I remember being on my yoga mat in the midst of a field less than five months ago, three thousand miles from where I am now, listening to a song on my phone on repeat while my body flowed in tandem. The spoken word-song begins, “It’s coming to pass. My country is coming apart…” But this time, what I had been listening to as a voice for the collective expanded to include my own private reality. I mouthed the words, feeling the shift of them in my gut and off my lips: “It’s coming to pass. My mar

For some more Mary Oliver goodness: “Tell me about Despair, yours & I will tell you Mine”—Rare Live Reading by Mary Oliver. I am learning this as a fledgling learns to test her wings. That day she hops from the familiar comfort of her nest onto a tree limb, stretches her wings, and drops into the naked space of air is monumental. But this is only the beginning of flight. She must do this again and again, falling to the earth. She risks injury, capture, and death. This is the only way she can

From another place and time, further on in our story, I can look back and see you here, right now—in this liminal space. I see how you shriveled for years within containers too small and dreamt of being free. I see your courage that began as a tiny match flame, lighting the end of a string of dynamite. I see you grabbing all that is true in your life, as the flame danced closer to the end, and running toward freedom with these cherished truths bundled in your arms and strapped to your back. I

I woke up the other day feeling the weight of anxiety lodged like two bricks on my chest, forcing shallow breaths. My heart was fluttering the way a bird does when sounding the alarm against a predator—wings flapping, feathers ruffled, voice ready for war—except, I didn’t want to move. And I knew I’ve got to dig into my toolbox quickly to attend to myself in this place, or I’d succumb to its power. You see, I’ve been waiting for a portal to open. All this time spent in limbo, living in a spac