Category: Faith

On blue moons, gods and fates, and living the commandment of our names

5/31/2026

A BLUE MOON IN SAGITTARIUS—I accept this exceptional celestial invitation to release and reset—the astrologers say this could be just the right moment to practice radical honesty and it’s all happening tonight!

In the age of astrological hyperbole, when every configuration of stars signals unprecedented transformation, it’s hard to make sense of any of it. But a full moon is a full moon, blue or otherwise, and I’m carrying the residual pain of impasses. I’ll howl at the moon tonight.

Outdated beliefs: the ones that begin with “I used to” and end with “but now I…” Emotional baggage: goodbye to the good lie that kept me tied to you. Personal truths: the morning was never mine but I made peace with it; I still love smoking a cigarette—especially at night—even though I’ve sworn them off as “so good, but not for me.”

What are you carrying around that you need to set down—at least for a night or two? This moon will follow you around and tug at your heart strings, asking for a bit of attention and an honorable mention with the gods of fate.

In high school, we read the bible as mythology and then we read all about the greek gods. It never occurred to me how radical and revolutionary this could be—how offensive, actually—until I got older and saw with my own eyes how seriously the literalists took the word of god.

What I gathered, then and now, is that humans act in god-like ways when pressed or stressed and their transcendent deeds get inscribed into the collective books of belief. I read this morning how in Hebrew, the word for crisis and birth pains are the same--mashber--and this amazed me, to consider how what the body perceives as pain is also an opening—a beginning—a rebirth.

Thank you, Rachel*, for telling me about this. I’ve spent so much time and energy attempting to contain the part of me I call Jewish that I’ve tended to ignore the beautiful wisdom embedded in our ancient language and traditions. I find myself taking secret passageways back to my faith—offline and undocumented—one step at a time.

It’s sweet to think of the time my parents put into naming me. In Jewish tradition, our names are commandments. Amanda comes from Latin for love, “she who must be loved” or “worthy of love” or “beloved,” well which one is it! Love is the commandment, that’s clear. Supposedly there are millions of Amandas worldwide. So much love. So much love!

I was never crazy about my name but I accepted it. I’ve also been called Dodin and Didi, names of endearment, names indicating that I have been loved, am worthy of it. My daddy wanted to name me Deirdre, I guess there’s some family lore that my parents disagreed on what to call me.

This morning I thought about my dad, gone but ever-present in our lives, urging us on and transmitting messages of love—commandments, really. A memory popped into my mind of that time when my dad took me and my sisters to see Flashdance, that movie about a woman steelworker who aspires to become a professional dancer.

I know, it’s kind of scandalous, right? This was the 1980s when taking kids to R-rated movies was not that big of a deal and we felt grown enough anyway to handle all that we saw that afternoon. Of course, we loved every single minute of it—the triumphant moment when she’s finally auditioning for the dance panel and nails it!

But what I remember most about watching this film at the age of eight is coming home and dancing with abandon on the green carpet of a lawn in front of our childhood home and feeling whipped up with big love for creative possibilities. I spun in circles with my arms spread wide open singing Irene Cara’s 1983 anthem, “Flashdance.”

“Take your passion—and make it happen!” I belted out every word of that song, which I still have memorized and on every playlist.

OK, so what does this have to do at all with a blue moon or faith or crisis or the meaning of our names? There’s this feeling that life is about breaking free—moments of restraint and release—times of holding on and letting go.

And whatever the moon’s messages are tonight for me—I’m listening!

*Rachel Goldberg-Polin, author of When We See You Again.

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On yahweh power and hiding out in god's face

5/24/2026

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GOD APPEARED TO ME through the leaves and the trees when I was a kid and then not for a long while—that stretch of schooling when rational thinking and material evidence ruled—until I was on my own long enough to start having conversations again with the invisible.

I learned to pray and I learned to convey my requests and I learned to convert faith into a more secular—and socially acceptable—hope. But faith is a much more enduring presence than hope, which often feels fleeting.

