The box was the last I opened during the clean out. A bare lightbulb lit the space overhead, a sliver of sun filtered through the basement window. I removed the gloves I wore to lug out bags of garbage once I saw the care with which the box had been packed. Tissue paper and velvet slid between my fingers. Inside: Wedgwood china, two boxes of velvet-wrapped sterling silverware, two crystal coupes. The box was made of cardboard. On its side in marker it read: Hope Chest.

Mavis’s family had built the house. She was eighty-nine when her children moved her back to Long Island and we bought the house in The Catskills.

I never learned who the hope was for. Only that it had been packed with great care, and tucked away.*

***

It’s well past bedtime and I’m lying in bed, face lit by my screen, brightness lowered so I don’t wake Ben. I’m reading the news, jumping from one article to the next, my stomach tightening. I’d pick at my cuticles, but need both hands to hold the phone and swipe. I open Instagram instead, a cacophony of disjointed images and video, a barrage — the Peanuts gang is singing The Smiths, bombs are dropping, politicians are preening, and here is thirty seconds on the best way to mulch my flowerbeds.

I land on a blonde influencer with a Parisian accent who explains the difference between the way American women and French women apply their makeup. We do it wrong. They understand skin care. Luckily, for around $90 I can have the kit that fixes me. She looks calm. Refreshed. Youthful.

The ad follows me for weeks, screen to screen, Instagram to YouTube to Facebook to some news site I was only half reading. The first time, I roll my eyes. The next time, I catch myself running a hand across my face, checking for dry spots. Maybe I need a serum and not a tinted moisturizer. In each ad a new woman sweeps the product across half her face and shows me how little concealer it takes — a swipe of lip oil, a few dots worked into the cheeks, and there she is, awake to the world.

I add it to the cart. I don’t even have to fetch my credit card. It’s saved there on my phone. Convenient. I pay the extra $5.90 to have it arrive the next day. When it arrives, I immediately apply it to my face, examining my skin up close in my brightly lit bathroom mirror, wrinkling my face with doubt before tossing it into my overstuffed makeup bag, next to the three tubes of once-promising, identical creams.

Perhaps it’s your makeup bag, perhaps it’s your house.

This is how we were raised. A good citizen is a good consumer.

“Show your confidence. Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.” Giuliani, post-9/11.

Now the ads tell me to purge my closet of everything I don’t want anymore, to make some money back on Vinted, Poshmark, eBay, which god knows we might need when the AI takes our jobs. You have a goldmine at home, or maybe in the storage space you rented when the closet bulged and the boxes threaten the doorways. A mini-Collyer mansion. And when you sell it all, the ads tells me, you’ll have enough money to start all over again. Rinse and repeat.

Marie Kondo asked what sparked joy. But do we even know what that is anymore? We were told it was consumption, the gratification of buying something new and having it arrive. The serum promised joy and delivered a thud of reality. It held no magical power, no joy. I sort plastic and cardboard packaging into the recycling bin, a pang of empty longing in my belly.

I pay an extra $2.99 to have Amazon send me toothpaste and a new lamp. The app lets me track the driver, a small blue dot floating on the streets of Manhattan, coming closer and closer to my home.

I need the toothpaste. I want the lamp.

Our longing is truncated. We have no idea what sparks joy, because there is no unmet desire. But longing and delayed gratification are uncomfortable. We ask our limbic system to quiet its ceaseless hunger for a quick hit of dopamine, to let the prefrontal cortex do its job and weigh the consequences. We stack the Amazon boxes at the door, the drained exhaustion inside.

We spent our lives honing our need for more and now we yearn to quiet that need for more. There is even a drug for appetite now. We call it “noise,” that biological, physiological state that signals a need for fuel that is so intertwined with our emotions that we can’t pull them apart. A wonder drug, but what is living if not that hunger that makes us feel alive?

Did Mavis understand something when she swaddled the good china in the box, treasuring it?

There are few things that make me feel more abundant than standing in our kitchen and looking at the full jars of grains and nuts lined up above the sink. I don’t want to touch the jars, I like keeping them full for a day we might need them. Until then, I will just gaze at the bounty as I wash away the remnants of our dinner, running the soapy brush over the dishes and letting the warmth of the water pour over my hands, breathing in the scent of lemon and eucalyptus, not needing anything more than this moment.

Except that reminds me we’re running low on hand soap.

I’ll order that in just a minute.

*Today’s newsletter grew out of “Hope Chest,” my piece in Kathy Curto’s anthology What Are You Waiting For, out on July 21, 2026. Mavis, and the box that started all of this, live there in full. You can pre-order it here or here or here. I’ll also be reading from it this summer at the following times. Please join us. I’d love to see you.

P&T Knitwear, LES, Thursday, July 23, 6:30 pm

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, Tuesday, July 28, 6:30 pm

Bruce’s Garden, Inwood, Wednesday, August 12, 6:30 pm

(Note: I wrote this before the big win. So, multiply the below by one gazillion.)

Third quarter, and the Knicks are down twenty-nine. Spectators, if not fans, start filing out of the Garden. I imagine they did that kind of math where you decide to let something go before it’s taken away.

But then the unthinkable happens. The players keep shooting. They keep making it. And by the time OG Anunoby tips the ball in with 1.2 seconds left, the roof has lifted off the Garden, screams are ricocheting from the city streets, airplanes in the sky, and every bar in the Universe is clattering, chanting, crying: Go Knicks!

I don’t know a lot about basketball, but I do know what happened this week. It was the largest comeback in Finals history. And it was also a comeback of sorts for the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people who decided at the same moment to start believing again. To believe in hope.

It feels scary to believe in hope these days. I don’t need to list all of the horrors that might serve as proof of hope being a bad bet, and yet this year has shown me repeated moments of people choosing to believe over the siren call of cynicism.

I learned the term for it: collective effervescence, a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. It describes the electric feeling of energy, harmony, and connection that occurs when a group of people gathers to engage in a shared purpose. It gives us belonging, shared identity, emotional intensity, and the felt sense of being part of something larger than ourselves. Turns out it explains why I am so moved at parades, when people sing together, when dancing with my friends (happy birthday !) — the sound of many Oms becoming one.

The Knicks gave us a reason to feel unified. We feel seen. We feel less alone, whether we’re winning or losing. We’re in this together.

The Knicks aren’t alone. We’ve seen this before just this year.

Heated Rivalry. My group texts were lit up with stories about hockey. Hockey. I swatted the references away for a while, skeptical that anything to do with hockey might have to do with me. But the more I heard people I care about and respect say the show had changed them in some significant way, more than just made them horny, but restored their hope, I became intrigued. Within three episodes I was spreading the same Gospel. People, including show runners and writers, can surprise you with a story that debunks the typical narrative that love is dangerous and will lead to heartbreak. Can you believe that the opposite is possible too?

Minneapolis. Four days after an ICE agent killed Renee Good, a few hundred people gathered and sang “This Little Light of Mine” and “We Shall Overcome” in English and in Spanish. What started with a small group grew into hundreds. What started as a seed blossomed into a movement. I wish they had not needed to, but they showed how it’s possible to fight oppression with song, and that every message lobbed at us about polarization, that our differences are too great, that coming together isn’t worth the effort, that we should bury our heads or build a bunker, is a lie. We have the power to alchemize grief into a force that can carry us all.

The Moon. In April, we were led by a group of tremendous astronauts who taught us how to walk the walk of hope, without stepping foot on the moon. They spent ten days looping its far side, farther from Earth than any human has ever been, and the way they spent that time they taught us how special it is to be on this planet with one another. “Moon Joy,” it seems, was never really about the Moon. It was about Earth, about how rare it is to be here at all, in this company.

We long for connection, even if inertia keeps us from coming together. That longing is the thing we can build on, fight with, heal through.

A stadium, a group chat, a freezing street corner, a quarter-million-mile journey. It turns out they have a lot in common. It turns out we do too.

***

PS Some of you know that I work as a media strategist and producer for the On Being Project, including the podcasts On Being and Poetry Unbound. Krista created a beautiful series called the Hope Portal, which we published in 2025. I offer it to you in case the idea of practicing hope appeals, or maybe even if it doesn’t (yet). In it, she leads you through a beautiful practice of developing your own hope muscle.

FDR

Inwood, where else?!

When I graduated from j-school it was tradition to rip up the pages of the publication you hoped to work for, tossing the strips into the air. It was like a wish on a dandelion pod, spreading seeds of aspiration across the quad. I tore up pages of The New Yorker and The Village Voice, where I hoped to spill barrels of ink and tens of thousands of words.

Instead of the skyscraper with a famous lunchroom or an iconic downtown building, I went to work for a chain of community papers on a nondescript block at a nondescript desk.

I was lucky to be given the chance to write 1,500 word stories plus dozens of 50-100 word blurbs each week.

