Hi friends and fellow creatives, Like many of you, I’m trying to pace myself with the news and the state of the world. It’s a lot. I feel it in my body, in my family, in my friends. The collective anxiety is real. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to stay engaged...

Wake Up, Naomi! That’s the sign poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees above her desk every morning when she sits down to write. It’s a note written by her son when he was a boy, maybe as a reminder that he needed to wake his mother up from a nap, but a note she has kept all...

A Few Things I Don't Want to Forget The dream where both of my parents are asleep in the same bed. The floor is littered with balled up tissues because someone has a cold, and my father's eyes are fluttering like he's trying to open them after 15 years shut. In the...

To All My Friends Who Struggle with Loving Their Bodies So there I was, staring at a little sticker on a table with the words, "I hate my body" written on it. There were lots of stickers on that table with many different things written on them like, "I want people to...

A Few Wild Things… The dream I had last night where I spooned with a baby possum, right up against my spine. It was tiny like a child, and we slept so cozily all night. In the morning I quietly lifted myself from the bed so I wouldn’t wake it, but when I turned around...

Illustration by Zoe Wagner What if We Already Loved You? 11 years ago, when I started dating again after my divorce, I was excited at the thought of meeting new people, but I was also riddled with nerves. I’d been with my husband for over 24-years, and here I was...

A Few Things I Won't Be Writing About How the 20 something nurse assistant looked down at her clipboard during my appointment and asked me if I was sexually active. And the way I said no - with no qualifiers - no comments about the dating pool for women in their 60's,...

It helped that I was dirty, that I hadn’t showered in three days, and that what we called “shower” meant standing naked in the sagebrush in the late afternoon sun, in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, and lifting a hose over our heads. It was the miracle of clean...

(1) When the llama, who looked to be my age, maybe younger, said he’d been diagnosed with bipolar and depression in his 20’s, he said it so sweetly, so softly. He’d heard about depression, but until he experienced it, he said he had no idea. And because he didn’t have...

If you find yourself with a pen in your hand, but you don’t know what to write. If you mean to put down a few lines, but you’re speechless, and you don’t know what to say. If you find yourself staying in your pajamas for hours, promising yourself that you’ll get up,...