I memorized my torah portion at the age of thirteen, commanded to craft an essay on the themes within it. Imagine, at this age, having to say something to a room full of congregants about the deeper meaning of darkness?

But I tried, oh, I tried. God had already told me by that time that I was a poet, a scribe, and I abided. My parents hoped I’d hold ongoing conversations with god but I grew up at a time when loving god and expressing love for god was not cool—it was, at the very least, private—and at most, much too much.

There’s something sweet about believing that god believes in you. I think I held onto that even if I wasn’t talking about it to anyone, not even myself. It’s easy to lose faith in god and still pray to the out-there presence of an infinite beyond and say, “help me,” and “see me,” and “protect me.”

Traveling to places where god’s presence was so obvious, undeniable, and enduring made it easier to start weaving god-presence into my existence. I thank those I met in Zanzibar for reintroducing me to a holy presence in everyday life.

Call to prayer, everywhere. Every time I ate, a prayer on the lips. Every time I entered or exited a doorway, a prayer behind or in front of me. Every time I said hello or goodbye, a prayer for me and the other. Life got rearranged around protection, peace and love, on high.

I learned (or learned again) that all has already been written. I learned (or learned again) that we are puzzle pieces in an immense scattered picture of the universe. I learned how my breath and presence and attempts at consequential kindness held profound meaning.

When I wasn’t talking to god—when I was hiding myself from the gaze of god—when I forgot how to hide myself in god’s face—I was also reeling from the feeling that I didn’t know where I was going or why I’d ended up anywhere.

I thank the Christian mystics for giving me some language for this.

I was raised in a Jewish home—but not the kind that stitched me into a community of believers—ours was more of a collective nod to a history that had hurried away from us. I circled the faith like an American teenager would—with a side-eyed curiosity.

My parents never talked much about their feelings about Judaism or their connection to Jewish life. But my dad always praised yahweh—and that’s the name he used often and always—the most sacred name for god in the holy scriptures.

“Yahweh power’s where it’s at!” he’d chant to us as girls. Can you imagine? I am who I am. I am the one who exists. Daddy! This was the kind of god-love I grew up with—a cheer from the tired jazz man who worked a day job as an English teacher. Daddy, who worshipped music as if it was god himself in a robe of songs!

At fifty, I find it’s easier and most relieving to praise yahweh on walks in the woods, in bird sanctuaries—the magic hedge—the edge of lakes, the fuzzy dunes, all that houses and protects the divine—houses of worship, of course, but also the least expected residences—the nest, the cave, the cloud.

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On monasteries as schools and learning to listen to silence

5/17/2026

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MONKS CURL UP with their cats in caves they carved into cliffs surrounding the ancient rock-hewn churches of Lalibela. When I peeked inside of one while walking the path from one church to the next, I caught a glimpse of a sleeping ascetic next to her white cat and an open prayer book, its pages flapping in the wind. The green metal door to her dwelling stood ajar in the mid-afternoon light. A single red rose bloomed by the door.

Alone in Lalibela for four days, I found my way there to these cliff dwellings while walking around the churches. At first, I explored this holy place by myself, which I would have preferred. But later, I reluctantly accepted the help of two persistent guides who wouldn’t leave my side until I eventually surrendered to their assistance. All I remember now about the cliffside monks were their mustard yellow scarves and the many cats that paraded back and forth on the narrow paths in the mountains.

“A monastery is a school” in which one “learns from God how to be happy,” writes Thomas Merton about his decision to enter beyond the gates of Gethsemane. He’d been so drawn to the silence, relieved to have his final conversations with the peopled world, that even entering its folds in the depths of Kentucky winter seemed to please him, gardens barren and ready for new seeds come spring.

There’s monastic intention and then there’s joining a monastery. The master of the novices asks him, “Does the silence scare you?” to which he replies no, he’s entranced by it, and feels that he’s entered heaven. I don’t know why I’ve been so drawn lately to writings by and about mystical Catholics, but I suppose it has something to do with this lifelong tug to know what’s beyond the here and now—and record my observations about what I experience—however fraught or foiled by illusion.

