It started because there was a book that I wanted to write about heroines, and there’s a lot of delicious heroine history in France. But then my life went upside down and I needed to figure out my own heroine-ism, and what had started as a research trip became a pilgrimage and that became a thing in itself. A pilgrimage is anti-heroic, because it isn’t about anything greater than itself, and that was exactly what I needed at the time. To remind myself that stories thrive in the spaces and the moments where attention is drawn downward and inward, to the feel of one’s literal and figurative feet on the ground. To remind myself that story happens on the path, and that the thing we call a journey is just that story, told in hindsight, through the filters of structure and plot and language; sense-making toward something bigger. To remind myself that the most important moments are always smaller.

I have said this many times: women’s stories have historically rarely taken journey form, in no small part because women’s lives have long been mostly restricted to the (seemingly) smaller moments. The kinspace moments, the moments by the hearth, the cookstove, the cradle. Women’s lives have usually been lived, at furthest, close to home, in the private sphere of nurture rather than in the public sphere of adventure. There’s a reason why fairy tales set the security of the tower, the bower, the bed of ashes against the terrors of the dark forest: for the princess, the maiden, the child there is nothing beyond the walls of home but shadows and danger. One can only hope to find rescue. One only voluntarily leaves to escape greater harm, and/or to find love.

A Heroine’s Journey, in other words, does not start with a call to adventure. It is almost always based upon a call to liberation – to freedom from oppression, from constraint, from the social rules that tell you that your life must be spent close to home, in circumstances that you do not choose. The end result is not saving the world, it’s saving yourself. As I said in a talk a couple of years ago:

It’s about attaining freedom. This is why Happily Ever After resonates. Because for most of human history, the idea that you could marry who you choose, that you could fall in love with somebody and spend your life with them, was radical. A radical, radical, radical idea. The idea that — and there’s still places in the world where this is still untrue — you can choose who you love.

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The freedom to choose. This is every princess story, of course. It is also the story of Mary Magdalene, which is one of the reasons that I ended up in France, and why I lead storytelling retreats anchored in her story: because hers is a story of radical choice-making. And it is no conte de fées. It might be un conte merveilleux – a story of marvels (as any story rooted in a religious tradition might be) – but it is still a story at least partially rooted in a received history, and even the gnostic parts arguably have more of a ring of truth than do many of the stories of the New Testament that children learn in Sunday school. There may or may not have been dragons, which don’t diminish its believability in slightest, to me, anyway.1

But you don’t have to believe it to be inspired by it, any more than you need to believe that Odysseus really fought in the Trojan War or battled sea monsters or was held captive by witches and minor goddesses in order to experience The Odyssey as an epic story. We have not historically sung hymns to Mary Magdalene – the hymns and odes to women in history are very very few and far between – and her sainted status within the traditional confines of the Catholic Church keeps her, for the most part, in the role of servant/witness to Jesus. Still, hers is a story that belongs at the very foundation of a canon of Heroines’ Journeys, were there ever to be one.

Mary made the radical choice to leave her home and her assigned future, to choose her path. To choose love, in some versions of the story, perhaps in all of them, depending on how the love in question is framed. And to become a storyteller, which is after all what an apostle is – apóstolos, from the Greek meaning (broadly) messenger – who carried one of the foundational stories of the west to, according to the lore, the shores of Europe. The first to carry it, if you believe the lore, and even if you don’t, it’s a much better story than the received one.

Like many heroines’ stories, it’s a partnership story (to use the language of my friend and teacher Riane Eisler): it’s a story that offers an alternative to the well-propagandized stories of domination (according to Riane, the most famous example of this is The Odyssey). This holds whether by “her story” we are referring to Mary’s gospel or to her mythos: both invite us to find the divine in love, and in community. Even in her retreat from the world, her journey to her cave (ah, caves!)2 requires – as do all katabatic stories featuring women – aid and support. There is no heroine’s journey that is not a partnership journey, driven by mutual care: it requires fairy godmothers or woodland creatures or dwarves or angels carrying you up and down mountains.

Which is why when I gather, with my dear collaborator and sister , small cohorts of heroine-writing women in the south of France, it is an exercise in sisterhood. Our “Writing The Heroine’s Journey” experience is not about finding the lady version of the hero, singular and triumphant, but about becoming, collectively, our own fairy godmothers and the apostles of our shared stories. It is about identifying with Mary, and her angels; becoming the poetic forces that carry ourselves and each other up mountains, singing hymns to ourselves and being nourished by our poetry.

And it is about searching for the deeper magic in the hidden stories that lay beneath the topsoil of received canon, the overgrowth of monomyths, even further down than Mary’s story, the hidden layers of stories of goddesses and fertility rites and water nymphs and sacred forests, Artemis and Cybele and Isis and the Druids. Reminding ourselves that the sacred work of women’s storytelling is the sharing of story, the surfacing and reseeding and nurturing and rewilding of the vast garden of our stories. Proving to ourselves that our utopian experiments in shared, storybuilt community, however small, are proof to the world that the expansion of the garden is possible.

(If you’re interested in joining us next year, or learning more about a new experience that we’re plotting, send a note. Every story begins with at least one brave word.)

The French call it l’appel du vide — “the call of the void” — that feeling that you get when you’re somewhere up high and you feel a sudden, perverse urge to jump. It’s not suicidal; it’s characterized by coming out of nowhere, challenging our reflexes for self-preservation. Hence l’appel, or call — it’s like something calls out and urges you to follow the completely crazy impulse to leap.

I’ve felt this many times, but never thought of it as an urge so much as a kind of felt curiosity: a longing to know what it might feel like to tumble through the air into the unknown. Even that doesn’t quite capture it — it’s almost more of an urge to recapture a feeling that you somehow already know, like déjà vu but with falling. It’s a sense that you can not only imagine what it might feel like to tumble through the air, you already know what it would feel like because somehow, you’ve already experienced it. You already know the sensation of losing your footing or your grip and feeling the ground slip away from you; you know the drop in your stomach, the electric pulse of alarm down the back of your neck and your spine, the sudden pounding of your heart, the sensation of nothingness as everything gives way, the flash of familiarity, the ohyeahright I know this feeling…

You know?

Anyway, that was what I felt as I tumbled over the edge of a cliff on a mountain in the south of France last month.

Pilgrimages are usually pretty straightforward. Usually they just involve a lot of walking along a fairly well-trodden and often pre-determined path — the Camino de Santiago, for example, or the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). They can be physically taxing — part of the point, arguably, is to push yourself physically — but they usually aren’t inherently dangerous, for the most part. A pilgrimage is not a quest, in the strict sense: the pilgrim goes in search of something, but the search isn’t for something that can be found on the literal path; it’s for something that can only be discovered on the spiritual path, through the step-by-step movement of a journey that has its fullest unfolding in the heart, soul, or spirit. It’s not meant to be a thrilling adventure. You’re certainly not supposed to fall off cliffs.1

In any case, I was not on a pilgrimage last month, not technically. Figuratively, spiritually, certainly — there’s much to be said about simply being in a state of pilgrimage, even if you’re not walking — but technically I was in France to co-lead a retreat and facilitate a storytelling journey for a small group of women. Which is to say, I was responsible for supporting the creative and spiritual pilgrimages of others, not my own, and so going off into circumstances under which I might fall off of a cliff by myself was not on the agenda.

The frame of the experience (and the name of the retreat) was Writing The Heroine’s Journey, which was a little bit tongue in cheek because I am more than a little bit critical of hero’s journeys and some of that criticism extends to standard frames of heroine’s journeys and even kindred journeys and really any journey-focused story framework that draws heavily from the hero’s journey structure and/or connects itself to the idea of a monomyth. My use of it (for the purposes of the retreat, and beyond) leans pretty heavily deconstructionist: interrogating the idea of the hero or heroine in women’s stories, and unpacking the whole framework of journeys. For the retreat in France, we were going to be walking both a figurative and literal landscape, navigating the archetypes of both figurative and literal heroines — ourselves, as authors and as protagonists in our own stories, and Mary Magdalene, whose lore dominates the landscape of that part of France — and exploring, unpacking, and crafting our own stories. This involved a lot of walking up and down mountains, as it happens.

