It’s despicable that it’s come to this, that it’s always been like this.

I finally fall asleep to the sound of neighbors laughing across the street, families walking home from the park, honking their horns, letting the air cool us down.

My niece reminded us at the park how words don’t necessarily match their meanings. Look for context clues, she was taught in school. Look for congruence. Look for coherence. Look for clarity. Look for comprehension.

We may not find it these days—only dissonance in our midst—but we listen for laughter—listen for learning—listen for love.

On making lists, stirring creativity and finding direction in these times

7/5/2026

MAKE A LIST when you’re lost and it’ll guide you back to the point of things, to steer yourself in a direction meant to delight you. When I walk our dog, I often ask him, “Which way, which way?” And sometimes he’ll pause and ponder the question, but just for a moment, before he makes his move, a gut reaction, a way forward—he knows where to go and he leads me. What a good boy.

When I say make a list, I mean a list taken from the pages of the Surrealists’ handbook. I got the idea from an ex-boyfriend who worked as a photographer when I met him. We used to teach together in public schools, create curricula for youth centered on creativity and collaboration. He’d always make what he called a “shot list” for our students—a list of assignments that were open-ended enough to yield a wild array of results.

"Take a photo that bends light." "Take a photo that talks to the color green." Take a photo that made a decision."

When my current love, a musician, told me he was feeling lost and uninspired by his process, always following the same formula and feelings to create his albums, I suggested a “sound list.” Make a list of directions you could take a song and follow it, however you interpret the assignment.

He was game, so I made him a list:

Make a song that feels like clouds
Make a song that reminds you of trees
Make a song that sounds like your childhood
Make a song that asks too many questions
Make a song that melts in the heat
Make a song that loves to look at itself in the mirror
Make a song that sounds like a date with god
Make a song that a dog would love
Make a song that makes me cry
Make a song that travels only at night

I asked him how it was going the other day—with the sound list—he told me it was going well, that it had him pondering the shape and feel of clouds, that he was working with the ethereal and transient nature of those fluffy beings floating overhead. I told him it didn’t have to be so literal—that’s always a playful tension between us, me, the poet, him, the realist—but in all fairness, he got it, and he’s working on a song about clouds now, when just weeks before, the sky was dark.

I make all kinds of lists—it makes for a great poetry assignment as well—I used to ask my students all the time to make lists as poetic transmission. Make a list, I’d say, of things that go up, or things that go down. Things that move and things that remain still. Things you love and things you hate. Lists of places and faces, hatreds and favorites, lists of to-dos and to-don’ts. I got the idea from a book on teaching poetry to kids, when I was sure I’d be teaching poetry forever.

So I never made a list of other jobs I might have in a lifetime. Memory merchant. Nostalgia Dealer. Story Bender. Resident Director. Writing Consultant. Sentence Healer. Book Surgeon. Paragraph Peddler. Futurist Fawner. Instagram Ideologue. TikTok Talker. What else, what else may I be in this lifetime, at fifty, as women confess in quite a mess that they can’t find work for the life of them?

Make a list, I say.

A song list, a shot list, a poem list, a job list. A list of options and plans should the shit hit the fan, should the end and the beginning crash into such a chaotic flash we’ll all be stunned by its beauty! I know I could probably sell my chocolate chip cookies, famous just to my family members, but if the world only knew, if they knew! I could go door-to-door to floor my neighbors with their deliciousness.

My list will not include listlessness or listening, to be fair. I thought about going back to school to train as a therapist, but I think I’d make a better trapeze artist than deep listener, because I know at some point, I’d always want to interrupt and talk to them about the beauty of lists to make it all better. And no one wants to pay a therapist for quick solutions to their long list of life’s problems!

I can’t wait to hear my sweetheart’s cloud songs. And after that, a song about trees. My list for him is quite selfish, if I’m honest, it’s a list of sounds I want to hear as the soundtrack to these strange days and nights. I’m especially excited to hear what he does with that one about god—or that one about the song that loves to look at itself in the mirror—or that one song that only travels at night.