I admire those who can dip into pools of silence and stay there long enough to tell us what they hear.

When I was teaching poetry in public schools, I led a writing exercise in which I asked fourth graders to “go inside the silence,” and see if any images, words, or sounds appear. They always came back to the room with delightful ideas—one kid said that being in the ocean while it’s raining is like “double-swimming” and I loved that then and I still love it now.

I may not be a thousand percent comfortable with silence but I still work with it—not perhaps in the monastic sense but in a contemplative one. I notice a squirrel dead on the sidewalk that’s so silent in its deadness while the wind still blows through its delicate fur. I notice the single wasp trapped in the window panes in the upstairs bedroom and I think about how I wish I could save it and I also fear that if I tried, it’d sting me.

Noticing is a bit pretentious when you announce it, I suppose. The way memorizing a poem might get perceived as pretentious, or thinking your familiarity with silence is any more precious than anyone else’s date with infinity—but the difference is that saying it might inform one’s relationship with silence for years to come—with poetry—with wasps—and so why not say so if there’s one tiny ripple you’ve made in the silent waves?

All I’m saying is, say it.

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On saint interference, spontaneous rebellion, pity spirals and other fragments

5/15/2026

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SAINT INTERFERENCE—how they march when the stars fall from the sky and the moon turns red with blood and the sun refuses to shine, the saints go marching in, so the song goes! You know where I learned the most about saints—at the thrift store. I met Saint Theresa, patron saint of flowers, there. I also met Saint Dymphna, patron saint of mental illness, via billboard transference on a highway in Indiana. And wouldn’t you know that today, May 15, is her feast day. There must be some reason why I’m thinking of her today.

SPONTANEOUS REBELLION—of mind and spirit and it comes swift, this sudden awareness to pivot, this turning of directions, a subtle yet firm shift in regard, a reckoning, a way back, a forceful no, a distinct demarcation of borders and boundaries otherwise lacking until the moment you discover the road you thought would go on forever ends. To rebel quells doubt. To rebel fells fatigue. To rebel smells like springtime with the saints—a turning inward for the first time or the last is a secret you share with the sky.

VIVID CONVICTION—where indecision once stalked me I could now walk with the clarity in each step toward the grand doors and down the generous hallways that would lead to an ease in my posture and stance toward the future. The message to keep moving comes from the bird with a worm in its mouth this morning on my windowsill. I told the bird the memo has been received by me, the perceiver of all things taking shape in the world right in the center of my mind’s eye! Good morning, bird, I see you.

BAD ATTENTION—comes from wanting to avoid rejection and so therefore walking straight into the garbage heap, we think we’ll find nuggets of gold there but it’s dipped in disease and when I say I wanted to stay up all night with the man who wrapped his long dreads around my neck like a scarf I mean it but the arrangement didn’t come with eyes or kindness, it came with a long night on a mattress on the floor, the night before. And in the morning, I pushed him out the door and said please don’t come back because I won’t live here anymore, come tomorrow.

RECKLESS REDIRECT—when friends who texted daily cease their pings and friends who sent you invitations for a home-cooked meal quietly disappear from the window of a shared view, and lovers who pulled you from the deck of tarot cards tried to find meaning in your body as a symbol, and lovers who carried you to the clinic to check on your queasy stomach and solar plexus spasms and then left you there, there’s a kind of reckless redirect in their kind regards and the terms have changed but the contract still drips with drops from an earlier ink.

PITY SPIRAL—I try not to go there these days but when I feel it coming on I get down low on the ground and press my forehead to the wooly carpet and marvel at the stitching and wish I knew a thing or two about a heritage craft I could carry with me to the end of my days. I can’t do the high-highs or the low-lows anymore but my panic attacks have taught me that no amount of stress could take me down the road of self-loathing at this point. Once I realized that stress made me sick, I learned to escape the labyrinths we get dropped into with despairing dynamics and at this point, the only time I encounter a pity spiral is when I’m reading about a woman in her early twenties trying to find love.