I use the words we and our, because this was absolutely a shared experience, but again, I was there as a teacher and a facilitator, not an explorer. It was not my journey. My personal impulses and desires and curiosities were not part of the map, so to speak; it was crafted very specifically to meet and serve those of the participants. So even though there was one teeny-tiny nagging curiosity that I was carrying from my personal journey/pilgrimage the year before, that nagging curiosity was not going to have a place in the experience, unless some unlikely window of opportunity opened up.

Which it did. Of course it did.

It was on the third full day of the retreat. The focus of this particular day, outside of the story work, was a hike to the very top of the Massif de Sainte Baume, where you can find the Chapelle du Saint-Pilon as well as spectacular views across the valley below, over the dragonspine-like ridge, and all the way out to the Mediterranean Sea. The spot that you climb to is directly above the Grotto of Mary Magdalene, and it’s where Mary is said to have been flown by angels seven times a day for prayer, which makes sense, because it’s a steep and rocky climb and hiking up there just one time in a day is an intense workout even if you’re not a holy person slowed down by robes. Doing more than once honestly wouldn’t be doable without divine assistance.

It’s a long way up, and a long way down. On the hike back down the mountain there’s a fork in the road: one path takes you around to the hike up to Mary’s grotto, another is the main pilgrimage path—the so-called Chemin des Roys— another goes down a different way that takes you more directly to the monastery and its hostellerie, and then one more goes to a clearing directly beneath the rockface underneath the grotto. Beyond this last area is a very, very narrow trail that snakes along the tree line of the mountain, where the forest meets the cliffs; it’s the path that people sometimes take when they’re trying to find le Grotte aux Oeufs — the Cave of Eggs — and it is a notoriously tricky way to get there.

This was my nagging curiosity. I wanted to see if I could get to the Cave of Eggs on my own, taking that path. I had been there the year before, up a more straightforward route from the valley below, but I wanted to see if I could find it myself, by myself, the hard way, for reasons that I can still can’t quite explain to myself or to anyone else. It was just an urge, un appel, a persistent whisper in my psyche. Or it was ego. Or both.

Again, I had no intention of shoe-horning this into the retreat experience; I was fully prepared to let it go until my next visit. But as we made our way down the mountain after our hike to Saint-Pilon and got to the fork in the road, the group began to split up. One wanted to go on her own down the secondary path; two others wanted to go ahead on the Chemin des Roys; everyone could just meet back at the house, which wasn’t that far from the mountain. Here, unexpectedly, was an opportunity to explore the other trail.

I’ll walk Susanna to the other path and then check out the goat trail and then head back down that way, I told , my co-leader. I’ll meet you all back at the house.

I won’t regale you with the details of walking the winding, narrow mountain path; this isn’t a hiking blog. I will say that it was spectacularly beautiful, if a little throat-tightening at times. It was early May, so the path was abundant with mountain wildflowers and blooming trees — wild daffodils, lupine, lilies and apple blossoms — and where the path opened past the trees along the rocks, the whole valley came into view. Birds sang and swooped along the tree line; butterflies came so close I thought they’d land on my shoulder. I was a pilgrim and a Disney Princess all in one.

This, I thought, this is church. My heart was so full I thought it would burst.

Still. It was a tricky trail, as advertised. There were places where it branched upward and the sensible thing seemed to be to keep right and keep gaining elevation. The Cave of Eggs is in the rockface of the mountain, after all, just at the tree line, so why would one go down? I knew that this was one of the common mistakes that people make on this path — they assume that they should keep moving upwards and then find themselves too high up, headed back up the spine of the mountain to the top. So I kept left, angling down.2

But as I forged along, I started to doubt myself: had I gone too far? The wrong way? I was tracking my distance relative to the monastery down in the valley; whenever I broke through a clearing and could see the valley below I’d look for it and try to gauge my distance. How far had I hiked? Had I missed an upward turn and somehow gone past the cave? It was hard to tell how far I’d come — the monastery was literally a thumbnail on the landscape below, and it’s difficult to translate thumbnails into real distance when you’re walking along the side of a mountain nearly 3000 feet from the ground and the thumbnail is a mile or two away.

I began looking for a path up into the rocks. I knew that I would eventually have to wind my way around at least part of the rockface to get to the cave, so the right path had to curve in that direction. It just had to. It didn’t make sense to curve away and down from the rocks. So I looked for a way up.

There were many narrow cutaways through the bushes and into the rocks, but I finally saw one that seemed promising. It looked more well-trodden than the others, like it had been walked recently, and it arced up into a bank of much larger rocks. It didn’t ping my Cave of Eggs radar (which I’d been hoping for) but it all looked very cave-ish, and heading in a cave-ish direction seemed to make more sense than going deeper into the woods. I congratulated myself on being a sensible hiker, and clambered up.

And found nothing. The path ended beneath an unclimbable wall of rock with a steep cliff-drop on the other side. This wasn’t the right way. Ugh. Branches were snagged in my hair and my zen was turning into frustration. How did I get this wrong? Why didn’t I stay on the path? Did I have to turn around and climb back down? It was so frustrating. Couldn’t I just find a way to climb down here and call it a detour rather than a wrong direction? I grabbed onto a branch and leaned over the edge of the cliff to see.

You already know what happened next.

I knew that I was falling before I was fully in the air. I knew that it wasn’t just a slip and that I hadn’t just slid down the rocks. No, the branch had broken and I was fully tumbling forward, away from the rocks and into the air. It was an actual somersault, a flip forward and over, which turned out to be a blessing because if I’d slid I’d have scraped myself against the rocks and if I’d just splatted forward I would have broken my face. By launching, somehow, into the air and flipping over, I cleared some danger. But still, I was falling and while falling I was thinking exactly what I’d always imagined I’d think if I fell over some significant height: oh, right, yeah, of course, this is what it feels like. Déjà fall.

And then: oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I was falling over the edge of a cliff. This was not good. It was a small cliff — 7 feet high or so? — but still. The fall felt interminable, like I was tumbling through time itself. This is what it feels like. This is what feels like. Oh shit this is what falling feels like.

I landed on a bed of damp leaves and wildflowers and pine needles, cushioned by my backpack, right at the edge of the trail that I’d just left.

I lay there for a moment, winded. Was I hurt? Would I even know if I was hurt? I didn’t have any experience falling over cliffs, so I didn’t know. I did know that the wind had been knocked out of me and that I was definitely sore. But sore was good, right? I could feel everything, including a deep sense of embarrassment, which made no sense because I was alone on the side of a mountain with no witnesses other than an owl that had hooted just as I hit the ground. I felt my backpack beneath me; it held a sweater, a journal, a gnome, two large mostly empty plastic water bottles, and some fistfuls of wildflowers and pinecones. I could hear the water bottles crunch as I shifted my weight, and I hoped that they hadn’t leaked and soaked my journal (priorities).

The backpack had broken my fall, as had the bed of flowers and foliage. I got up and checked myself for blood and jutting bones. Everything in my body seemed to be in the right place, and there was only a bit of blood on my hands and forearms where I’d been scratched by branches and rocks. I moved my limbs; everything was working, everything was in place.

Except my glasses. Bizarrely, I checked the top of my head to see if they were there, because that’s always the first place that you look for your glasses when you realize that they’re not on your face. They were, of course, not there; I scanned the ground around me and realized immediately that there would be no finding them in the leaves and bushes even if they had somehow landed nearby, which itself was a stretch given that they had a whole mountainside to fly off into. There was simply too much foliage and underbrush; that, and I couldn’t see for shit.

All there was to do, then, was to continue hiking across the side of a mountain, bruised and half-blind. Because of course I wasn’t stopping; the mountain had tossed me back onto the correct path and so who was I to not continue following it? What would be the point of falling of a cliff if I just got up and turned around and went back the way that I came? Sure, if I’d been hurt I’d probably have thought and done differently, but I was just a bit banged up and scraped and sight-impaired and in any case I was on the right path. The mountain wanted me to find the cave. It had tossed me off a cliff to make sure that I would find the cave.

So I did.