It was 2006. And I was happy. I was a working journalist.

In time, the threat of layoffs grew. The Great Recession came and went. I ducked and weaved and kept reporting. I started my own neighborhood blog. My work shifted to digital platforms where I struggled to cram big ideas into 140 characters. Later still, I left writing for a byline altogether and shifted my focus to strategy.

That doesn’t mean I stopped wanting to be a reporter and writer. It doesn’t mean I didn’t mourn the loss. But staying in journalism meant letting go of the fantasy of journalism and finding a way to stay in the game. Doing so has meant holding a certain level of grief alongside the mission.

That is what I thought of while watching The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Spoiler Alert.

The film opens with Andy Sachs winning a prize for her investigative reporting at the same moment her entire team, seated beside her, is informed by text that they’ve been laid off. It’s been 20 years since she worked at Runway and as fate would have it, they want her back. Once again she asks if it’s possible to do her “real” work in a place like that.

It’s certainly shinier than the kind of journalism she’s been doing, but far less glossy than when we left it 20 years ago. Runway (a.k.a. Vogue) and Miranda Priestly (a.k.a. Anna Wintour) are much diminished and need saving.

Andy says she wants to go back to Runway so she can hire her friends as writers. She can finally move out of her uptown apartment, where the water runs brown. But what is clear is that she believes she can finally win Miranda’s respect, if not love.

Hijinks ensue.

Miranda hosts a party at her Hamptons home with several famous journalists in attendance: Kara Swisher, Tina Brown, Molly Jong-Fast, Jia Tolentino. The scene looks the same as the fashion show. High glamour, glitz. Andy is invited because she landed a big and respectable story, yet slips right back into the fantasy of what it means to be a player in this world. She shows up in borrowed clothing from the fashion closet and immediately stains it, a sort of foreshadowing that not all that glitters is gold.

We have an acronym in 12-step groups that serves as a warning sign of what might endanger your recovery: HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired). One friend in another program told me he and his friends added an F at the end (HALT-F). F is for Fabulous. When I feel like I am too “fabulous,” thinking I’m better than, it might be time for me to call my sponsor.

I get Andy. I also wanted to be a JOURNALIST. I thought that label would mean I had arrived, that I was a serious person. It would make me “worthy.”

I wanted to work for those publications not just to write or even do good, but to experience the fantasy of making it in New York, in media, in life.

Did I also want to be flown around the world? Yes. Did I get to do that? Yes. Did it sometimes feel like I was flying too close to the sun? Yes.

Did I melt? No.

I had already tried out the fabulous life early in my 20s and landed flat on my face, with little to my name, destruction in my wake, and a mattress in my mother’s New Jersey basement. In recovery, the F in HALT-F was the scariest word in many ways. I didn’t melt because I had a healthy fear of the F.

While watching the movie, I longed for the simple fantasy of the first film, where there was no deeper meaning behind needing to borrow dresses from the company closet in order to be respected. Or maybe just the fantasy of being 31 and still believing that a $3,000 handbag could cure all that ails.

Yes, I sometimes trip on latent desire for the dresses, the luxurious apartment, the fancy parties. All things I’ve been told to want since I first started watching TV ads, movies, flipping through teen and women’s magazines.

But I’ve also chosen poetry, creative writing, gardening, being part of a community, being a wife, daughter, sister…and a journalist.

From this vantage, perched on the tippy top of Manhattan with its view of the George Washington Bridge, teeny tiny skyscrapers in the distance, and the sunset over Inwood Hill Park, I return to the knowledge I had at 20-something: that I could not keep living a life centered in the proving, in the always being “on,” in the aspirational runway of someone else’s vision for me.

It’s the same understanding I try to center as I attempt to guide my graduate students looking to find their place in this industry and this new world that is unfolding, with all of its potential for glitter and danger.

Ask yourself, who will you choose to be?

If you and your team got laid off by text tomorrow, what would still be yours?

I finished writing my book this week.

Well, I finished writing a draft, and I am sure there will be more to write and certainly more to edit, but for now, I can say that I have completed the task at hand and it has been an interesting journey.

Finishing a writing project, especially when working on a memoir, is never really possible. We continue to grow and the stories from the past do too through the prism lens of experience, time and perspective.

I received my editor’s notes in that movie theater in Paris last October, the theater growing dark and me willing my hands to shut down my phone and not read the suggested edits. I ignored the work through December and returned in January, determined to finish while on break between semesters. I quickly realized I would need more time and set out to clear space on my calendar through February, looking at the symmetry of the month to act as a container for the work. February 28 came and went and I laughed at my attempts to bend and control time. As the Universe would have it, I needed until March 6.

They say that every seven years your body, mind, and soul go through a powerful transformation. Some people think that reflects linear time, meaning every seven year cycle from birth until death, some just look backward to the past seven years. All of those years swirl, a vortex reaching up up up, sometimes a timeline of tumult, others a deep calm.

I rode all of the currents this week: art and poetry and celebration of community alongside frightened peeking at the news, disbelief at the war and frustration at all the other horrors it has covered in an avalanche of slop. I longed for all of it to stop, for the tragic velocity of the year to return to a pace that doesn’t dizzy.

So I did what any normal person would do — I went back in time.

Seven years ago, I left the offices of The Wall Street Journal. This week I returned to visit with students. It was lovely to say hello to many former colleagues. I saw my old desk, noting the newsroom’s fresh coat of paint, my former team’s section filled with new bodies. Walking past the old conference rooms where I laughed and cried over the years — shoutout to the weird mirrored glass conference room where I watched myself at various moments doing both — I was struck by how small it all felt. Despite the televisions broadcasting the biggest news stories of the day, I allowed myself loving distance — perhaps the closest I can come to objectivity. There was an undeniable sense of it being all in the past, as if it were from someone else’s lifetime. Because it is.

The next morning, I listened to the entire Tiny Desk concert from earlier in the week — 3/3, aka De La Day. Their voices took me back to Carla at 16, house parties near my high school, punk kids dancing with the Filipino club kids who introduced me to a new kind of music beyond my alternative music cassette tapes. I write about That Carla in the book, how confused she was, how sad, how on the edge of life she was hanging, but I also remember her laugh, her dancing, her body and desire to live. How she loved.

And in my kitchen I felt myself reach back and sway together with her, arms in the air, laughing as the cat watched me jump around to the beat. So much of the music seemed to call toward this cosmic connectedness, toward life force, maybe even god, and in that moment the overlapping years, seven and more (or perhaps 3?), all arrived in perfect symmetry, filling my heart and making me cry, grateful for these versions of Carla and for that moment, all of us in the kitchen, reaching forward and backward, rooted in the ground and beaming higher and higher to the sky.

Maybe this is what it means to “finish a book.” It’s not the last word on the page, not a specific date marking the moment of completion, not the breath I took and the tears I cried in release. Because although the book may be done, I am not done with myself.

The draft is complete. The journey is not. That Carla in the kitchen dancing to Me, Myself and I, that Carla walking through the newsroom, that Carla sitting at her laptop, all of those versions are still reaching toward the sky, conspiring with the Universe.

Hello friends, my desire to speak the truth comes naturally, but the the fear of being truly seen is stronger. Does this make sense? Is it OK to feel this deeply? Can you hold my anger and still want to see a movie with me next week, call me friend? I’ve hidden from rage my whole life, letting it eat away at my insides rather than letting it boil and roar aloud, that molten core threatening to ignite the world or burn me to ashes. Poetry is my controlled burn.

But I recently learned that ash is alkaline and can be used to raise the pH of acidic soils, making them more hospitable for a variety of plants, helping them grow.

Perhaps these ashes can be good for something after all. Let it burn. Let it all burn.

Instructions for Outrage

His parents will have to avoid the television, the radio, 
newspapers if they can even find them — 
stay off social media and the frame-by-frame 
analysis like a cudgel’s pounding beat 
building outrage to drive up clicks. 

They’ll be asked to cry on demand, 
be angry but not too angry. Maybe he speaks 
with a curled fist, tears barely 
held at bay, she stands behind 
him staring ahead. 

Or perhaps we ask her 
to look straight at the camera in a post-traumatic 
haze, demanding justice as he sobs 
behind her, red-faced 
with tissue at his mouth. 

The memes will be designed, the list 
of those who also fell 
at the hands of the gestapo assembled. 
The anger for the anger: 
he was BLANK and they were BLANK, 

who is more deserving of our allotted sliver 
of outrage this week? Because it’s back-to-work time 
and everyone has to pay their bills. And did you hear 
what happened in Maine? 
Portland, New Orleans, Chicago? 

They fade as we wait 
for the next headline to interrupt —

and wonder where this will all end.