(note to self: when I find, after reading several books this morning, two-words phrases that feel like doors I need to push open and see what’s in there, I get to sit with thoughts like this, and let them go).

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On learning to wait for meals and messages from God

2/26/2026

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Travel taught me how to wait—for a meal, a message, a bus ride out of town. I waited, and waited. In the blistering heat. Under the shade of a tree. Next to a mango stand or phone card man. In dark parking lots at dawn. Near the coffee stalls, enthralled. By the port, for my ferry, in a flurry of sweat and swagger. I waited.

I carried a tiny black Nokia back in those days. I could text and make calls, even pick a ring tone, but beyond that, no big cloud existed on which to float except the one in my own mind. I dialed up my daydreams and surfed the waves within, scrolled through my rolodex of regrets.

When I studied at the University of Nairobi in 1996, I stayed at a dormitory called Stella Awinja, near campus. There wasn’t much in the area—a YWCA across the canopied street, lined with a few fruit sellers, and a few old men frying fish in deep black kettles bubbling over with hot oil.

One afternoon, I decided to try the little restaurant down the road. I lost my mind waiting for my food to arrive. (I was an American baby, I had to learn).

Here’s the scene: The waitress asked me what I wanted from the menu. I pointed to several options. Each time, she told me they were out. Finally, I asked what was available. She pointed to a curry stew with rice. I agreed. She shuffled out of view. I waited. I read my book. An hour and half later, my food arrived. I asked her what took so long. She’d gone to the market and back for the ingredients. I felt like a guest star in a sitcom with a laugh track. I never went back.

My tolerance for delays expanded as I landed further out afield.

Monks in monasteries say meditation is about waiting for God. Philosopher Simone Weil also talks about prayer as a kind of waiting—you don’t go looking for God, you wait for God to find you. Christian Wiman says the poet lives in perpetual states of waiting, “enduring silence.” I can wait as long as I’m in motion inside a promise I’ve kept to myself to keep going. It’s only when it feels that life stops that I get sad or enraged. Waiting can feel then like a betrayal, no God in sight.

When we wait, we locate ourselves in the interior. Now, we pick up our phones for quick hits to swat away the boredom. But back in the day, we’d climb inside ourselves and look around for some yarn to pull or shelves to organize inside the mind’s mansions. When the bus breaks down, we can experience it as a delay or an adventure.

I did fear once though, on the road somewhere between Lushoto and Arusha, that I’d never make it home again. And I couldn’t daydream in the heat.

I remember those enormous sisal plants that stood tall on the side of the road like gentle plant mothers that had seen it all and told me I’d be OK. Weird to think of them now, all ancient, prickly and green. I also remember how the preacher passengers on the bus cracked open their bibles and just started reading aloud in the middle of the road in the middle of the day in the middle of the waiting. Parts got replaced, our fear, erased, and we were cruising again back to the city.

The letter home is a daydream. The letter home is a meditation. The letter home is a prayer. I’ve written many thinking the letter was about the other person. But we all know by now the letter is about spending time with yourself while keeping another in mind, your witness. Dear you also means dear me.

Where do you go to practice patience these days? Where do you find glimmers of anticipation? I think a lot about these ideas but at this very moment, I’m writing my way out of the dream and into a calendar. Like you, I’ve become impatient with myself and what a day can do (what I can do in a day). The day as a unit of measure. The hours strung together like a series of letters to myself.

Transit Slips, #26

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Mama, malaria, money, and sitting in the rocking chair of one's feelings

2/20/2026

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To sit in the rocking chair of one’s feelings. Sleep in the bed of one’s regrets. Wake up in the house of one’s dreams. Tend to the fields of one’s history. Gather the smooth stones of one’s hopes. Alphabetize the memories of one’s many lives. I’ll start with the letter M.

Mama—how you called me from the lobby of a Landmark seminar with your scripted apology, how you sounded like you’d been held hostage by strangers, how that calm, sweet voice wasn’t you but someone hoping to find you, how you wished to make amends but had to go, a new session was starting soon, how you later told me you were washing toilets for discounted sessions, how you later said it was all in your head, how your Clearwater friends were murky.