It wasn’t actually all that much further along, and my instinct that it was somewhere in the next bank of rocks had been correct; I’d just gotten cocky and started climbing too soon. Within a few minutes I saw the where the path forked and curved upward into a narrow passage into the rocks and knew that this time, I had found just the right spot. I clambered up and there it was: the Cave of Eggs.

To say that I was exhilarated doesn’t even capture it. I was elated. I had found it. Half blind and a little battered and more than a few twigs in my hair, but still. I had found it.

I stayed for a while, reveling in having the cave all to myself. I might have sang into it, as one does.3 At one point three young French guys appeared from the opposite trail; if they were startled to see a middle-aged woman with pine needles in her hair and dirt and blood on her cheeks, they hid it well. I asked them to take my photo and they obliged and then continued on their way. I decided to take their appearance as a sign — it showed exactly where the route down the mountain was — and so I said goodbye to the cave and headed into the woods.

Getting down the mountain was in some respects more difficult than getting to the cave itself — the forest was dark and full of fallen trees and slippery rocks and I was only able to see a few feet ahead of myself without my glasses. But I knew that if I just kept heading downhill I’d end up in the open valley with line of sight to the road. So I just forged my way along, taking my time and watching my steps, and eventually made it all the way down and out of the forest and onto the path home.

I messaged Patricia. So you know, I texted, I’m safe and en route back.

The “I’m safe” was superfluous. I had not been gone all that long, all things considered; even with my fall, I was still within a very reasonable timeframe for hiking across the mountain and back down to the valley. I knew that Patricia would have been watching the time closely and waiting to hear from me, but the ‘en route back’ would have sufficed. No declaration of safety necessary.

Except that there was a need, for me. I think that I needed to declare it, not as a statement on having survived a fall (which Patricia, thankfully, did not yet know about), but as a declaration of my state of mind — or more accurately, my spirit. The word “safe” derives from the Latin salvus, which can be translated as “not injured” or — more accurately — as “whole.” I wasn’t thinking about this at the time, of course, but this was absolutely my state of mind and spirit. I felt whole. Despite the minor injuries and the impairments of lost glasses, scraped skin, and sore muscles, I felt more fully myself, more wholly myself, than I had in a long time. When I texted, I’m safe, perhaps that’s what I meant: I’m whole. Perhaps that’s what I most wanted Patricia — and myself — to know in that moment.

Hi, just checking in. I’m whole. Back soon.

That’s what makes any journey a pilgrimage, I think — it makes one feel whole, or even just closer to wholeness. It’s a lived reminder that as you navigate the inevitable cliff-falls of life, you can always find your self on the path — your most whole self, even (not to get too spiritually twee here) your most holy self. That’s all that holiness is, maybe: wholeness. Many theologians would disagree with this on translation grounds; I’m relying on the Old English etymology of the word “holy” here (hal and halig, from which we get, respectively hale / whole / healthy and holy) and turning it to my own purposes. So it is, admittedly, a stretch. Greek is more standard for translating the word “holy” in religious contexts, and the primary Greek word for holy, hagios, actually means separate or set apart; so does hieros, which is closer in meaning to “sacred” than “holy” but the sense of separateness still applies.

But maybe that’s fitting, too — to pilgrim or to journey in any context is to separate yourself from a fixed place. It’s answering the call of the void, in a way: you feel a sense of possibility in the unknown, and you let yourself get drawn toward it, even if it means letting go of the things that attach you to permanence, things like roots, home, solid ground. It means letting the ground give way so that you can tumble forward, away from the things that keep you rooted in place. It means letting the tumble carry you, already knowing what it feels like to have let go. Maybe the tumble scares you; maybe it breaks you. That’s the risk, obviously. That’s why it’s hard.

But maybe it’s what puts you on just the right path.

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Interested in joining me in France in 2026? We have two sets of dates upcoming, in May and December. I promise that I won’t lead you off of a mountain, literally or spiritually. Find out more here: https://www.sacredparis.com/writing-the-heroines-journey-sainte-baume-pilgrimage

I gave up on tracking, measuring, quantifying, watching time. It wasn’t a conscious choice at first – it was something that I just found myself doing (more on this below) – but eventually it became a kind of practice. Sure, I needed to mind calendars and schedules in order to function as an adult, but day to day I committed to not worrying about the broader passage of time. To not watching clocks or tracking dates or fussing about seasons in either the literal or figurative sense.

This is easier to do in Southern California than in many other places, granted. The trees hold their green and the sky remains pretty much the same blue year-round. Once you’ve been here for a while you notice subtle seasonal shifts – different blooms cast a different flavor to the air; the arc of the sun casts different light – but if you squint you can elide their movement. You can imagine that time isn’t some progressive, linear thing. You can tell yourself that chronological time is just an invention, a story, a crutch for the Dayplanner Industrial Complex.

None of this means that you give up your dayplanner, of course. You just add a lot of stickers and doodles with colored pencils and call it a journal instead.

You tell yourself that this is resistance.

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It all started with the fires, I think. Until that point, I’d been heading into 2025 with a firm commitment to not just getting shit done but to getting shit done on time.

There’s a point in everyone’s life when they really start to hear the clock ticking – it’s usually midlife; there are tropes about this – and in my case it was when my mom died two years ago, because few things bring your mortality home to you like singing the lullabies of your childhood to your mother’s lifeless body. That put me on a course of aggressive timekeeping, albeit one that kept getting disrupted by other disasters. Time felt like a speeding car taking too many wild turns on a rain-slicked road. So by the time that 2024 was rolling to a close – around this time last year – I was really fucking determined to grab time by the wheel and get control of it. Start actually steering it, and following some kind of reasonably adult map. Hit some markers. Not run out of gas. Not crash.

I made a manifestation list, with “2025” written in bold across the top. It was not exactly a to-do list, but it was also not NOT a to-do list, you know? (It was totally a to-do list, one for which I was asking the universe for an assist.) It was a list meant to give shape and form to the year, a list meant to map the year, after a period of feeling like I was lost and losing time. 2025 was going to be the year that I reclaimed control, the year that I got time back on my side. I was going to make it to the end of my dayplanner and write way to fucking go on the page for December 31 and then pop some champagne in celebration of my badass, time-whipping self. And it was all going to start with the turning of the calendar, with some flex allowed for solstice and lunar new year and other non-Gregorian considerations, of course.

Then Los Angeles caught fire, and that all went out the window. Time itself went out the window. January lasted, like, a year or more. By the time that February arrived, it didn’t, because I was still existentially untethered, and then March came in like a bamboo-drunk panda and just kind of splatted on the ground for a nap. I couldn’t even tell you what happened in the first quarter of the year other than evacuation and displacement and therapy and grief circles and a bizarrely timed Octavia Butler reading group. None of it had been on my manifestation list. None of it moved me forward.

But neither did that upside-down stretch of time feel like a setback, which is what you’d expect it to feel like, if you were, like me, a loss-stricken middle-aged woman with mortality anxiety. It actually felt, in some odd, vaguely perverse way, liberating, and I think that’s because it didn’t feel like a “stretch of time” at all. The events of early 2025 had thrown me outside of time and completely resisted any effort – not that I made any – to reclaim the clock. I was just in it, and although I can look back now and pinpoint dates and measure weeks, I still can’t view it through the lens of time. It felt instant and interminable, and not in an entirely bad way.

The ancient Greeks knew that time was complicated. They had gods for it, as they did for pretty much everything, because slapping a character and personality on a concept is one way of telling a richer, more complex story about ideas that are too easily reduced to black and white. Only one of the three Greek deities associated with time in its broadest sense was connected to time as we usually understand it: Chronos, from whom we get the word chronological, was associated with quantification, sequencing, and measurement. Kairos, on the other hand, was about qualitative time, time understood in the context of a kind of rightness or fitness – the right things at the right time, everything in its own time, for everything a season, etc. etc. Opportunity, serendipity, alignments of experience.

And then there was Aion, which/who is often left out of the conversation, because it refers to an arc of time that we don’t usually think about. It’s the origin of the word eon, which we use to refer to epochs or ages, or to deep time. Cycles beyond the calendar, eternities. It derives from the Proto-Indo-European words heyu, which also means lifeforce, and aei, which means always, and both of which are connected to the old English word aye – or yes.