From a friend in Minnesota — how you can help: Rent relief funds remain urgent. People can’t work while hiding in their homes, which means they can’t pay rent — and rent comes due every single month. We don’t know how long this occupation will last. This requires sustained support, not just initial outrage.

Stand with Minnesota has a “Rent Relief Funds” section that expands when clicked:

https://www.standwithminnesota.com/

You are invited.

I’m co-hosting a beautiful LIVE event with New York Times bestselling author (The Book of Alchemy and The Alchemy Journal) + style icon and mid-life advocate this Thursday, January 8 at 7 p.m. ET.

Joining us: (author and CEO of TheLi.st, a private networking group I’ve belonged to since ~2012) and writer Paulette Perhach. Bring your favorite journal, your most trusted pen, and whatever’s been growing within your heart and mind.

In Ann’s words:
This is NOT a "New Year/New You" Post. You are great as you are. No notes. This is an invitation to dive deeper into relationship with yourself. To connect with your own joy, love, weirdness, gentleness and complexity. And we're bringing the masters of self-reflection/connection to the party…

This is a rare chance to journal with one of our finest memoirists — and a room full of people who understand why the page matters. I hope you will join us. <3

RSVP HERE: https://lnkd.in/eWytBr5e

For those new to my newsletter: Thank you for joining in and reading. For those who’ve been here along the way, many will know this newsletter is one that attempts to hold grief and joy side-by-side, much like my book. Today is no different as I mark the sixth anniversary of my brother Oscar’s passing.

I wrote this poem last night as the full moon kept me awake, its light reflecting off the snow and through my window — light traveling from sun to moon to snow to me.

Ben, my husband, told me that the Earth has reached its perihelion, the moment in the year when we are closest to the sun. Perhaps that is what woke me or perhaps it was Oscar reaching through the darkness to beam his smile into my heart.

I’ll be back tomorrow with an invitation to join me and friends for some beautiful writing and reflection. Until then. <3

The Potato Thief

To know my brother was to know a person

who stole crispy potatoes from the baking sheet—

sizzling so hot they burned his fingers

and the roof of his mouth—

over and over again

before dinner was served.


To know a person so filled with puns

they came out in tidal waves so strong

they took us down in peals of groans.


To know a person who loved dogs so much

because they didn’t know his gait was bumpy,

his eyes droopy, his smile crooked,

because he knew they were as close

to a God’s love as this Universe allows.


To know my brother is to know a person

who taught me lessons I am still learning

in the shadow of his loss.


To know my brother is to know a part of me

that remembers all of the pokes and pranks

and tears and struggles

and longs for one more smile.


To remember my brother is to listen

to the potatoes as they lie on this hot tray

and swear I hear the steps of a potato thief

giggling behind me,

waiting for his chance to steal away.

I’d been sad. For weeks, maybe longer. The kind of sadness that becomes familiar, that you stop noticing until suddenly you don’t feel it anymore. Many things have happened to contribute to that sadness — we said goodbye to Gertrude, I got sick, the world around us became less and less recognizable in a wave of violence and suffering. This fall was rocky.

But then I co-officiated a dear friend’s wedding last weekend — a wedding of 175 people — and I felt embodied in the process as I stood at the altar and guided them in their vows. Really joyful. Really confident. In awe of my friend at the start of this new chapter in her life.

After the ceremony, a woman came up to me, and was very complimentary and heartfelt about what I wrote and read during the ceremony. When she was done, she started to walk away, but doubled back to ask: “Are you a public speaker?”

I paused and smiled: “Yes.” I mean, I don’t typically define myself by that word, but I have spoken to rooms packed with people, on stages to a crowd of up to a thousand. I speak to crowds in public. I am a public speaker.

Something in how she saw me, in being recognized that way — this idea of being known — was very potent. But in that moment, I wasn’t just thinking about my career and what I do now. I was thinking about sitting on my mother’s bed reading the Sunday newspaper. Enunciating.

My mom was working multiple jobs, delivering newspapers in the morning. I think I was in middle school or early on in high school. If I got in trouble, she would take me to deliver papers with her at 4:45 am in the morning, the sun just starting to brighten the sky. “Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky in the morn, sailor be warned,” she taught me. I was delivering with her because I was in trouble, but the work became a bonding experience, and a foundational one.

We would come home and open the envelopes left by customers — payment for the newspaper, plus often a tip — and there would be dollar bills all over her full size bed. We would count the bills and read the newspaper out loud to one another. My mother had this cassette recorder and she would read and play it back to hear, her voice deliberate and careful, practicing her English.

I can hear her voice now: “I am prac-tees-ing my eeh-noon-see-ay-she-own.” Her words reach me today.

A few days after the wedding, I watched my first class graduate with their master’s degrees. I knew I would be a mess — I stuffed two packs of tissues in my graduation gown’s billowing and long sleeves, alongside the handwritten cards I prepared for each.

I met these wonderful humans last year just after I began my role as professor and director of the program — all of this, twenty years after graduating with my own master’s in journalism. Their eyes were so bright and proud as they received their diplomas. I teared up on stage watching them cross and strut back to their seats, throwing their caps into the air, dancing to Bad Bunny as they filed out. I thought of all of the meetings I’d held with them, answering their concerns, trying to guide their studies, letting them know they were doing OK. And here they were, dancing.

In these moments — at the wedding, watching the students graduate — I felt this surge of joy. This tremendous life force. This desire to truly live. This knowledge of where this life has brought me, the unseen potential in each of my moments.

It’s only in hindsight that we see our path of growth. I wasn’t enunciating with my mother thinking, I’m going to be a public speaker. Or go into news. Or become a professor.

This idea that growth is linear, that expectation — it is so false. Growth is not linear. It’s only in hindsight that we see the path. And sometimes that recognition — that sudden view of the hidden architecture of your life — that’s not just insight.

That’s awe.

In those moments on stage, at the altar, I could see and feel the thread between everything — delivering papers with my mother, my own degree, watching the face of my dear friend saying “I do,” the smiles of my students going off into the world.

All of it connected. All of it leading here.

I was on a call with a young producer for All Things Considered on NPR/WNYC recently (!!!) when she asked me a question I didn’t expect. She’d recently graduated from Boston University and said: “My generation is calling the em dash the ChatGPT dash and it seems as though they’re steering away from it completely. What do you think about that?”

I had to pause. Here I was, several “generations” older, sitting in my home office with Ben’s grandfather’s vintage microphone in view and a vintage bicycle behind me that’s been part of every video call for years, being asked to defend a piece of punctuation. But of course it wasn’t really about punctuation at all.

The role of each new generation is to evolve and respond, I told her. I celebrate that. But these machines are only regurgitating what previous generations have handed down — so why let them dictate whether you write it off? (Write it off. Ha ha ha.) I think the wariness comes from a good place: wanting to be authentic, to retain the truth of who you are and not be seen as something fake. I get that. I am not an anti-technology person. I utilize AI, but I want to be discerning. Leave the em dash or embrace it — I just hope we don’t give into living in a reactive state based on what a tech company puts in front of our screens.

The em dash to me has always been this kind of anarchist, very Gen X punctuation. Definitely not something that I was taught in Catholic school where grammar was emphasized. I see the em dash as a tool that allows us to have non-linear thoughts and add on different ideas in one container.

As a person, I see myself as the embodiment of a person split, as if by an em dash. I’m a poet, I am a journalist, I’m a creative, I’m analytical, I am a curlicue thinker able to go off on tangents and rein them into a strategic arrow. The em dash in my writing allows me to express all of that, at once, often in one sentence.

The em dash grants me permission to not have to be rigid, to be freed of the rules, to veer off course, to be tangential, to allow each of these moments and thoughts to build upon one another and remind us that they - and we - are all connected.

By the end of the interview, the producer said: “This is what I needed. I needed a poet to put it this way, so we can understand.”

In some ways this newsletter is a sort of em dash itself. Next month marks the six year anniversary of its launch. On December 23, 2019, I hit publish from Soho House in the Meatpacking District, sitting in front of a fireplace, sipping tea, feeling a little glamorous. The idea: Build an audience, form a sense of community, and yes, prove to a publisher that I was “marketable.” Short essays, light and breezy, link to things I was reading, or things I’d bought and loved. Very influencer-y. Fun.

And then my brother died – a record scratch moment. I didn’t write again for three months. Having started with one intention, my sentence ended on a completely separate emphasis.

All of these years later, I have learned that this is life.

I had this a-ha moment in that first year of grieving. I was missing him so much while quietly looking at the sky, contemplating the Earth’s atmosphere – how a rocket ship needs to burst out of the atmosphere to leave, while here we are in this globe, contained. We are part of the universe, but physics means that everything that has been birthed on this earth remains contained on this earth. Imagine them all: the dinosaurs, Oscar, my loved ones, your loved ones, Earnestine, and soon, my beloved Gertrude.