I don’t mean to congratulate myself, but I must admit the list as remedy is as good as any for these difficult and disturbing days. How the world keeps collapsing in on itself with words that no longer hold their meanings, how we in the world keep on walking through it, no longer certain of the ground beneath our feet—wobbly, wooly, woeful, wistful, a list of words that start with a letter of your choice, make it now, you’ll reach the letter Z and begin again with A.

Love you.

On trying to make peace with an America I barely recognize

7/4/2026

WRAPPED IN A FLAG of red, white and blue, I sat on the floor of the little den, going through my mom’s closet after she died. We were sorting through all her sewing stuff and fabrics, in a moment of delirium, I draped the American flag around me like a toga, a lady liberty of sorts. I can sense the irony behind my eyes.

I had just returned from living in East Africa for many years, and I was still contemplating a return back to the United States, in all of its complexity and chaos. In the years I was gone, the country had spiraled into a polarized funk I could barely recognize and it was hard to muster up any kind of patriotic feelings about any of it.

If you read enough about American history, after all, it’s hard to find any sort of love or reconciliation with a nation built on so much suffering and injustice. Americans abroad also got a bad rap, for the most part, as many of us travel and work with a sense of arrogance and condescension.

I spent a lot of my time in Zanzibar downplaying this aspect of my identity, and doing everything I could to signal a willingness and desire to learn about the culture I was in instead of importing some wonky version of the one in which I grew up.

Still, I worked at a place called the “American Corner” section of the State University of Zanzibar, for an organization called American Councils for International Education, and my job entailed supporting young Americans as they ventured to learn the East African language of Swahili for a semester or two in Zanzibar.

So it was kind of hard to avoid my identity as an American—and with this job came some pretty weird privileges like regular visits to the American Embassy for security briefings, and the one-time visit to a state luncheon with the Tanzanian president, with my students in tow, to express mutual goodwill and respect for each other’s nations, histories, and friendship.

So much has changed since then—the embassy still exists but certainly not the robust presence of American ambassadors and civil servants who once worked for USAID and other agencies—that all collapsed within the last year, as the current administration worked to contract our nation’s presence in the world, and shrink us back into a state of isolation and insularity.

That’s not to say the work Americans did abroad was entirely good—there’s plenty of corruption found running through those channels. But being so close to this kind of diplomacy also gave me a front row seat to view this country’s presence in other places, and the ways in which its messages of mutuality were once delivered.

This work also gave me a chance to reflect on how I would choose to talk about my country to those I met along the way. At times, I’ve been critical and disparaging, yes, but I also learned to call out this nation’s layers of goodness, even as I critique its deeply insane foundations of injustice and violence.

In Zanzibar, the local university students would often tell me they wished they could live in the United States one day, to study there or relocate. I’d tell them that America was indeed amazing but also deserving of way more critique than praise. I’m not sure if they understood what I meant, but I offered up the invitation to consider what might happen if they dreamed of staying instead of leaving.

I was able to have many conversations that helped me see my country from all sides and angles—and I’m still contemplating all the ways I appreciate this place—even as I critique it and rail against it.

I remember coming home after a long time away and marveling at the smoothness of the sidewalks for example. The way I was able to walk in a straight line for more than a minute without fearing I’d break my ankle on a jagged stone or jutting wire on my path.

I remember marveling at the insane abundance of options at the local Target—not to celebrate consumerism but just to feel the relief of knowing I could easily access what I needed without much struggle. I know we’re mad at Target now, but at the time, it was something I indeed noted as a privilege as compared to the sometimes endless search for basic needs on the islands, where everything is imported and somewhat expensive.

I remember appreciating the ease with which I could rely on electricity and other amenities like WiFi without worrying much about whether I’d stay connected during an important call or meeting online. Again, a small noticing but not something I could take for granted while living in Zanzibar, where power goes out all the time and calls are dropped, meetings cancelled.