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Aionic time, in other words, is a kind of time beyond time, time beyond measurement, time as experience, time as life in the broadest, most cosmic sense. We can’t fully experience it when we’re distracted by Chronos and Kairos – by measured time and and by time as opportunity. We can only fully experience it when we choose or are forced to function outside of calendars and sequences.

Religious experiences can take us there. So can travel (qua pilgriming, which is a variety of religious experience), and love. So can grief.

In the movie The Life of Chuck there’s a reference to Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, which tries to provide a measurement of aionic time; it uses Chronos to explain Aion, which any student of Greek mythology can tell you is a bad idea, but an interesting exercise nonetheless. Basically, it compresses the 18+ billion history of the known universe into a singular calendar year and points out that if we go by the broad strokes of that measurement, we’re in the last milliseconds of existence. Not human existence – all existence. And all of recorded human history is happening within the last fractions of the last second of the last day of time — on December 31st, Cosmic Year. Yes, it’s supposed to make you feel small. But it’s also supposed to make you question time itself. What even is time, when we are specks upon specks of dust in eternity?

Why worry about time when it — whatever it is — is so completely beyond us? When it’s possible and impossible all at once?

This is not a huge consolation when your neighborhood is on fire, or your mom is dead in your arms, or fascism is on the rise, but still. It’s some consolation. Because it reminds you that time is absurd, that all of this absurd, and that most things that seem bonkers impossible, beyond our comprehension, just kinda… aren’t?

It’s real life, but it’s also a story, and you can turn the pages fast or you can turn the pages slow and you can even skip ahead or back or just hold a page with your finger while you pause and stare at the sky and remember that there’s a whole universe outside of you. And one inside you, too.

You should watch The Life of Chuck.

Anyway. Ignoring Chronos became something of a practice for me this year. I stopped attaching deadlines to most of my to-do lists. I used dayplanners as journals, scribbling notes with colored pens and pencils on whatever pages had the most space, dates be damned. When I had to keep track of time for some reason, I used an antique hourglass and kept an eye on the sands, rather than setting a timer. I let the sun wake me up in the morning. Sure, I had my Google calendar and a spouse willing to do most of the school runs, and I turned on notifications when I needed to, but still. Outside of almost missing one plane and one or two other mishaps, I managed to do okay holding time lightly in an aggressively time-bound world.

This practice also influenced my broader world, as my work began revisiting themes of time/non-time and possibility. I mentioned the Octavia Butler reading group; I also co-produced and co-led a retreat called Once Upon A Future. I did a talk on the Cassandra myth. I did two on rethinking futurism through the lenses of impossibility and the imagination. I stood on a stage in Azerbaijan and told a room of investors that measurement and prediction are just stories that, poorly told, can inhibit the imagination.

I argued strenuously for the power of utopian thinking, thinking that aims at both the good and the impossible and that holds the question of “when” very, very loosely.

I walked labyrinths, and ancient forests. I visited places where the ancient and the modern are deeply entangled, places where you can become deliciously untethered from a coherent sense of cultural time because you’re sitting in front of millennia-old goddess stone while sipping a cappuccino. I crossed time zones and didn’t bother trying to calculate the difference in time between where I was, where I was going, and where I’d been. I didn’t spend time anywhere, I just lived it.

It’s important to note that this wasn’t just a gentle drift through the soft clouds of space-time; there were moments of friction when “living” time bumped up against measured time, when Chronos was not to be ignored, like the time that I almost missed my plane because I got caught up in a writing flow in an airport lounge in the wrong terminal at LAX. Or the time that I fell off the cliff in France, where the cliff-falling itself wasn’t as big a problem as was the fact that it happened very late in the afternoon, which is a bad time to be on the side of a mountain by yourself, lightly injured and (crucially) having lost your glasses in the fall. I could say that fumbling one’s way down a mountain through a heavily wooded forest in rapidly fading light is a mood – and it is – but it is also disconcerting and one tends to be very glad for a functioning smartphone with clock and GPS in such a moment, mood notwithstanding.

When I got back home to the US I was annoyed that the replacement glasses I’d ordered weren’t already on my doorstep; one can hold Chronos at arms’ length and still want fast, free shipping. I’m still sitting with this contradiction, aware of myself as a being who is accustomed to the hyper-velocity of late-stage capitalism and who enjoys its conveniences, even as she strives to resist them.

I kept time when I had to, and when I didn’t have to, I didn’t. It wasn’t always easy, but it worked out okay. And now it’s the end of the year – according to the Gregorian calendar, which is just one, arbitrary calendar – and I’m pushing myself to write this before the clock strikes midnight, which is another contradiction but one that I’m embracing. Why I’m embracing it, I don’t know – because the story demands it? The story that I tell myself about what the story requires? Stories that look back upon a year through the lens of time need to be mindful of time.

That, and January is all about predictions and looking forward – new year, new you! – and I’m as vulnerable to that vibe as anybody. Of course I want this year to be a good year, whatever that means. Of course I want it to be better, whatever that means too. As if time were some linear thing that arcs upward or downward in its progress, rather than a flat circle or an eternal recurrence or a trio of gods or goddesses weaving and squabbling and not caring a whole lot about what mortals do. Or just a story.

There are a whole bunch of stories that emerged out of this year that I haven’t told yet. Partly because I lost track of time (intentionally) and partly because the last few months of the year turned a whole lot of things upside down in terms of how I see myself and my life and – yes – my future. And I’m still processing it all. Maybe I’ll have made some sense of it by the lunar new year.

Or maybe I’ll just tell it in my own time.

If you’re longing for an experience outside of time, I’m co-leading another retreat in the south of France with my dear collaborator in both May and September. It’s a rich exploration into your own story. You will not fall off a cliff.

More about it to come in January; in the meantime, details are here (spaces are very limited; you’re getting advance notice). You can also listen to me and Patricia talk about the backstory and share more about it here, in this podcast episode.

So it’s hard to say when that journey really began. It might have been when my dad died, it might have been when Tanner died, it might have been during my existential crisis at Disney, it might have been when my start-up failed. It might have been in grad school when I got too deep into the stories of Eve and Esther and Mary and the Levite’s unnamed concubine. It might have been in my early teens when a nun told me that no convent would want me (why I wanted the convent is another story). It might have been when I was six and I had a super vivid dream about Jesus and my dead cat. It probably doesn’t matter. I’m not getting Skymiles for any of this, so tracking time and distance is pointless.

What I do know: it accelerated when my mom died, at which point it shifted from being an abstract journey to an actual one (for which I have, as it happens, earned and used a lot of Skymiles), and that its biggest breakthrough moment (so far) was not the kind that prompts one to send a postcard . It wasn’t on a mountaintop or in a sacred cave or in a Redwood forest or in an ancient cathedral or in a kirtan circle or in a Druid pool in the south of France.

It was in a twelve-step meeting.

I hadn’t intended to go to the twelve-step meeting. There are a lot of reasons for this, not least that I simply didn’t think that AA or AlAnon or any of the AA-related ‘programs’ had anything to do with me. I also carried some judgments from a previous life; for many years my mom worked in the addictions space in Canada, where there was some skepticism about the efficacy of twelve-step programs. But mostly it just wasn’t something that I was interested in, and in any case (in this particular case) I was on a retreat in Costa Rica and my focus was soul-searching and writing and communing with monkeys and none of those things were served (I thought) by attending a twelve-step meeting.

Except there was this: Anne Lamott was running the meeting. The retreat was co-hosted by her and her husband Neal, and while the twelve-step meetings were obviously entirely optional, she had made it very clear that they were also open to everybody and that everybody was welcome. How often do you get to sit in a sharing circle with Anne Lamott? Also, pretty much everyone else was going and I’m a joiner. So I went.