We are shopping at the supermarket, we are commuting to work, we are having an argument, we are holding that profundity alongside our lives. We breathe them in and we breathe them out – they are here and they are not here, both before and after the elongated dash.

I want to make space for that kind of ambiguity and hazy truth, hold the beauty and the darkness and the grief and the joy — even in my chosen punctuation.

So, I say Save the Em Dash. Keep things a little weird, a little confusing, a little tangential. Maybe you will start writing a sentence and an em dash will take you in a direction you never expected. What if we make space for that journey?

Don’t let a machine - regurgitating everything that came before - tell you how to write the rest of your sentence.

Take a deep breath and let it flow out of you – one elongated dash at a time.

I arrived at Gare du Nord this week after a journalism conference in London. Four nights on my own in Paris. I’d chosen this — the solitude, a place where I could sit with my thoughts without having to explain them.

The taxi line was long. When my turn came, I slid into the backseat and gave the address in my broken French. The driver nodded, pulled into traffic, and within moments we were speaking — English, French, Spanish, Google Translate, whatever worked.

We’d been talking for maybe ten minutes and we’d already moved past weather and traffic into the Louvre heist and what it means when nothing feels sacred anymore.

“We are the laughingstock of the world,” he said, his dark brown eyes heavy with shame meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

“If anything, people are horrified at what happened, because it means if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere,” I tried to reassure him, recognizing how deep this feeling ran in him. “It can happen to you, it can happen to me, this is the kind of world we’re living in. The old rules no longer apply.”

He nodded his head and the shame seemed to dissipate: “We are living in the Matrix.”

I thought of him later when I read the wonderful artist Morgan Jones Johnston’s newsletter about the heist. She wrote:

“I keep thinking—how French that the instinct was to protect people first. And when officials spoke afterward, their tone wasn’t just outrage—it was shame. A sense that something sacred in the French psyche had been violated.”

I think about shame a lot — the shame I carry, the shame that is passed down generation to generation. Shame has lived in me in many forms: my family’s experience with abuse, addiction, loss, my immigrant childhood, my socioeconomic upbringing. For years, that shame kept me from believing in myself, kept me at war with myself, kept me from being fully with others. I know too well what Brene Brown describes: “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

While in Paris, I went to the movies by myself to see the Springsteen biopic – a film ultimately about … shame — personal, ancestral, and the force it takes to create in its shadow, or perhaps by facing the shadow. As I waited for the film to begin, an email arrived from my editor, subject line: WORTH Editorial Letter and Revised Manuscript.

My stomach began doing flips as the lights dimmed and the previews began. Back this summer when I began the process of working on this latest revision, I’d hoped the note would arrive while I was in Paris, a space and place for me to digest, to be with it and myself, alone. I shut off my phone and tried to put the email out of my mind, and allowed myself the experience of witnessing the story of a man who fought for the truth of who he was even when coming to terms with who he had been and from where he had come threatened to break him. As a Jersey girl, I tried to hold onto Bruce’s courage as proxy for my own.

Once back in my room, listening to the rain hit the roof in my Boulevard Saint-Germain room, I read through the clean copy of the text, all 234 pages. Despite the excitement of this more concrete version of my book — thirty chapters! — a flood roared in my head:

Is this even a book?

Who am I to tell this story?

I should keep this a secret.

Who will like me, forget about love me, if I tell the truth?

I stayed up late with these questions, trying to convince myself this was just part of the process. That I needed to hold on and let it work its way through me. The following morning, a friend sent a quote from the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

I am bringing it forth. My book is about many things, but the most crucial theme is about my experience of shame and where it took me. Being ashamed for not being enough, for being too much, for being “the other,” for being different. We wake up with shame and go to sleep with shame. My dream is for all of us to live in a post-shame world — and writing this book is my way of trying to break that cycle.

I still don’t know whether it will save or destroy me, but I know this: I am starting to claim what I need and what I want to be in this world. I want to be one of the antidotes to the heaviness of shame — for you, for me, for all of us.

During that cab ride into this rainy few days in this glorious city, my driver, a stranger, offered me exactly what I needed — someone else admitting their shame, and surviving. Proof that confession and connection is possible. Each of the small moments along this trip — the stranger’s confession, Bruce’s courage on screen, a gnostic gospel passage — have shown me the same thing. I’m not sure how I’ll feel as I continue, but these moments have given me courage to take the next right step, including telling you how I feel on this page.

Merci. 🙏🏼

Video credit: Anke Dieber

September has always felt like the real new year to me, and as the energy pulsed through these past few days, three significant moments taught me something different about presence, community, and what it means to be home.

I experienced what I can only call a joy hangover after my second annual poetry and prose reading at Bruce’s Garden last Wednesday. The light was so beautiful, filtering through the garden in that golden September way that makes everything look like it’s been touched by grace. But it was the voices of the seven writers who joined me in reading that really illuminated the space. Each brought something so essential to that circle — authentic expression meeting craft, presence meeting courage.

Afterwards, I felt wrung out in the most beautiful way possible — the kind of exhaustion that comes not from giving too much, but from witnessing something alchemical unfold. I curated this reading because I believe in the power of bringing voices together in community, and the joy hangover revealed something deeper: when we create authentic spaces for people to share their truest work, we don’t just host an event. We become witnesses to transformation. And that kind of witnessing changes us too.

The next morning, riding the A train to work, a neighbor I’d never met slid across the yellow and orange bench seats toward me. We only knew each other’s names from our co-op’s private Facebook group.

“You created something incredible last night. Do you know that? There was something magical about hearing all of those women telling their stories, all connected in that space.”

I nodded and smiled as she continued.

“It’s rare that we find that, right? And now because of that, you and I now have a connection.”

She was right. The writers had woven together threads of their personal stories and lived experiences — all stories of the lives we make and brave choices we learn to own — and in that weaving, we managed to form a web of community beyond one magical evening, beyond one magical garden.

The reading happened during my first full week back teaching at school, and marks my transition to full faculty. Teaching engagement journalism has meant a true integration of my own practice of authentic storytelling — whether memoir, poetry or journalistic — and a new understanding of ambition and balance. Through this work, I’m learning once again that it’s not about learning to want less; it’s about wanting more, with precision, discernment and intentionality. That significance is no longer measured by a job title or salary or even social standing. It’s measured by whether I’m pulling people up the ladder after me, with me, whether I am living fully.

And while I was learning what it means to be “full” in creative and professional spaces, Ben and I are also redefining what home means in the most literal sense. We welcomed a new life into our space — a tiny kitten we’ve named Talula, or Lula Mae (IYKYK) — who has already changed the entire energy of our home as I watch her breathe.

What is it like to have only been on this earth for several months?

What is it like to meet the dust mites in the air, the sound of my fingers tapping on this keyboard, Gertie’s big nose breathing next to hers?

She’s teaching me about feeling the awe of this moment. She is not Earnestine. She is not Kali. She is here today with Gertrude, for how long, we do not know. And that is enough.

This is what I’m learning about home: it’s not a destination but a practice. A practice of creating space for others to be seen. A practice of showing up fully for work that matters. A practice of being present to the small life purring on my lap, to the September light, to this moment that will never come again. September is teaching me that home is wherever we choose to build and honor with our whole hearts.

There’s a piece of art that used to hang behind me in my old office — a woman in flats teetering to reach a flower blooming on a cactus. For months, she watched over my video calls, a silent witness to my professional presentations and academic discussions. When I moved offices recently, I placed her beside my desk instead, and it wasn’t until I was mid-conversation the other day that I really looked at her. There she was, no longer behind me like some protective guardian, but right here beside me. And I found myself getting unexpectedly emotional about this small geography shift, this repositioning that somehow felt unexpectedly significant.

I placed my hand on the wooden frame and looked at her face taking in the victory of the cactus flower scent.

She is here by my side.

That moment is exactly how my week went — a week of small recognitions and victories, smelling the long-awaited blooms, and seeing things that had always been there but from new angles.

The most profound of these recognitions came when I was updating my CV for work, a task that felt daunting because the work of translating my creative work into academic language feels foreign. I’ve spent so much of my life separating these two halves of myself — poet/journalist. Even the term CV conjures performances of someone else’s version of seriousness.

I needed to add a new section for publications and forthcoming work, and as I typed out the entries, something shifted. There was the existing section listing my achievements over the years: the metrics that showed my success, the speaking engagements where I discussed journalism and media strategy, the job titles I’d fought for — work that had always felt separate from my “real” voice, like borrowing someone else’s authority.

But the creative work — that was different.

I began listing my forthcoming literary memoir. My book of poetry. The community events I organize featuring creative community work. Work written in my voice, tended to purely from my heart and mind. Unfiltered and uncompromising. And there it was before me, taking up sizable space in this formal academic document, claiming its proper place among my life’s work.

