My inner hostess
I have a part I’ve started calling my Inner Hostess. She comes alive anytime I’m hosting people at my house. She wants everyone to be comfortable, delighted, fed, included, seen. At a party, some part of me is constantly scanning the room. Is everyone having a good time? Is anyone …
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The butterfly in your throat
The thyroid is shaped like a butterfly. A small one. Wings spread, sitting at the base of the throat. And its job is metabolism. Maybe that’s coincidence. I don’t especially care. The image is too good to leave alone. The butterfly is our oldest picture of becoming. Something goes into …
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The space between the trees
Look up in a forest sometime. Not at the trees. At the space between them. If you catch it right, there’s a halo of light around every canopy. A thin river of sky running between one tree and the next, tracing the outline of each crown like someone drew it. …
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The waiting room of my own life
Sometimes I find myself on pause. It’s as if I’ve walked into the waiting room of my life and sat down. Hands folded. A phone that doesn’t ring. There’s an ungroundedness in my bones. An anxiety humming in my body. And the strange part is, I couldn’t tell you what …
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What are you no longer reaching for?
There’s a moment you probably won’t notice. You reach for something you’ve always reached for. The book on the nightstand. The friend’s name in your phone. The turn you’ve taken a thousand times on the way home. And your hand doesn’t finish the motion. There’s no decision in it. No …
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Desire
Something in you says: this. It doesn’t arrive with an argument. Often it’s quiet, sometimes a little embarrassing. A pull toward a place you’ve never been. A door you keep noticing. A person you want to sit next to. Sometimes the wanting points at something new. Unfamiliar, unproven, not yet …
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Room tone
At the end of a scene, after the last take, someone on a film set calls for room tone. Everything stops. The actors stay exactly where they were standing. Nobody talks, nobody moves, nobody so much as sets down a coffee cup. And for thirty or sixty seconds, they record …
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The seed
I’ve been thinking about the seed. Not the plant it becomes. The seed itself, in the moment before anything is visible. Sitting in the dark of the earth, no light, no proof, no way of knowing what it’s holding. Inside it are the makings of the whole thing — the …
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The Untethering
My brother’s kid is writing a book, and there’s a passage from it that keeps circling in my mind. In it, the parents of the main character notice something about their child’s name. A name that used to fit. A name that, for years, had been a kind of tether. …
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Two truths at once
I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to hold two truths at the same time. We’re trained, almost from the beginning, to simplify. To sort things into columns. Good or bad. Right or wrong. This or that. It makes the world feel manageable. But it also lies to us. …
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