For the first few minutes of the meeting, it was exactly what I expected: boundaries were established (anonymity as prime directive), non-denominational prayer was invoked, and basic introductions were made. This was at a beautiful retreat site in Costa Rica, in an open-air room perched high above the rainforest, with views of the ocean and the setting sun, which is to say that none of the church basement AA meeting television tropes applied — there were no styrofoam cups of bad coffee, no flourescent lights and metal chairs — but for anyone who’s ever seen such a meeting depicted on screen, which is to say everyone, it was still very recognizable as what it was: a circle of somber people sitting in quiet expectation of revealing themselves to each other. An AA meeting.

I settled in to listen quietly, my heart open but maybe just a little bit detached. I don’t know what I was expecting; maybe nothing, maybe everything. Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything like what happened.

I obviously can’t and won’t repeat anything that was shared. I’ll just say — and I say this as someone who has both sat in and held many, many confessional story-sharing circles — that it was some of the most soul-stirring storytelling that I’ve ever heard. Ever. Straight from vulnerable hearts, no performance; just a pure, raw flow of story pouring into a loving, protective circle. I don’t think that I’ve ever sat in such a stripped-down human space, nor one that has felt so deeply sacred; it thrummed with the energy of the divine. I was held fixed in my chair, humbled, small. I had no story to share in that space, but I could witness the stories of others. Which is what I did: I sat very, very still and witnessed the pouring out of sacred stories.

And that would have been more than enough. But then someone said something that sent a shockwave through me. It was just a few words but those words were like a knife through my ribs, cutting right through years of stories that I had told myself about my family.

Addict. Alcoholic. Sister.

It sounds so ordinary, even boring, relaying it here; cool story, you and how many million others?, and wow, no duh, you had to have known this. But in that moment those words were a wild, universe-shaking soul-punch. I’d been grappling for a very long time with the impact of my sister’s mental illness, and I’d been painfully aware that drugs and alcohol were an aggravating factor, but I had never put any of the words together, and putting the words together was like uttering a magic spell, the kind that wakes one up from a long enchanted sleep. Or summons dragons.

Even in the moment I couldn’t quite wrap my tongue around the words. They sat like gristle in my mouth, ugly words that I wanted to spit out and cover with a napkin but also words that made a whole bunch of things make sense. I felt them out. I held them on my tongue and then I released them. Addict. Alcoholic. Addict. Alcoholic. I said them out loud. And then suddenly there were a lot of questions that I had to ask myself (you’ve woken up, you’ve summoned dragons; now what?) and it was overwhelming but I was in that circle, that sacred circle; I was in church, I was safe, and it was okay to feel overwhelmed.

After the circle Annie (we called her Annie) hugged me and thanked me and said some very warm and encouraging words but I can’t for the life of me remember what they were. I wish that I could remember what they were.

I’m not going to tell my sister’s story here. Annie once famously wrote that “if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better,” but still. My sister behaved terribly, atrociously, for a very long time, but a lot of that has nothing to do with me, at least not directly, and in any case for the purposes of this particular story I don’t need to say much, so I won’t. I’ll just say that it was bad, really bad, for a really long time and for some reason (a bunch of reasons) I never used the words addiction or alcoholism in relation to what was going on, even though those were a big, aggravating part of a larger mental illness story. Of a family story. I can come back that, maybe. Right now the details don’t matter.

What matters is this: I hadn’t named a core element of what was really happening in her story, or at least in my version of my experience of her story, and that had complicated everything. I’d wrapped too much of that story in pretty words and forgotten to acknowledge the ugly ones. And that by carving out the more unsavory pieces of her story, I’d missed a core piece of my own.

People often say that they’re embarking on spiritual journeys to find themselves; I suppose that I’d have to say the same of mine, except that I really didn’t know what I was looking for. And if I were pressed to call it a journey I’d have called it a liberation journey, rather than a heroine’s one. In a world where I no longer had to hold the role of Chief Worrier for my family of origin — my mom, my dad, my sister — my biggest challenge was figuring out what my life might look like if I wasn’t the heroine. What do you do once you're no longer the eldest daughter / big sister / family savior? What happens once there is no one left to protect, when there are no more dragons to slay?1

I didn’t know the answer to that, so I set off in search of other archetypes, the archetypes, I suppose, of the unheroines: the women who found their own way on their own terms, for their own purposes, divine or human or otherwise. Women who walked away. I wasn’t looking for models of overcoming and conquering and winning; I was looking for models of radical, liberated being.

It was a good quest, and I had (am having) lots of adventures, but there was a piece missing: an honest consideration of what liberation actually means, for me. What was I walking away from, setting myself free from? If you’d asked me what I was rejecting, I’d have said, loudly, patriarchy. I’d have cited (and still will cite) all the data about women and girls’ oppression, all of the things that have held us back, all of the things that I made a career out of tackling, and said, I’m walking fully away from all of the expectations associated with that. But then I would have also said (still will say), but, but I was luckier than most, I had loving, supportive parents and grew up in a close family in which I was always encouraged to fly free and chase my dreams yada yada and I wouldn’t have noticed any contradictions at all.

Because although that would have been the truth, it would have also hidden a deeper, buried truth: that although I was encouraged to fly free, there were some heavy, anchoring chains hindering that flight. There were unacknowledged shadows, closed books, hidden stories; legacies of trauma that my parents wanted to hide from us but which had insidious ways of making themselves known. There were monsters lurking in the woods, and we could never get far enough away, as a family, for my parents’ assurances that there was nothing to be afraid of to be fully true. So I made it my job to be on constant alert, a girl-Gawain committed to protecting her loved ones and defending my parents’ promise that we were safe. No-one was wandering into that forest on my watch.

But that was a fool’s errand, because my sister kept running into those woods, starting fires and summoning ghosts, dancing with monsters to a beat that only she could hear. My parents rushed in to save her again and again until the fires got out of control and the trees burned too hot. I’d rush in too, sometimes, in part to stop my parents, in part because I thought it was my job, in part because I loved her, I did, I really did. But there was another reason, too. The fire scarred my skin and singed my hair but — and this is what I learned in that twelve-step circle in Costa Rica that day — my deepest longing wasn’t to run away from the haunted, flaming woods where my sister danced. It was to go even further in.

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This is where it gets really thorny, obviously. I’m still working it through even now; that week in the twelve-step circles was a messy and uncomfortable process, peeling layers off of giant onions that I didn’t know I’d been gathering. The story that I discovered wasn’t just one about acknowledging murky truths surrounding my sister, nor forgiving her (I’m not there yet)—it was about my own complicated longings and resentments. It was about acknowledging my own murky truths, and one truth in particular: the truth that I’d been jealous of her.

It wasn’t that I’d wanted to give myself over to addiction and mental illness—fuck no— it was that I’d wanted some of her wildness. I’d wanted the freedom that she embraced, the whole-soul commitment to giving absolutely zero fucks and leaning fully into her desires and impulses. That probably sounds fucked up, but that doesn’t make it any less true. My sister was kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Addict, an unhinged free spirit who raged and ran amok and made her own rules. We romanticize girls like her in books and movies because they embody a kind of freedom that is usually forbidden for women and girls—they’ve broken free from their chains; they run wild like feral horses and let nothing hold them back.2 My whole existence, on the other hand, was all about holding back, about being rational and restrained and prudent and calculating and careful. And caring—I care deeply about everyone that I love, and even many that I don’t, and although I am glad that I am a caring person, there’s a part of me that has at times felt powerfully constrained by her own heart.3

So, yeah. There’s a part of me that has always just wanted to say fuck it and be feral. Go wild, like, really wild. I’ve flirted with doing this, of course; I’ve gone to the edge of the cliff and listened closely to the call of the void. I’ve even rappelled down a time or two — but always with ropes, of course, always feeling guilty for making my parents worry, for making anyone worry, and always pulling myself back up over the edge quickly, my bruised and bleeding fingers the only evidence that I ever tried to go down.

I’ve never jumped. I’m too cautious to jump.

But what if I had felt free enough to go fully over that edge or into those woods or onto whatever landscape of wide open space with nothing holding me back? Supposing I had done that, what then? Supposing I were to do that now—what would happen? Suppose it didn’t matter what might happen: what would it be like?

What would it feel like to be wild?