I know some will say that these small appreciations are possible because of this country’s abuses of power that make these conveniences possible—and I acknowledge that—but I also do feel some sense of gratitude that, at the very least, this country does gives us some choices about how we respond to these imperfections and injustices, and actually make moves in the direction of liberty and justice for all.

I’m trying to make peace with a country that I barely recognize any more but continue to love.

In seventh grade, my crush refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I thought he was so cool for doing that—he stood his ground even when our history teacher admonished him and tried to make him stand up, even if he wasn’t going to say it, out of respect for the flag. He still refused and got kicked out of class! The rest of us were stunned by his commitment to protest and exercise his right of refusal.

I still think that’s part of what makes America great, the relative freedom to exercise one’s right of refusal. Of course, that’s all being tested now more than ever before, and it feels so uncertain and wobbly in these times, but I still hold out hope that this radical experiment in belonging, community, and justice is already set in motion and we’re still heading in the direction of its fundamental promise.

As a vintage collector, I often come across the strange and fevered scenes of Americana across the ages—images from history that make us shudder, cringe, and cry, memories that make us wonder, hide, and question everything—and yet, I also appreciate these images and objects as evidence of a country becoming itself, reaching toward the edges of its constitutional contours, striving to look itself in the mirror.

History holds up this mirror to us every day—and every day we also have the choice to look, or look away. I choose to stare back and also look forward, so to speak, take one step and then the next in the direction of a hope as radical of this nation’s becoming in the first place!

I don’t consider myself super patriotic as a person, but I also feel deeply grateful and in awe of what’s lead us to this moment, and admittedly optimistic that we still have time to steer the ship toward more peaceful and just shores.

Happy Fourth of July!

A recipe, an idea, an invitation—on welcoming a Friday morning with a wink

7/3/2026

A RECIPE, for Fran’s brownies, sits on my desk.

We call her Aunt Fran—though we’re not related by blood—and her brownies are the best. Fran was best friends with my mom, and growing up, we were kind of scared of her. She has this Bostonian no-nonsense tone in her voice, and took a tough approach to keeping us all in line.

I didn't understand her "meanness" growing up, but I truly appreciate her now, and we still talk from time to time. She called me "Mandy," and reassured me much later in life that she knew how hard it was to grow up with a mother like mine.

Bless them both.

I still have Aunt Fran's brownies recipe card with my mom’s writing on it, that slanted ease, as if the letters are parading off the page. They used to bake and cook all kinds of things together, spent hours in the kitchen together rolling crepes and egg rolls, mixing the ingredients for brownies and tuna noodle casseroles. They kept busy and seemed to have fun with each other, getting through life. Fran used to live down the street from us.

I’ve tried to adapt the brownie recipe in recent years—it’s too sweet, I never buy baker’s chocolate, I need to improvise—and yet, this recipe reveals its winning feature, the will to bend toward the sweetness of time.

AN IDEA came to me this morning, to write about how my friends are doing the most amazing things but they don’t toot their own horns or sing their own praises, and I sometimes wonder if I should just write about each of them, one story at a time, how they found what lights them up and went and did it, how they figured out the answer to that game we were all playing a few years ago during peak pandemic times:

“What would be your job during the apocalypse?”

"What’s the one thing you’re good at that you’d be willing to contribute to the commune in the after-times?”

And here we are—in the after times—making our offerings, quietly, with confidence and grace. The calligrapher friend, the critical response friend, the gardener friend, the massage therapist friend, the editor friend, the organizer friend, the ceremonies friend, the yoga for wellness friend, the writing workshop leader friend, the grant writer friend, all of us, saying “Here, I have this, and what do you have, and can we share?”

The world should know about these quiet geniuses. I bet you know so many amazing people, too, who we deserve to know—and our hearts would expand if we became aware of all the good they make and do in this life.