Malaria—how you got so sick your muscles might have snapped in the midday sun, how you broke into a sweat during the night and woke up soaked and delirious, how your boyfriend walked you to the clinic at 8 a.m. and you read those medical journals from Muscat to distract your mind, how they poked you with needles and pumped you with fluids and smeared you with ointments and told you to stay a week; how you feared you’d never feel hungry again, the pungent smell of rotting garbage outside the clinic window made you gag, how you made it home but your mind was still maligned; how you swear you can still remember the exact mosquito that bit you.

Money—how you made it, saved it, spent it, resented it, hoarded it, scored it, shared it and bared it, how it’s not fair that you carried loads of it to and from air-con blasted banks on the islands while everyone around you clicked their coins for porridge; how you had to watch them count millions of paper shillings; how you waited for hours in lines at ATMs, stuffing those bills into your kitenge cloth pouch, walking through town hoping no one could sniff your wealth; how your ex got kicked out of one for waiting barefoot by the door; how you tried to give as much as you got but you didn’t have much, it’s all relative, right? how you watched your wealthy friends withdraw so much more than they needed and kept it all for themselves; how the requests kept coming, for funerals and weddings, graduations and trips abroad for pharmacy school, how you complied, how you lied, how you hated to need it, how you longed to have enough.

What about those “self-serving liberal illusions” we all suffered? It all gets revealed to the traveler who tries to make herself at home. Zanzibar changed me, and maybe I changed the lives of a few folks I met there, even if that doesn’t matter now. I’m sitting in the rocking chair of all my feelings, alphabetizing memories for the records.

You might ask me what my mom’s brief stint in Landmark had anything to do with suffering from malaria or my fragmented thoughts about money. Not much, I’ll laugh and say out loud if you’ll listen, not much! But that’s what’s beautiful about writing into the void. The editor can take off her coat and loosen her grip on reality. And when this happens, so much appears to us out of the infinite mystery—phantom feelings, a myriad of forms and phenomenon—all it takes is a bit of madness to catch it all when it comes flying through the mind-sky.

Transit Slips, #20

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The spirituality of decisions and getting to the near from faraway

2/19/2026

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Is the past a foreign country, or just a closed room inside the mind’s mansion?

I open the door from time to time to rummage. Sometimes I open a window. Other times, it requires a flight and a passport to get anywhere in the before times (if now is the measure).

I met foreigners like me who landed on the islands of Zanzibar with a lack of clarity about their plans. Some spoke with such disdain about the ills of capitalism and the “West”—their moral righteousness at a fevered pitch—all while situated in their neocolonial lifestyles, living like kings with servants.

This stung but I could never name it then because I was also playing along. There’s much the “resident” must ignore to make it through their days.

I’ve suffered from chronic back pain since I was 16, but I mostly had it under control until I was living 8,000 miles away from home and feeling stuck in the life I’d sunk into as a freelance writer. During this period, I often stayed at the fancy boho chic resort owned by a friend who’d gotten burnt out in banking and fled to live a luxe life on her own terms.

One weekend, my pain exceeded all knowable limits and I was laid out. My friend called me a taxi and her staff helped me fold my distorted body into the back seat to see a chiropractor in a village further down on the coast. He ran a pay-what-you-can clinic in this idyllic fishing village that had not changed in thousands of years but was now starting to strain under the weight of reckless tourism.

The chiropractor worked on my back in the quiet, clean room with the fan whirring overhead. And then he whispered something to me that I will never forget: “Are you afraid to make decisions,” he asked.

I was caught off guard with my head faced down on the table. I waited for him to say more. He went on to say that although he hesitated to share spiritual insights with clients, he was getting the message from on high that my back pain had to do with my chronic indecision about whether to stay longer or go home.

I cried. I thanked him. I left. I returned to my friend’s fancy resort and heard her scold her staff for speaking Swahili in front of elite guests from (white) South Africa. I often felt sick to my stomach when I lived in Zanzibar but never knew to name it anxiety.