I stared at the screen for a long moment. This wasn’t the CV of someone playing at being serious. This was the record of someone who already was.

The realization hit me with unexpected force, partly because it directly contradicted a voice I’d been carrying for years — an echo of Logan Roy from Succession, that cruel patriarch who weaponized the phrase “you’re not serious people” against his own children. That show had gotten under my skin precisely because Logan’s abuse resonated with my own childhood, a particular brand of diminishment. The idea that someone could look at you — someone who was supposed to love and support you — and declare you fundamentally unserious, unimportant, a disappointment, had always felt like a devastating possibility.

But here was evidence to the contrary, laid out in clean academic formatting. The most important aspect of my professional identity, it turns out, was built from my most authentic voice. Not the borrowed authority of institutional speak or strategic communication, but the voice that emerges when I’m alone with a blank page, accountable only to truth and beauty and the strange alchemy of turning experience into language. The work is me.

The dark haired, pale faced woman in the artwork seems to understand something about reaching for beauty even when it emerges from unlikely places — a flower blooming on a cactus, something delicate growing from something designed to protect itself. Maybe that’s what seriousness actually looks like: not the performance of gravitas, but the quiet persistence of showing up to do the work that matters to you, even when (especially when) no one has given you permission to think it’s important.

It’s meaningful that she’s beside me now. She’s not watching over me; she’s witnessing alongside me. And that’s what this whole recognition has been about — moving from seeking external validation of my seriousness to simply acknowledging that it’s been there all along.

The CV sits saved on my desktop now, a document whose gravitas I am not questioning. Not because I’ve changed what I do, but because I’ve finally seen what I’ve been doing all along. Building a body of work that reflects my own understanding of what it means to show up consistently to the work that calls me, to be true to myself.

That is a serious person. I am a serious person. And it took seeing my achievements properly formatted to finally recognize what had been true all along.

PS Serious people can also be silly. And sweaty.

I don’t like rollercoasters — not just because they’re unpleasant, but because of what happens before the drop. That slow, mechanical climb to the peak, where you sit suspended, knowing exactly what’s about to happen and hating both the anticipation and the inevitable plunge. The way your stomach clenches not from the fall itself, but from the certainty that the fall is coming. It’s the knowing that kills me.

Somewhere between the safety bar and the exit ramp past the carnival worker’s sadistic smile, I’ve realized this feeling is bigger than amusement parks.

This past year was voiced by the sound of a rollercoaster ride, ramping to the top in preparation of that big drop — tick-tick-tick up to the top. All of that going up, up, up; of watching for signs of illness, aging, death, of holding worry about the people I love most — that is this stage of life. The midlife anxiety and fear while grinning through the dullness and irritation of relentless bureaucracy and mundane tasks of life.

I once was the kind of woman who suffered quietly through all of this, who absorbed everyone else’s anxiety and made it my own burden to carry, who did not ask for what she needs. But that is changing. Slowly.

It took Oscar’s death to teach me the difference between surviving and actually living. A few weeks after he died, I returned to work and was asked to attend a meeting at the Ace Hotel. Walking from SoHo to Broadway, I was afraid to cross against the light — suddenly aware that trucks were too close, streets too aggressive.

At the meeting, I answered questions and shared ideas like a good little soldier, never mentioning the absurdity of discussing product development beneath a sexy black and white nude when my world had just shattered. I was still the kind of woman who accommodated everyone else’s version of normal, even when nothing felt normal. I started noticing how much energy I was spending on things that didn’t matter, while pushing aside what did matter as “selfish.”

It took me months to understand that the experience wasn’t just about grief — it was about the exhaustion of putting up with discomfort in hopes of making others comfortable or proving how “good” I am. After I realized this, I began practicing asking for what I needed. I asked for bereavement time away from work that summer (and am incredibly grateful to have received it). I began earnestly looking for a house in the country, a longtime dream. (We closed later that year.) I decided to center my life on what I desired rather than what I thought was required of me. I gave myself permission to choose what I needed and ask for support so that I didn’t have to carry it all myself.

As I was considering how I managed to do the audacious impossible for myself in 2020, I realized it may have begun earlier with gold foil stars.

You see, Ben has been baking me a birthday cake each year for the past 11 years. The first time was when I turned 40 and requested a simple white cake with edible gold stars all over the frosting. Gold foil stars that would normally make you say, I’m not paying $20 for this bottle. But I was clear. I felt no shame or guilt or that feeling that I should be smaller, that I shouldn’t ask for something so frivolous. I asked for what I needed and he made me a glorious cake. I felt cared for, luxuriated in the stars, felt like royalty (I even wore a tiara while eating it). I had my cake and ate it too. I was becoming the kind of woman who asks for gold foil stars instead of accepting whatever cake appeared.

Becoming that woman didn’t happen overnight. It took years of practice, birthday cake by birthday cake, to learn that asking for what I wanted wasn’t selfish — it was necessary. Each year, I got a little braver about being specific. A little more comfortable with taking up space. A little better at distinguishing between accommodation and genuine care.

This year Ben made me another cake — I requested sour cream vanilla with cherries ringing the top. I’ve gotten good at asking for that yearly cake, but I also practiced what it would take to ask for more — spending my birthday (yesterday, August 2, thank you — yes, 51) swimming in a salt water heated pool overlooking Windham Mountain; reading my book until my eyes began to close with satisfied sleepiness, making a Branzino for Ben and my friends, because I decided I want to be the kind of woman who makes a Branzino for her dinner parties.

All of that work and here I am, even if asking for what I want feels like the scariest thing to do when that rollercoaster is still ticking to the top, where I know it is inevitable to one day lose all of these things I love and cultivate in my life.

But this is what the gold foil stars have always been about — learning that when you’re riding the roller coaster, you can’t afford to give your energy to things that don’t feed you. Precision about desire is the opposite of frivolous, it is vital. And vitality is finite, so we must enjoy this gift we’re given.

Because here’s what I now know: the world will keep taking and taking until you learn to distinguish between the caring that exhausts you and the caring that feeds you. Until you become the kind of woman who doesn’t just survive the roller coaster, but who knows exactly what will make that ride bearable, if not.

Gold foil stars, cherries, and Branzino for dinner parties — all of it.

There's a south-facing window in my new office that needs cleaning from the outside, but even through the film I can see the sky, and I think this might be the perfect metaphor for turning 51.

This week, I moved offices at the school for the next year. And after this year, I will likely move again. It was striking to see how much I had already accumulated in just one year in this job. At home, painting the apartment also meant packing everything and unpacking, going through all of our belongings and deciding whether they suit this life right now, not just what I collected over the past 18 years.

This has been a time of assessing and discarding, pausing and reviewing. Welcome to my extended Mercury Retrograde. Not a time of chaos and technology fails (although yes, that happens to me too), but a time of reviewing – going back, of auditing, of scanning and naming what is and what is not working.

I think this feeling has a lot to do with this stage of life on top of the topsy turvy uncertainty of the world. A friend and I talk about the popular understanding of perimenopause and menopause — this social media meme idea that it is all about not giving any more f-cks, to burn it all to the ground. F-ck the patriarchy and the police, middle aged lady style (You've seen these memes too, felt the pressure to embrace this version of 50-something rebellion?) I may rebel, but crafting a reactive life like that doesn’t quite appeal. I don't want that kind of chaos or hardness. If anything, I want to give more f-cks. I want to give more, to feel more, to live more. I want to pause and rewind and decide what needs to go to make more room for everything else that life has to offer.

When people my age talk about getting older and not giving a f-ck anymore, I don't believe them. It sounds like a little bit of wishful thinking, and if the no f-cks age comes in life, I don’t think we get to that point until much later. More importantly, I actually don't want to be a person who doesn't give a f-ck. I want to be in communion with others, growing alongside others. And that means that I do give a f-ck.

This questioning and pausing is also something I'm learning from my own body. I keep thinking about our periods — the moment every month where people with uteruses are forced to pause, right? Purge, pause, rewind, reset. As an almost 51-year-old woman I am realizing that perhaps this is the moment in time when I have to learn how to do that for myself without my body reminding me each month.

Part of that pause involves making room to examine my relationship with ambition. For the longest time I built my life around the climb, the need to get a bigger title, a bigger job, more money. After the layoff in 2023, and following years of raw grief, I told myself I wanted to live differently. I fantasized about living off the grid – as I’ve previously mentioned, becoming a version of Mary Oliver herself crawling around the forest floor writing poems. I declined c-suite roles at big media companies. I told myself I was not Type-A like so many of the powerful women around me. I was no longer striving to be successful, rich, or powerful.

But this shift in how I think about ambition became clearer when a good friend laughed after I said I didn't define myself as Type-A. When I think of that term, I think of leaders who don't pull people up the ladder after them, who operate from a scarcity model. Masculine. I've often joked that I'm at minimum Type D, if not Type Z.