AN INVITATION came to me this morning, to go for brunch at a local spot that just opened up, with my sister and her two lovely friends, two creatives with warm hearts and sweet souls, who gather for a coffee or a fancy granola bowl or a bagel shmear, because it’s Friday, and a holiday weekend approaches, and everyone’s off work, if they still have jobs, so why not go for brunch?

I’m grateful for the invite, I’ve been trying to socialize more with friends, but I’m seriously underemployed and kind of broke when it comes to brunch. Besides, this morning I’ve been called to knead dough for another round of challah-making experiments.

So as the dough is rising in the blue and white marbled bowl, covered with a cloth featuring blue and white tiger prints, I decline the invite. I have a date with god, this morning, I tell myself, an appointment with the divine, to drop into deep time and knead my way toward a better understanding of how yeast works to come alive and bring us sustenance, our daily bread.

Pray for me, that the dough rises, but not too high, that the bread keeps its shape this time, that the center is sweet.

Shabbat shalom, and happy Fourth, to all grappling with the meaning of any of it, the boom and shock of it all.

On things that break and how to handle the inherent brokenness of this world

7/2/2026

A DREADED MESSAGE arrived this morning in my inbox—a message about a handmade terracotta jug that broke in transit from Skokie to Madison. How sad! How tragic. I'd wrapped it so carefully, first in thick brown packing paper, and then in layers of recycled bubble wrap, in a box with more paper and bubble wrap, with careful attention paid to the handle and rim.

And yet, and yet. The item broke. Despite all my fragile stickers plastered all over the tidy box, taped and taped again for added security. The postal service is pretty good, for the most part, but occasionally this happens and it always fills me with feelings of disappointment, for sender and receiver alike.

I fully refunded the client and then went on to file a claim with the post office. These days, it's easy to submit a claim with photos and usually, they honor it.

But it's never about the money, is it? Money comes, and money goes, it flows. But this old jug that has survived for many years and passed through many hands, has finally broken into parts.

The woman in Madison was still hopeful that she could glue it back together—to restore it back to its original form—but the fact that it had still broken had me feeling down this morning as I washed the dishes. I wished for the existence of a more fragile mail service, where carriers hold each package in their hands the whole way, never having to touch a conveyor belt or get tossed with disregard into a cavernous bin.

Have you seen how your package gets thrown like a football across the backroom of a post office, from one bin to the next? It's kind of wild. It's a miracle and a wonder that anything we send arrives whole anymore, to the next state or across the country!

I'm grateful that the buyer was understanding, overall, but I still feel a twinge of regret after I get a message like this, a feeling that I could have packaged it better, wrapped it with even more care, taken more time to ensure that brokenness would never even be an option.

But we all know brokenness is an inevitability when it comes to humans and our objects. Nothing lasts forever, not the objects or our bodies and beings. I sometimes stop to ponder the energetic trajectory of a broken thing—the slow motion arc from whole to broken, invisible to the human eye, and yet, somehow set in motion before we've even had time for an intervention.

My sister has a favorite plate. She texted us the other day to tell us that it had broken in the kitchen. Just like that, whole to broken in a flash. And we talked about how its brokenness had already been set in motion earlier that morning, but she wasn't yet aware of it, and I totally understood what she meant—the object is on its own path from nothing to something to fragments.

I've been reading a lot about quantum physics recently, attempting to understanding consciousness, the limits and possibilities of it. We learn about how entropy is the default state—all things stumbling toward states of decay. Life energy is the counterforce to this fact of entropy—we have to work toward and for life to sustain it—it's not a given.

So we tend to our objects to extend their lives as best we can, even in this throw-away culture, even in this time of abundance and waste, many of us still attempt this tending to the things that need our care and attention.

And yet, despite our best efforts, things break.

I think about that Pablo Neruda poem, his "Ode to Broken Things." I wrote about teaching this poem to fourth graders long ago, for Teachers and Writers magazine.

In the poem, "Neruda makes peace with all things broken; he portrays brokenness as a state as natural as wholeness. Things get broken, and it is no one’s fault:

It’s not my hands
or yours
It wasn’t the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.