The truth is that indecision often gripped me on the road. But I’d have a good day—an extraordinary day of simple sensory pleasures—and congratulate myself for staying.

Then I’d have a miserable day—like that time my ex left me alone on the ferry with a chipped tooth just before it took off because he was angry with me for berating him for getting there so late—and I had to visit the dentist in Dar alone, walking around like a zombie afterward with numb lips, waiting for the ferry back at dusk.

I wish I knew all those days before that any decision is the right decision, we make it right through our memories—meaning comes later, experience comes first.

Rebecca Solnit talks about this in “The Faraway Nearby,” this distance between the near and the far of every life. At some point, through an old photograph, a talk with an old friend, an old letter reread, we realize, “without noticing it,” we have “transversed a great distance.”

“The strange has become familiar and the familiar has become if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.”

The door is open or the door is closed. Opening a window expands what any of us sees on the horizon. It also means we also risk letting the world “out there” see what’s within.

Transit Slips, #19

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On holy translation, radical teaching and caring for rabbits

2/11/2026

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In kindergarten, I was the keeper of the rabbits. During winter break, I carried the twitchy-nosed pair home in their metal cage and took care of them for two weeks. I always think it’s because I was the tallest person in my class that made my teacher entrust me with the rabbits. And I also trace this moment back to my earliest memories of hitching my worth to how well I could handle my responsibilities.

This snowballed into intense anxiety about getting good grades and excelling in school, eager to please my teachers by anchoring the line, turning off the lights, stepping up as the companion to kids bullied by everyone else. I spent the entire day at an amusement park with Galit for this reason. She needed a friend and my teachers assigned me to her as a companion. It was a long and lonely day with way too much sunlight on my freckled skin.

To this day, I aim for straight A's and 5-star reviews. So ridiculous. Triste mai vrai.

Yes, I pressed pennies on the train tracks and hung out under the viaducts, waiting for boys with wallet chains and cigarettes to appear like saints in the parade of my middle-school fantasies. I puffed on a few cigarettes and curled up in the dark with one in particular, his parents were going through a difficult divorce, which made it feel like neither of us had parents, mine bickered and then they went silent. I spent a lot of time at parks in the summertime, lugging around 19th century poetry books to impress myself and any kind of god watching down on me.

Our whole lives are spent in translation, converting words, turning over stones, transferring the water of our memories from one bucket to the other. I learned to decode Hebrew in a dingy basement synagogue but it wasn’t the kind that led me to modern poetry, only to the burning bush. I spent hours pacing the desolate parking lot in the freezing cold winter, waiting for my father to pick me up. He was often late, but he came with sliced challah from the local bakery. Italian beef sandwiches steaming in a yellow basket was another version of a formal apology.

The first time I read real literature in translation was in high school. Milan Kundera: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “100 Years of Solitude.” Just the titles alone made my heart seize up with longing to find a new language for my budding pain! I’m so glad my teacher Ann Goethes assigned these texts to us. Bumping into her at a pro-choice rally downtown when I was 15 felt like an initiation and a pact with a feminist future. I felt seen.

Around this time, I read the bible from cover to cover. I was raised in a reform Jewish home in Skokie, with parents whose holy spaces were more prairie and flea market than temple. But I took a class on the bible as mythology, taught by a man named Barry Deardorf, who used to be a reverend, and we read through each and ever miracle and mishap as myth. I didn’t realize how radical this teaching was until much later, when it was much easier and more obvious to question everything.

Transit Slips, #11

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travel far now

On blue moons, gods and fates, and living the commandment of our names

On yahweh power and hiding out in god's face

On monasteries as schools and learning to listen to silence

On saint interference, spontaneous rebellion, pity spirals and other fragments

On learning to wait for meals and messages from God

Mama, malaria, money, and sitting in the rocking chair of one's feelings

The spirituality of decisions and getting to the near from faraway

On holy translation, radical teaching and caring for rabbits

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