I have a strong drive, but it's rooted in empathy. I want to know what I don't know, and I learn that from other people's experiences. I love people because they're human and want to lead them to be the best they can be. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn't make decisions without considering the human cost, not just the bottom line. That to me is someone who is not Type-A. But am I ambitious? Yes.

In the midst of the packing and unpacking at home, I came across my morning pages from 2009. In them I listed all of the things I wanted, pages and pages of the lists repeated over and over like a mantra or an intention setting ritual or a wish to the genie inside the orange Rhodia A4 notebooks.

A new car, a house upstate, and a refreshed kitchen — they all came true (just took between one year and 16 to come to fruition). And underneath the wishes for material items lay a greater desire for freedom, connection and stability. That came true too. But I was 35 then and I didn’t really know if any of those things were really possible despite how much I wanted all of it. It was scary to ask for it and looking back I am grateful for that younger me and her audacity to give so much and to want so much, to have ambition.

She’s still here today, but different. I still have a deep-seated desire to achieve something significant, something meaningful. That significance is no longer measured by a job title or salary or even social standing.

It's not that I'm less ambitious — it's that my ambition feels more aligned. I still seek balance, but I'm not interested in the kind of hustle I see in others that leaves me feeling disquieted, wondering about its purpose. There always feels like there's more being hustled for, and for right now, and despite seeming to always be BUSY, I'm not feeling connected to busyness itself. Maybe I say no to that party invite, but make sure to attend that new 12 step meeting each week, because I know I need it and others need me.

This is the work of being “increasingly Carla,” as the ever-so wise put it. I thought turning 50 would flip my life on its head, that I'd become a different, better packaged and whole person. But I'm still Carla — just more so. The work hasn't been about reinvention but about curation, about taking box by box and looking with discernment about what stays, what must be transformed, and what goes.

So here I am in this new office with the south-facing window that needs cleaning. The view isn't perfect yet, but I can see the sky. I can see the water tower and the weird short building with the sex toy shop across the street, and somehow that feels like enough. Like maybe the work isn't about having a crystal-clear view of everything ahead, but about choosing what deserves the light, what gets to stay in frame.

I value personal freedom, and I am pro-choice — about everything, about what kind of leader I want to be, what kind of ambition feels worth pursuing, what kind of 51-year-old woman I'm soon-to-become. The boxes will keep getting packed and unpacked, but now I know that's not chaos — that's the work. That's how we grow into who we're meant to be, one wish at a time.

Does anyone feel pre-apocalyptic vibes right now before this forecast heatwave?

I’ve been gardening upstate, which I lovingly call Xtreme Gardening™️, consisting of hacking through vines, brambles and pioneer growth that is making its way from the forest into the small plots I’m trying to tame. I’m covered in itchy no-see um or chigger bug bites (not clear which) from last weekend and am praying the insect gods will grant me a week’s relief from itchy welts and hives. My Benadryl cream is always at hand.

But this is my favorite time of the year upstate. My delphinium has bloomed, the foxglove make the front garden look like a cottage in England, the peonies burst into cream and oxblood powder puff, and the Scarlet poppies are an embarrassment of raw hot sex in the front yard. What must the neighbors think?

I sometimes fantasize about leaving New York City and living in the country. A simpler life, one of quiet walks and writing in the gazebo, the sound of the stream beside me lulling back into a white noise nap, the warm air that smells like green flowing in and out of my nose.

What would it look like to live in this quiet at all times? How would my brain fill the silence with my own chatter, anxieties and (wo)man made noise? Could I let it be quiet here? Is my fantasy just a seductive desire to feel nothing, to escape? Will life continue its relentless pace — illness, death, capitalism! — alongside dancing fireflies in late June, groundhog babies eating side-by-side with their mothers, a McDonald’s hash brown in the car with Ben days before his birthday? Yes.

I’m conscious of that feeling again — of holding dread and beauty at once. It is a difficult thing to hold both and the awareness is itself a type of work. The cottage garden dream and the tsunami that always seems to be coming. A perfect day visiting yard sales and s’mores on the deck followed by the news that the U.S. has now entered the war with Iran.

This is what life looks like today: learning to tend what you can while the warning bells ring, Benadryl cream in one hand while the other keeps reaching toward something whose name you’re still learning to say.

I received a rejection letter for a fellowship I’d applied to participate in this coming year in Paris. I felt sad, but also knew this is not the right time for me. How do you hold both the disappointment and the rightness of it? Another thing requiring grace — saying yes to a door closing when you’re not sure what door might open. I need to focus on publishing my first book. I need more time living the topic I plan to study: the role of beauty in times of uncertainty, sorrow and grief. I don’t want to write too much about it now. I am always wary of “wasting” the juice by writing about something before it’s ready. But I do want to say that the hardest thing is living in this duality. Pragmatically reviewing the news of the day, the appointments to keep, while taking in the truth and beauty of this broken world, remaining open to awe. Asking for grace and not gritting my teeth too hard while waiting for it to arrive.

When I was young we always “said grace” before dinner, showing gratitude and thanks for our meal.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

Despite not having recited that in easily 30 years (I am not a practicing Catholic) the prayer came to me in its entirety as I was remembering our pre-dinner practice. And yet, I couldn’t even really tell you what it meant until I paused and examined the words.

The prayer asks for blessings, both of self and of the food already bestowed upon — for the current moment, for what is. But there’s something else: “which we are about to receive.” It’s holding both gratitude for what’s already given and a plea for strength to receive what’s coming, wanted and unwanted alike.

Maybe this is what my psyche was offering me — not nostalgia, but instruction. The spiritual technology I need now: how to bless what is while asking for help with what’s coming.

This is the work of today — learning to say grace over everything. The Benadryl cream and the reaching hand. The tending and the waiting. All of it requiring blessing, all of it requiring me to ask for grace not to grit my teeth too hard while I wait.

Maybe this is the work for all of us right now, in whatever garden we’re trying to tend, whatever warning bells are ringing in our particular corner of the world. Learning to hold both hands full — one blessing what we have, the other open to receive what’s coming. The fellowship rejection and the perfect poppies. The war news and the yard sale day. Not knowing which will be gift and which will be burden, but asking for the grace to receive it all without gritting our teeth too hard while we wait.

In New York City, springtime transforms people-watching into an Olympic sport. Coats are stripped off, millennial black and gray fade away as GenZ neon bursting ripeness takes center stage. My eyes feast on stories unfolding and tectonic reverberations pulse through the world, framed only by the music playing through my headphones.

The sadness of the winter is beginning to lift and I'm relearning how to let the energy flow through me, with that masterful conductor, NYC, recharging my spirit with its currents. My titular saint, Walt Whitman, is by my side. (Maybe you think this is an exaggeration, but I tell you, he always is.)

This week, when the rain stopped long enough for the sun to come out for a day, and leftover drops scented the air with petrichor, I watched with wonder as a parade of lovely humans reminded me what it is to live and love in this city. Yes, I cherish the nature of upstate and swoon at the antics of wildlife, but the wilderness of these complicated, tough streets lights me up. Still.

In that vein, I share with you a short note, documenting some of what I saw one afternoon this past week. No photos. I just ask you to breathe it in and channel their yang energy as you step into this coming week.

• Punk young girl wearing garter belt and lace panty shorts, white tank top and Yankees baseball cap. ~ L train

• Zaftig woman wearing jorts so short and tight you could see a clear outline of her vulva. ~ A train

• Man with head shaved like a monk (no hair on top, only “halo” of hair around bottom of his head) wearing a long lace skirt, Docs and a corset. ~ L train

• Woman my age with bleach blonde hair, short paisley babydoll dress with spaghetti straps and a shawl hanging off her shoulders. Metallic pink tote bag and Barbie pink 1970s “Charlie” sandals. Reached under her bum to adjust skirt that rode up her thighs, before she got off at her stop. ~ A train

• Old man on a small bicycle riding east on 14th and Third Ave wearing what appeared to be nothing but a bright yellow rain poncho. The wind had blown it up like a balloon. ~ The street.

GIVE ME THE SPLENDID SILENT SUN
Walt Whitman 

Keep your splendid silent sun,
Keep your woods O Nature, and the quiet places by the woods,
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets—give me these phantoms incessant and
endless along the trottoirs!
Give me interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Let me see new ones every day—let me hold new ones by the hand every day!
Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan!
Give me Broadway, with the soldiers marching—give me the sound of
the trumpets and drums!
(The soldiers in companies or regiments—some starting away, flush’d
and reckless,
Some, their time up, returning with thinn’d ranks, young, yet very
old, worn, marching, noticing nothing;)
Give me the shores and wharves heavy-fringed with black ships!
O such for me! O an intense life, full to repletion and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the
torchlight procession!
The dense brigade bound for the war, with high piled military wagons
following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants,
Manhattan streets with their powerful throbs, with beating drums as now,
The endless and noisy chorus, the rustle and clank of muskets, (even
the sight of the wounded,)
Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus!
Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.