I remember how my students helped me make a list of all kinds of things that break, not just objects: friendships, promises, glass, bones, toys, hearts, families, memories, trust, numbers, time, love, borders, laws, innocence, trees, vases, bodies, buildings, plates, war.

What are we supposed to do with all this brokenness?

Neruda's idea:

Let’s put all our treasures together
—the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold—
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.

But sometimes, it's not so simple. To glue a jug back together is one thing. It's the ultimate expression of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, to honor and elevate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence. But how do we stitch back together the brokenness of borders that break apart lovers, or systems that separate families, laws that lend themselves to longing, wars that wear down the heart's capacity to feel compassion?

Living in these times has tested our ability to hold space for other's suffering, allow for the stories that contradict our own, grant grace to actions that feel safe to some and a threat to others. I hear it in my friends' voices—the weariness, the impatience, the exasperation of these days—how do we hang on amidst so much brokenness?

I could wax poetic about the Jewish mystical notion of tikkun olam, repairing the world, which frames brokenness as an essential part of the human creation story.

According to 16th century mystics, God created the world with vessels that contained divine light. These vessels shattered, scattering these sparks of light into the material world. Each of us has the mystical and moral task of performing good deeds as a way to gather these sparks of light, repairing the fractured universe and moving toward harmony and wholeness.

It's a powerful idea—one with an organizing force behind it—to act with loving kindness in the direction of justice.

But how do we make sense of the current inertia of this calling, to restore and repair an inherently broken world?

In Upside-Down Love, a memoir told in two voices by Israeli lawyer Sari Bashi and her Palestinian partner, Omar, I read about the brokenness of Israel and Palestine, the barriers to movement among Palestinians, the impossibility of comprehension on either side to imagine the pain of the other, the extreme sense of threat on all sides, the sense of this threat as infinite and eternal, baked into the stories that steer us in one direction or the other.

The book details the way Sari and Omar attempt a love affair and marriage in this climate, against all the odds, and describes how the brokenness is so baked into their existence, the idea of its opposite doesn't even exist anymore.

"For Palestinians, it's impossible not to break the law, because everything is illegal," Bashi writes.

"And because everything is illegal, most of the laws are not enforced, because you can't really outlaw living. So every Palestinian, by virtue of being Palestinian, lives in a state of perpetual criminality."

She lives in Tel Aviv, her partner lives in Ramallah, a place forbidden to all Israelis. But Omar, as a Gazan, can't live in Tel Aviv, so Sari decides to take the risk to live with Omar in Ramallah.

"I can't observe the commas of the military order that forbids Israeli citizens from entering the city of Ramallah because they have placed my love outside the bounds of the law, and that's a law I have chosen to break."

Since October 7, I have remained silent in public spaces about my feelings toward Israel, the genocidal war in Gaza, the heartache of Jewish connection to such a contested land. There's nothing useful I can say online that would repair or restore anything.

But reading has been a balm for me, reading stories about Palestinian lives and Israeli lives alike, and trying to allow my heart to feel into the corners, creases, and cracks that social media can't see and won't touch and doesn't reflect—the in-between spaces where life keeps unfolding—between people, families, communities.

That's where the golden threads course through the broken parts. I'm not saying this with much elegance or grace, but that's what I feel at this moment, that repair and healing happen in these very subtle, silence places without words or language.

Sometimes the breakage is so big, a claim feels like a joke. It's never about the money, is it? It's about saying I'm sorry for the state of its brokenness, and doing what one can to make the situation a little better, a little more manageable, a little less devastating, less disappointing.

I wish that jug hadn't broken in the mail. It was a beauty, someone made it with painstaking attention and care. It's broken now, and the refund has been sent. The woman in Madison thanked me. We both went on with our lives.

But once-whole jug is still broken. Perhaps she'll glue it back together again, or not. But I like to believe that the way the two of us handled the broken thing with care says something about what's possible yet between humans in this very broken world.