There’s nothing poetic about these questions. This is not about rewilding in the Instagram influencer sense of wearing flower crowns and forest bathing and doing baptismal rituals in sacred rivers (no judgement, I have done all of these things). This isn’t women running with the wolves. These are hard questions about navigating the sometimes deadly edges of the human wilderness — to say nothing of the feminine one — the rough cliffs and dark woods of addiction and mental illness and hidden and not-so-hidden trauma. Because asking the question what if I became wild? with any degree of seriousness also requires asking not just what did it cost me to resist wildness, but how did resisting wildness save me?

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There’s no heroine in this kind of journey, and not just because there’s no existing narrative script for it. You don’t find God or yourself on this kind of journey, I don’t think. Maybe it’s an anti-heroine’s journey, inasmuch as the point isn’t to locate yourself in some larger, possibly divine story arc. The point might be the opposite, actually: to explore what happens when you let yourself let go and get lost, when you let go of the idea of finding God.

Post-Script

Annie said that God can be anything that we want. She said it a few times over the course of the week, in the twelve-step circles and in our writing workshops and during one beautiful evening when we had a kind of spiritual mini-film festival and talked about how stories can give us come-to-(not)Jesus moments that change how we think about the divine and the sacred in an instant. It wasn’t something new, obviously, because she’s written about it a lot. GUS, she calls it, or the Great Universal Spirit. I clung to this idea, to Gus, like a life raft, because post-twelve-step revelation I was grappling with competing desires to let of my deeply entrenched ideas about God and to hold onto them tightly at the same time.

But for some reason I couldn’t hold the translation of the acronym in my brain for a single minute. Gus, Gus, I whispered to myself in my tent as I grappled with words: Spirit? Creator? The Universe? Gus? Which means what? In my head the acronym kept calling itself God of Unusual Size, which I knew was wrong but which somehow also felt very right. Maybe my God was just that: a god of unusual size, a god that I could both put in my pocket and also hold up against the universe, a god both infinitesimally small and infinitely expansive. A god that isn’t the treasure at the end of a journey, but the sassy sidekick who stays with you along the way — Jiminy Cricket, or Tinkerbell — a micro-extrusion of infinity into the material world to remind you that no matter how much of yourself you give over to the human wild, you always have a tether to the divine.

I think. Maybe. I’m not sure. It’s now one more thing that I need to find out.

The only reason that I’m not sharing it right now is because almost finishing it isn’t totally finishing it, and I didn’t totally finish it because as I was in the process of trying to do so the world went even more sideways than it already is, and then I fell down a rabbit hole of looking at Canadian real estate and got lost there. Which was somewhat ridiculous (I can’t afford any Canadian real estate), but also not. I’ve been insistent for a long time that we wouldn’t leave the U.S. unless things got really, really bad, which is a meaningless statement when you don’t really know what “bad” means — or, more accurately, when “bad” means so many things that it’s hard to parse the spectrum. And it’s not that this week was any more bad than any of the other weeks this year, it’s just that there were points that hit some particularly sensitive nerves. Or maybe all the bad things just got stacked up too high, I don’t know. All I know is that I stopped writing and started researching exit strategies.

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It’s unlikely that we’re leaving any time soon (I think), for a million complicated reasons, but I did cross a Rubicon by seriously thinking about it. Like I said, I’ve been really, really adamant that we wouldn’t leave, and insistent with myself and my family that both our Canadian citizenship and United States permanent residency status (to say nothing of the mobility afforded to us by our white skin) are privileges that should never, ever be considered lightly; never just pick up and leave just because you can (not everybody can, and that matters.) But the other day was a day that the considerations got very serious for a minute, and yeah, I started seriously thinking about leaving for the first time.

But then I went saw Yo-Yo Ma — a friend and role model and enduring source of personal inspiration — perform with Angelique Kidjo and their music soothed and lifted my spirit, and Yo-Yo did the thing that Yo-Yo does, which is to somehow make you feel lighter even when things are very heavy, and today I feel hopeful again.

Not hopeful enough to finish that other piece of writing today, though. I need to sit on my personal confessions for a minute, maybe a weekend (a long one), and play in the shallows rather than the depths so that I can get my bearings. And maybe pull hope a littler closer.

Anyway. In the meantime, here’s a sourdough oatmeal cookie recipe that my mom used to love. Swap the raisins for chocolate chips.

I’ll let you know if I decide to leave. I probably won’t leave — I don’t want to leave — but still. Pinky curl.

(If you’re at all interested in what weird things I got up to in the four weeks that I wasn’t writing — from whence the confessional shall come — you can find an overview of it all over on Sacred(ish). Trigger warning: there was Hare Krishna stuff).

There was also a section called Explore, and in it I put the following:

• An adventure that stretches me

• An adventure that nourishes me

• An adventure that teaches me something

• An adventure that puts me in a state of awe

For whatever reason, this section is the part of the list that has most met and even exceeded my manifestation hopes. We’re just past the halfway point of the year and I’ve had all of those kinds of adventures already. I was stretched in London, Oxford, and France; I was nourished in those places, too. I was taught some very clear lessons on the adventures in which I was supposed to be the teacher, as in France and in Northern California and on Catalina Island. I experienced deep awe among the redwoods in Northern California, among sea lions on Catalina Island, in a cave in the south of France, and in a dark, cavernous basilica in the middle of the night in Paris. Next week I’ll be in Costa Rica, in November I’ll be in Portugal, and in between I’ll be in a bunch of other places that hold as much possibility of adventure as anywhere else. I wanted a lot of adventure, I asked for a lot of adventure, and I got it. This is where I’m supposed to say: manifestation works, you guys!

But I don’t think that manifestation qua manifestation was really what was at work here. If I take the word at its roots – to reveal or make evident, to grasp by the hand – I might say that I manifested these adventures by recognizing opportunities and seizing them. This is, in the most important respects, all that manifestation really is, when you think about it: if you direct your energy (your attention, really) toward certain things, you are more likely to work toward their realization, consciously or not. I wanted adventures, and I articulated that want to myself, and that made me more attentive to any and all opportunities to have them.

I have not, I will note, started a podcast. But there are still 5 and half months left in the calendar year, so. maybe I’ll get around to it. That manifestation list was in some respects just a to-do list with extra steps; a task roster boosted by crystals and affirmations.

The manifestation experts say, be very clear about what you want to manifest. Working with the energy of the universe is like working with AI, apparently: for the best results, you need to have a super crisp idea of what it is that you’re asking for, and you need to ask for it clearly and thoroughly, otherwise it might hallucinate and make something up that you didn’t want. And even if you are clear and super descriptive, it will still sometimes give you a hand with six fingers and try to convince you that, yes, that is a very realistic representation of the thing that you wanted. I asked for an adventure in which I would learn something and the universe took me to a mountain in France and kicked me off of the edge of a cliff and taught me to not lean so far over cliffs.

The manifestation experts also say, don’t try to manifest things over which you don’t have any control, and this is both very good and very obvious advice. You cannot manifest winning the lottery or marrying Keanu Reeves, so don’t bother. It’s very much like prayer, in this way: players on the football field might kneel together before a game and pray for victory (#americanthings), but if they win it’s not because God interceded, it’s because they did all of the other things that made it possible for them to win. The prayer is just an articulation of the longing and the will that drove the doing of those other things. I could go out on that field and pray just as hard and just as clearly and light all sorts of candles and brandish a manifestation list that includes the line item Win Superbowl and I’d get squashed no matter what.

God doesn’t care who wins, and God certainly doesn’t care whether you get a billion dollars or marry Keanu. The worst people in the world have billions of dollars; these are the kinds of people who wouldn’t know a manifestation ritual if it hit them in their crown chakra, the kinds of people who risk bursting into flame if they ever pray. Bad people get good things not because they manifest better or pray harder, but because they do whatever it takes to get those things. Machiavelli said that it isn’t enough to be a prophet, you need to be armed; history has pretty much proven his point.1

Still. I light my candles and I say my prayers and I do my spells and I take my lessons and I embrace all of it because I know, I know, that my relationship to the magic of the world and the universe is core to my experience of it; I believe deeply in my own poetics of enchantment and that means that, yes, I do write wishes on slips of paper and bury them deep in the earth or set them aflame and watch their smoke waft up to the stars. I do pray, I do dream.