PS See Sinners. It’s NOT a horror film (OK, it is, but it isn’t) and I need to DISCUSS.

These two below images are related.

I'm on a train into the city on this very foggy and drizzly Sunday morning, feeling the familiar creep of despair after reading the news, and homesickness from saying goodbye to Ben and Gertrude for a few days. I will return to the apartment where we have crammed all of our belongings from our bedrooms and bathroom into the foyer and living room to allow our contractor to fix the walls and paint. We’ve lived here for 18 years and it shows. I am grateful for this facelift, but a little overwhelmed. And tired. I slept on our couch all week surrounded by bedding, a botanical garden of houseplants and boxes of books. The work will continue for at least another two weeks. I’m grateful to have the house and the awe of nature for a respite, but back to my work as a forewoman I go.

This week, again, I was unmoored by the bounty of my good fortune and privilege alongside awareness of lack and uncertainty. I complain about the packed apartment, but am grateful I can pay for help to repair and paint it in the colors we’ve chosen. I was distraught while driving in a taxi as I watched a mother and her children sit on the median of the Westside Highway as they waited for someone to give them a dollar or a bite of food. Many of their belongings sat on the road beside them — stroller, stuffed backpacks, a supermarket tote holds a pillow, an umbrella shielding the sun. My mind rattled off: Who am I to complain about my couch in my comfortable home of nearly two decades? Perhaps the complaints are my own clumsy way of acknowledging this imbalance.

Here on the train, I’m surrounded by beauty. The Hudson is misty; our drive here was foggy. The heather green of the new leaves on the trees ground the heavy gray sky. I would have liked to have stayed in bed all day, yet there are pools of people decked in windbreakers and hooded raincoats reeling in fish along the craggy bank of the river. A man my age holds hands with a young boy. An older man with a gray beard the color of the sky is waving them over and pointing to his tackle box. Generations huddled at the loamy soil. The conductor blows the train’s low whistle and they turn to wave in unison. I am trying to remember their faces, but the train is moving too fast. I want to study them, hold onto their smiles, touch their outstretched hand with mine and say thank you. This is what is good.

And then we’re off and my mind drifts back to the news and my to do list and all of the distractions that serve to entrap.

The tyrannical soundtrack: why is everything in life so hard, everything would be so much better if I just planned better, made more money, was smarter and more clever, weighed twenty pounds less, had thought to declutter sooner, was a better painter who could have just done all of this work during the pandemic, could just go on a long vacation and come back to this reality finally over and a new, fresher and cleaner version in its place.

And then comes the guilt, the ouroboros eating its own head. How dare you berate yourself with this crap when all of that — waves hands at the state of the world — is happening over there?

This old voice, the bully, is the opposite of the equanimity I've been seeking (There are horrors and there are joys, and it is our job to seek equanimity in that) and this endless litany of not-enough is NEVER enough, but naming it is the first step to freedom.

A ship named WISDOM is docked in the middle of the waterway, centered between east and west of the Hudson. I try to photograph it, capture it — that’s the PERFECT photo for this newsletter! — but the trees are in the way. Metaphor? Wisdom is not static, an ideal to be attained; it peeks through in the quiet, rumbling of life, gathered over time, fleeting. Enjoyed as is, a wisdom itself.

wrote in :

“The existential despair of potential perfection might feel particularly acute right now. Those of us who can see how good it could be—who dream of better—are living with the relentless ache of the gap between the vision and the reality.

And thus, we are tasked with the near-impossible: to still love the world even when it is not yet the one we long for.”

Our task: Love the world even when it is not yet the one we long for.

Equanimity means neither squandering my privilege with guilt nor pushing away another's suffering with numbness. It means feeling both the grateful comfort of painting my walls in colors I chose and the ache for the mother on the median who chooses only which dollar to accept. In the space between these truths, I'm learning that loving this imperfect world doesn't require me to solve the gap alone. It’s in learning to honor the gap and the fullness every day, stretching out my hand to that family of fishermen on the banks of the Hudson, to the family on the highway, and carrying them with me long after the train goes whooshing by.

A short note* on this Easter morning from a recovering Catholic who dropped out of seminary because she decided she didn’t want to become a minister.

One of my favorite things I learned during my year in interfaith seminary, was learning that Mary Magdalene is thought to be the first person to carry the message of Christ after learning of his resurrection. Somehow I never learned that in nearly nine years of Catholic school, but the Gospel of Mark reads: "Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene." Matthew and Luke offer similar accounts.

Because of her role in witnessing and announcing the resurrection, Mary Magdalene is sometimes called "the apostle to the apostles" highlighting her monumental importance (never mind that the church tried to malign and erase her. Read Meggan Watterson’s wonderful book, “Mary Magdalene Revealed.”)

Jesus, a rebel who shunned wealth and preached about radical unconditional love for all people, including enemies, had his message first carried by a woman. What does this mean?

I like to think of Mary walking along the road into town from the cave before speaking to anyone of what’s she’s seen and knows. There she is, quiet and reflective, containing a miracle inside herself after great suffering, grief and mourning. The secret knowledge is a healing light within, a kind of rebirth in itself. Inside her she holds an entire new world. Hallelujah.

In reflecting on her journey, and reflecting on the introspective period I’ve experienced for the past few months, I'm reminded that transformation often begins in solitude before it can be shared with the world. Each of us carries that potential for renewal inside; each of us has access to a knowing that exists before we can utter it out loud. We just have to get quiet and listen. That is my definition of prayer and meditation: We ask the question in prayer and quiet ourselves in meditation to hear our truth.

Whether you believe in this biblical story, have your own practice, or neither, I am wishing you moments of both quiet reflection and joyful connection today. In this moment of turmoil, questioning and suffering, I hope each of us can find shimmers of that light so we may bring it to others, one and all. After all, Easter itself—with its witchy roots in ancient spring celebrations of rebirth and renewal—reminds us that transformation is part of nature and human experience. Just as the trees and flowers burst out of the fertile ground, we can awaken to new possibilities within ourselves and in our world. Here’’s to practicing that hope.

✨ ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨✨

*This earnest writing brought to you after watching Godspell. Thank you, John. What a trip. PS Come for the campy biblical story, stay for a journey around 1973 New York City, and an amazing view of the Twin Towers.

PPS I can’t write about Easter without singing one of my favorite Tori Amos songs, so here you are: “Crucify.”

How are you?

Unsure how to answer that question these days?

Me too.

I tend to have two answers, one quickly doled out in elevators and when rushing to the A train or meetings, and another where I take a breath, assess whether the person I am asking actually cares or (and this is important) has the capacity to hear the truth.

a. Oh, you know, as well as can be. <insert smile and shift to the weather>

b. Oh, you know, it's been rough. <insert list of weight I am carrying around my heart, and increasingly, my perimenopausal body>

I struggle with the in between. When things are absolutely terrible, I feel a permission to be honest and feel my feelings deeply. When things are wonderful and I feel happy, I want to beam that sunshine on all. When things are both, I can’t find my center.

There are horrors and there are joys, and it is our job to seek equilibrium in that. I wrote down this line last weekend after eating breakfast tacos and tortas near the tennis courts in Inwood Hill Park with Ben, one of my favorite ways to spend a weekend morning. What a bright spot in the week. I tried so hard to keep focused on that happiness and not let the sour of the news and injustice seep into the morning, but there it was, side-by-side with us on the bench.

I’ve listened to the show “Terrible, Thanks For Asking” for several years. It’s hosted and created by and features people taking an honest approach to that answer. The show was inspired by her experience with grief and she serves as a model for living an honest and authentic life (listen to her TED talk). I love that Nora recently changed the show's title to a simpler “Thanks For Asking.” Because it’s not always terrible, and all answers are acceptable.

I began listening while I was working at The Wall Street Journal, around the time that a dear friend lost her parents and Ben’s father suddenly passed away. It was a sad and challenging time and navigating everyday life, including my growing career, while holding onto the truth of death was confusing and tender. I often escaped the newsroom for a quick cry in the restroom or mother’s room before returning to my desk where I got my work done. I soon found the busier I kept myself, the fewer bathroom stall crying sessions were necessary.

Being emotional is not the same as being fragile, or so says psychologist Lisa Damour. But sometimes, my emotions feel so big that I feel fragile. My mother tells me I should learn to compartmentalize (love you, Mami), but what if compartmentalization feels a little too much like lying? By compartmentalizing, you essentially create separate realities within your mind, cordoning off one part of your personality from another. For someone like me (perhaps you too?) this feels a lot like my childhood where I was taught my emotions were too big and where I was told things I saw and knew were wrong were not really happening or I did not really understand them.