When I was around 10 or 11 years old I wanted to be a nun. I really loved God and the church; we belonged to a very hippie Pacific Northwest Catholic church where we sang hymns with folk guitars and the way the light streamed through the stained glass windows on Sunday mornings made me believe that angels were real. I also loved Mary and many of the saints and it seemed to me that a life of contemplation and writing and prayer would be very romantic. I didn’t realize it at the time but there was also part of me that recognized it as a possible escape from an unfair, capitalist, patriarchal world. Obviously that latter part feels ironic—what is more patriarchal than the Catholic church?—but at the time I saw it as a path to at least some form of spiritual power. Nuns had less status than priests but at the time they struck me as more interesting and empowered than the characters in movies and tv shows like 9 to 5 and Tootsie and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.2 So for some period of time that was the dream: become a nun and live of a life of being super deep and mysterious and blessed by God.

Then we changed churches because we moved, and the nuns at the new parish were really mean and the priest was bad3 and the dream died a quick death. I kept my Mary statues, though.

The other month in Paris I got to live out a little bit of my childhood nun fantasy; my dear friend and collaborator Patricia signed us up for a night of adoration at the Basilica de Sacre-Cœur, which involves spending the night in the Benedictine guesthouse there. One of the many notable things about Sacre-Cœur is that it’s the site of 140 years of uninterrupted prayer – perpetual adoration – which simply means that people have been praying there non-stop, night and day, for almost a century and a half. Part of what keeps that going is prayer volunteers who sign up to take prayer shifts between the end of the last mass at night and the first mass in the morning. You stay at the guesthouse, which is as convent-like as anything in your most fevered adolescent nun-life dreams, the ones informed by the convent in The Sound of Music, complete with tiny sparse bedroom looking out over the gardens of the basilica with a single cross above the bed.

I signed up for two hours, from 3am to 5am. Patricia and I attended the Mass, and then sat as the lights were turned out; if you ever go to Sacre-Cœur and do the night of adoration, know that this moment is truly tremendous, when the massive doors clang shut and the lights in the vast, cavernous space go out one-by-one until the only lights are a few small spotlights in the apse and many hundreds of candles. We sat for a minute and then we made our way through the private hallway – the one that the clergy and the nuns use – to the residences and the guesthouse, where we turned in with alarms set for our respective prayer shifts.

When it’s your shift, you go back through the private halls to the side entrance and make your way into the dark, silent basilica. You’re told by the nuns beforehand that it doesn’t matter where or how you conduct your adoration in the space – you can pray or meditate or just sit in silence – the only direction is to simply be there in a state of quiet contemplation. And oh, is it quiet. It is a quiet that you’ve never heard before. There was only one other person in the entire basilica when I went in, knelt in silent prayer in the first row of pews, and it felt as though I had portaled to another world, a world without sound. If you’ve ever been in the furthest depths of a heavily wooded forest at night you might have a sense of this: the darkness and the quiet wrap around you like heavy veils, and you feel at once enclosed and exposed, a small thing in a cathedral of giants. You can hear your heart beat, your blood thrum in your ears.

I spent the first fifteen minutes or so in the nave area in front of the choir and altar, but then wandered to the chapels that circle the back of the basilica, behind the apse. It’s even darker there, and a bit spooky in places. The only light is candlelight. I found a seat in the chapel of the Virgin Mary and settled in there.

Meditating or praying alone in a silent, cavernous dark is very different from doing those things in spaces of noise and light; you start to understand why nuns and monks retreat to convents and monasteries far away from civilization. You get a sense of why Mary Magdalene hid herself away in a cave. When you take away not just the distractions of people but also those of sound and light you find yourself entirely by yourself in a way that you just don’t, say, in the bath. Or even in nature, in some respects; the effect is very much like being in a tomb. If there’s a God to find and you’re looking for them, you’re almost certainly going to find them there in the space where there’s nothing else to perceive. So, yeah, it’s a good place to sit in contemplation, which is exactly what I did. I sat there for the whole two hours and a little bit longer. Just me, by myself, and God, I think. In the dark.

Contemplation isn’t exactly prayer, if you’re being strict about definitions of spiritual practices; it doesn’t need to be directed at God, although when it happens in a church odds are good that God or some God-adjacent energy is part of the whole experience. Adoration is kind of a form of prayer, but unlike the forms of prayer that we usually associate with kneeling and clasped hands and whispered words, it can simply be a practice of being in presence with God (this is especially true for Catholics, for whom Eucharistic adoration – being in the presence of the host – is a whole thing.) Hence the seemingly laissez-faire direction from the nuns for the adoration at Sacre-Cœur: it is enough, in adoration, to simply just be there. And sometimes simply just being there – simply just being – is a practice that can rock you to your soul. It did that to me. I’m still reeling from it, in a way.

Manifestation as a practice is much closer to prayer qua prayer than it is to contemplation or adoration. It’s a form of asking, which is exactly what prayer is on most definitions. The very root of the word means to ask, and that’s how we most often use it: to say that we’re praying for something or someone is usually to say that we are asking God or Spirit or the universe to bend its energy in favor of said thing or person.4 Which is also basically what manifesting is, although in that case we’re not asking a higher power, we’re asking our brains and our energy – our thoughts and our intentions – to rally themselves toward shaping or reshaping reality. We’re the higher power, or at least our synapses are.

The distance between prayer and manifestation is probably the reason that I’m not very good at either: when I’m doing one I’m usually leaning in some direction toward actually doing the other. My manifestation practices have a very prayer-like quality in that they can’t help but nod at a higher power; my practices of prayer tend to have the flavor of a manifestation practice in that they are influenced by my suspicion that me and the higher power are somehow the same thing. The fact that I’m far more comfortable with contemplation and adoration – with just being with my thoughts and feelings rather than asking for things – is another complicating factor.

But I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. I was tempted here to make a joke to the effect that my poor skills in prayer and manifestation might be why I’m not wealthy, but I don’t think that the joke would have landed. We take want too seriously in our world; we’re a culture of asking for things, of demanding things, of constantly measuring our worth and our due. The popularity of manifestation is a symptom of this, I think – we no longer pray, or at least don’t believe that God dispenses favor on the basis of prayer, but we still want and we want hard and so we’ve made a religion of wanting and called it the Laws of Attraction and a whole lot of YouTubers and TikTokers and self-proclaimed self-help gurus are making a whole lot of money on what is effectively the new prosperity gospel. If you want hard enough and you want skillfully enough – if you know the tricks of asking for what you want in just the right way (or can afford to pay the tithes for the most powerful secrets) – then you can have what you want, you will be blessed, the Kingdom of Abundance will be open to you.

Which is why I identify more with witches and mystics and dreamers than with manifestors and mind hackers and anyone who charges thousands of dollars to share the secrets of rewiring the brain. It’s also why I still like cathedrals and saints and nuns, and why ritual for me is not about bending reality to my will but about sinking into it more richly and more deeply and asking it – asking myself – ever harder questions while caring less about the answers because I know that it’s the mystery, the dark, the shadows, the wonder that matters, not the things that I can get from them.

But I’m a girl who likes to cover her bases, and there’s still rent to pay and college tuition to cover so I’m still hanging on to that manifestation list and whispering incantations over it and occasionally the odd prayer. If it means that I get myself kicked off a few more mountains as cosmic lessons, so be it. I’ll still keep trying to be deep.

I simply don’t want to be there without her. In the weeks and months after her death I could do it, I could be there, because her energy was still there, and because it still felt as though I was taking care of her in some small but important way. I washed her body after she died, and it was a holy, healing act. Tending to her home for a while afterward felt very much the same: tending to the physical remainder of a deeply loved spirit, feeling my way through goodbye by running my hands across its emptiness. But while I was able put my whole heart into washing her physical body and holding her and singing her goodbye, I wasn’t able to do that for her house. It was more work than I could do alone. It required more time than I was able to spend. It demanded more courage than I had left. So that work remains unfinished, an incomplete goodbye that haunts me in its incompleteness.

Completing it feels beyond me.