Today I know my truth and I know what is happening in the world today is very, very wrong. I no longer want to gaslight myself. Compartmentalizing feels dishonest and inauthentic in the face of that truth. And maybe sometimes we’re meant to allow the raging sadness light the way toward justice. Maybe it’s not meant to be set aside for another day.

And yet, I get it. Sometimes it's just easier to put a feeling or thought in a box until a later time when you can get to it. Often there is no choice: it's the only way to survive. But go too long stuffing feelings into boxes and it’s hard to figure out where the rotten smell is coming from as they begin to rot.

Before writing this I was reading a Bluesky account that lists people “politically arrested, detained, or disappeared by the administration,” something my small mind never thought could happen HERE. I’ve been thinking of two of my favorite local businesses run by immigrants, businesses I am afraid to mention by name for fear of drawing attention to their storefronts, and feeling such love for who they are and what they contribute in my world. I also listened to the birds, watching them in their spring frenzy pushing forward to create life. Yesterday, I touched the fuzzy buds that feel like kitten ears on the magnolia upstate as they start to burst out of their fuzzy and safe cocoons. I cooed at the buttery daffodils as they make their impossible climb toward the sky.

How do we make sense of this disconnect? How do we move forward when the swirls threatens to take me under? If compartmentalization feels like lying, then what's the alternative when everything feels too big, too contradictory? Perhaps there's a middle path between forcing emotions into separate containers and drowning in their overwhelming current. Mindfulness practices suggest we can cope with challenges with a more peaceful mindset, and equanimity is considered one of the 'Four Immeasurables' essential for developing compassion and alleviating mental suffering. It seems what I'm seeking might be closer to equanimity than equilibrium—that even-minded mental state toward all experiences regardless of their origin. That commitment to riding the wave of emotion rather than trying to contain the ocean in an impermeable Hefty bag.

There are horrors and there are joys, and it is our job to seek equilibrium equanimity in that.

This understanding doesn't make the weight any lighter, but it does give me a path forward. When someone asked "How are you?" I can practice pausing, breathing, and choosing honesty when it feels safe to do so. And then I let them manage their own feelings (THAT is a topic for another entire essay). Not compartmentalization, not emotional flooding, but a compassionate integration of all that I feel and see. It’s not always pretty, and some days the balance tips heavily toward one side, but this clumsy attempt at equanimity can be my quiet rebellion against a world that asks us to choose between numbness and overwhelm. Perhaps true authenticity lies in this messy middle—fully feeling both the daffodils and the disappearances, and letting both move us into right action and deeper living.

May we be led by that light.

Love Haiku for You When Things Feel Difficult But It's Ok for Things To Be Difficult Because Things Aren't Always in a Rigid Binary and Sometimes Things Can Be Nasty but Also Be Sweet and Ok Too Like Pickling

I love you more than
Cabbage loves sealed tight jam jars
With big time to rot

Basie Allen (2022)

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As you know (see: dragonfly), I began the year in Buenos Aires on a writing trip and family trip and flâneuse trip overlapping the inauguration. The timing wasn't intentional, but it didn't hurt. Watching the spectacle from a distance was surreal and enraging, but the anger somehow dissipated across the approximately 6,000 miles between me and D.C. and the heat of the Argentine summer. It was nice to disappear for a little while.

I’ve always felt the ability to let the realities of my home in the US slip away while visiting Argentina. It’s typically been pleasant, but something about being so far and the taxi drivers there using the current US president's name as the butt of a silly joke rather than calling him out for his behaviour was hard to hold. It reminded me of a truth about bullies and abusers. Few call them out for who they are in the moment, fear and cowardice and the burnout felt from the grind of life keep us from naming the terrifying Beelzebub for what it is.

But I know what it is.

I spent my days writing in the mornings and walking around in the afternoons, ducking into cafes to drink my favorite cortado en jarrito and write a few pages. On these long walks I'd note the handmade plaques strewn all over the city sidewalks, marking the names of the Desaparecidos, the tens of thousands (the figure is widely accepted to be at least 30,000) who were killed and disposed of after being seized by authorities during the Dirty War, Argentina's military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Each tile and stone memorial plate made of broken pieces of tile and glass, commemorates the location where the individual was last seen and the date when they are thought to have “been disappeared.” They’re like the white “ghost bikes” that mark the death of bicyclists, like my brother Oscar’s, commemorating the person and reminding all of the incident.

I have walked over these tiles on every visit I’ve made to the city since returning when I was 12 and always find myself wondering what it is for a city to hold reminders of this trauma in the midst of life. On this trip, as I thought of the threats made to the people and the values I hold so dear in the United States, this reminder was more present than before.

I spent several afternoons reading in air-conditioned bookstores and literary salons about this period of time, wanting to understand not only what happened, but why. I read scholarly reports on the role of media during the dictatorship and accounts of disappeared journalists who acquiesced to the government preemptively. I searched for patterns that might explain their silence and complicity. I found signs of familiar tactics of delegitimization, manipulation, and a news industry so worn down and worn away that they downplayed what was actually happening until the evidence was too much to turn away from and deny.

I still don't have an answer.

In some ways, my family left because of that war, but the reasoning for our departure is disputed and rarely discussed. I may never know the full truth about the why of our immigration. Best forgotten. The frought reasoning behind our departure echoes in today's contested narratives about what constitutes threat, what justifies exile.

I understand the desire to leave the past behind. I do. The same impulse that pushes nations to forget their darkest chapters flows through families, through individuals. We are told to move on, to look forward, to not dwell. We hide the truth of our origins, of our wounds, because the pain of remembering sometimes feels worse than the emptiness of forgetting. But I also know what it means to live in fear, to live in uncertainty, to be gaslit over and over again to the point when you can't even believe your own Cassandra cries. And yet, I know what I see today is broken, I know it is malevolent. I know a bully when I see one. I know a twisted narcissist when I hear one. I cannot forget and I do not want to forget.

As I read the news about scrubbing the of mention of DEI on websites, preemptive corporate attempts to kowtow to the authoritarian government, and my two-time alma mater's cowardice, I think about what it means to voluntarily disappear yourself. These institutions erasing their commitments—often not under direct threat but in anticipation of it—constitutes an assault in and of itself. Not bodies vanished in the night, but principles evaporated in the harsh light of political calculation. The self-censorship that precedes official censorship. The silence that comes before the official silencing, the disappearing.

Imagine what it would be like to be kidnapped, tortured and killed because of your personal and political beliefs. I watch the clip on social media of the graduate student at my alma mater, rounded up and sent away with little information on where he is going, told he is a propagandist, a terrorist, shipped to another state away from his family, stripped of his green card status. I think of his wife, 8 months pregnant, terrified and worried, and I can’t help but think of those plaques in B. A. and the short distance between what is happening today and what happened those years before, 6,000 miles away. I think of the people singled out and hated for their gender identity, ethnic identity, who they love, how they love. The past is never really past.

Those plaques along the busy pedestrian streets of Buenos Aires pulse with that remembering, their prismatic energy a cry for vigilance, even as scores of humans carry on with their lives, walking over them on their way to pick up the kids, to lunch, to drink un cafecito, to meet a lover, to confess sins, to interview for a job, again.

We each walk over our own versions of those plaques and struggle with how to balance that reverence and just survive. On the subway, I oscillate between two states: feeling overwhelmed by the weight I sense strangers are carrying, and feeling a certainty that my burden is heavier than anyone else's. Both reactions leave me stuck—disgusted by my self-pity, helpless to lighten others' loads. In this paralysis, I have to fight the urge to turn away, to numb myself, to forget.

The same questioning applies to our collective response to what is happening today—are we feeling too much or not enough? Should we numb ourselves to survive, or is the feeling itself the point, the path through? What do we do?

All of this (few of you will be surprised) stirs such grief. I hold my personal losses alongside these collective ones—a kaleidoscope revealing connections between authoritarianism there and authoritarians here. It serves as a reminder that all of our suffering is connected and grief is cyclical (because here we are again with another year of loss, and once you become aware of loss as a pattern, you recognize it will keep coming—not because loss is newly present in your life, but because it always was. Beware the moment you believe you have mastered grief.)

This is what the plaques whisper as pedestrians pass, what the disappearances of institutional courage reflect back at us, what the inaugurations of tyrants and money hoarding complicit cronies remind those who have seen it all before. True mastery is not in conquering this pain but in learning to carry it and metabolize it, to let its light refract through you, illuminating the connections between the personal and collective, mobilizing us to action, to fight, to live, and to remain clear on what we remember and why we are told to forget. To keep walking over the broken tiles of history, while not allowing yourself to break.