Kyle is going up there in a couple of weeks to do the work himself, and I’m not going with him. I feel some shame about that: it’s my work, after all. Don’t I owe it to her to finish it myself? She would tell me no, I know. She would be worried about my heart. She would say oh honey and insist that I not do it, but I would push back and tell her that I wanted to, like when I stayed with her for almost every single day that she was in the hospital in the weeks before she died. No, Mom, I want to do this. Let me do this.

When she was alive, I meant those words with every single molecule and vibration of my spirit. She’s dead now, so I don’t. It just hurts too much, and even though I have embraced the hurt of losing her, I do not want that much more hurt, I just don’t. But isn’t that the point, isn’t this the moment that the work gets deepest, when it gets hardest, and aren’t I supposed to plunge into that and find my way through? Aren’t I supposed to just do this? Or am I allowed to say, I just don’t want to?

I know that I am allowed to say that I don’t want to, but I am ever and always the biggest naysayer of the things that I claim to know. I need to keep learning, I tell myself, and so I should do this even if it hurts. There’s always some deeper truth that I’m chasing, and I fear that that truth resides in the darkest corners of my hurt. I need to keep learning, I tell myself, and so I should do this thing even if it hurts. Especially because it hurts. This is me, just doing the work.

Or maybe I’m just doing the thing that oldest daughters do, that thing that over-achieving pleasing recovering straight-A gold star student girls do, that so many of us do; maybe I’m just seeking my worth in self-sacrifice. Maybe this is all just so much pious bullshit and I should just do what my mom says and let it go.

It’s my house legally now but it was never my home; my mom bought it for herself some years after she and my dad split up, well after I was off on my own. She was proud of it, and I love it for that reason: she loved it, and that made it special. But still. I tell myself that her house was not my home, it was never my home. She was my home, and I loved her, and she’s gone. Soon her house will be too.

I’ve lost a number of homes in my life. There was the one that burned down when I was six. There was the one that was lost by my parents in the 1980’s mortgage crisis. There was my grandparent’s home on Gilmore Avenue in Burnaby, which felt very much like home but which my grandfather sold quickly after Grandma died so that he could start a new life with his second wife, who had already been in the picture for a while. There were all the places that my family lived for only a couple of years because my dad’s job kept us on the move, places where I made friends and then left them behind, over and over and over again.

There was the loss of our home last year, not even a full year after losing my mom and my job and my cat and a bunch of other things, and then barely six months later, there was the almost-loss of our rental due to the LA fires, which wasn’t a loss in the strict literal sense but definitely a loss in the spiritual and figurative senses and which drove me to therapy for the first time in almost two decades.

And then there’s the sense of impending loss of this country as home, which is a whole different subject but also maybe not. If home is where you belong, and you don’t know where you belong, how do you locate yourself in time and space and nation? My mom hated that we moved to the US, mostly because to her it felt too far away, even though we mostly always lived close to the border when I was a kid. We used to make weekly milk and cigarette runs across the border into Blaine, Washington and watch American TV shows every night; as a child I barely understood that there was an invisible line between a country that was our home and a country that was not. She hated the distance between us but she never stopped encouraging my sense of discovery and adventure, and simply insisted that she would still be coming to live with us when the time came, no matter where we were. We were putting plans in place for her to do that just weeks before she died, but instead of flying her down to California I brought her ashes back on the plane with me, running her TSA-compliant plastic urn through the security x-rays, her name and date of death on a sticker on the side.

In the future that my mom didn’t get to have, home for her was going to be wherever I was. But even in that erased future I can’t say that my own sense of home would have been fully aligned. It’s so easy to say that home is where your people are, but that’s complicated, isn’t it? In any case my kids are close to leaving the nest and that nest is not the nest that they grew up in and for most birds nests are temporary so nest isn’t the best analogy for home qua home, when you think about it.

I’m loss-scarred and hesitant – we all are, really, not sure what to do with the uncertainty that seems to define our lives. We are rooted and unrooted all at once, like those floating plants that don’t require soil, in a country that we’re not sure wants us, that in any case doesn’t want many of the people that we love which makes it harder to love and what is love of country anyway but something that has gotten more than a little fucked up?

There was a period of time when I was at Disney when I was full of frustration and sometimes even rage and I wanted to quit – I tried, in fact, but it didn’t take – and even though we’d started putting down roots in LA I was well and fully prepared to rip those up and start over. I had no plan for what I would do professionally – I’d never planned on being a corporate professional in the first place, so I didn’t even want to stay on that path – but I knew that no matter what, I could write, and that I could write anywhere. I told Kyle, we can just buy an Airstream and travel North America, and we’ll be free and I’ll write and it will be great.

He was appalled. Abso-fucking-lutely not, he said. We are not moving into a trailer. He liked our house and our yard and our pool and the orange trees and the kids were happy in their school and why would I want to just take that all away to go live in an RV? Why would I want to make us leave our home?

It’s not our home, I said.

Maybe not, he said. But it’s our house, and that’s close enough.

A week or two later I relayed that story to my best friend Michael, who was with me at Disney and who helped me with the Princess work and the girl work and the mom work and who knew how frustrated I was, how trapped I felt. I told him what I’d said about the Airstream and about Kyle’s resistance to the idea and I expected his sympathy, but instead he laughed.

I’m sorry, he said, but Kyle’s right. You’ve built a beautiful life here and you’re telling him that now you just want to tear it down and go live in a Winnebago.

Not a Winnebago, I said. An Airstream.

He laughed harder. Honey, no. It would be a Winnebago and you’d end up in an RV park.

He might have been right; there’s probably an alternate universe out there somewhere in which we ended up in a Winnebago in an RV park in the midwest somewhere. And maybe there’s also a universe in which we became a vanlifer family and I wrote bestselling books about rewilding the family and we lived happily ever after on the road, feral and free.

In this life, though, I stayed at Disney and we stayed in our house, secure in our domestication until we weren’t, and I still don’t really know the difference between a house and a home and a trailer that holds everything that you need.

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When we lost the house on Janvier Way it was like a punch in the gut, but it also wasn’t a surprise. Our super sweet landlady had passed away a few years earlier, and we knew that at some point her kids would want to sell. We were paying well under market rent in a nice neighborhood in LA where the smallest homes sell for over a million dollars; of course they would want to cash out. We knew that our days there were numbered.

We’d never bought because we’d never planned to stay for very long, and once we realized, post-Winnebago debates, that we did want to stay, we were better off with the cheap rent. And in any case even the desire to hang onto that particular house was provisional: we’d leave as soon as the kids were out of school, probably, maybe move into the mountains or up or down the coast. There was never any question about going back to Canada. We’d fallen in love with California by then and were determined to stay.

But then we lost the house on Janvier and then barely six months later we almost lost the next house to fire and at that point I thought, what even is the point of a house? You know the saying, safe as houses? It doesn’t mean anything in a world where houses aren’t safe, where sometimes you have to run from a house in the middle of the night while flames light up the sky.

Maybe safety is knowing that you don’t need a house.

It’s been seven months since the fires and I still keep the collection of valuables that I grabbed (journals, mom’s recipe box, some crystals, some photos, a tarot deck) in a wicker box by the front door. Maybe that box is home.

There’s a children’s story book that I love called The Baby Unicorn. At one point in the story, the mother of the titular baby unicorn turns herself into a house to keep her baby safe from dragons. It would be easy to take that symbolism at face value and say, while reading it to a child, that it means that your parents are always your safe place – always, always – and that statement would be sort of true, for some people, but not for all. And even if it were true once upon a time, it doesn’t stay true. Parents change, parents die. One day you’re the child seeking shelter in your parents’ love, the next you’re the parent and you’re the shelter and that’s beautiful but where’s yours?

Growing up means that you’re expected to create shelter for yourself and for those you care for and especially if you’re a woman you get all kinds of training in what that’s supposed to look like. There’s a reason why Wendy is put to work as the mother of the Lost Boys when she gets to Neverland: her job as a girl is to provide care, and so it doesn’t matter whether it’s a London nursery or a treehouse on a magical island of make-believe, she’s the one who is supposed to make it feel like home.

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California isn’t Neverland but it and specifically Los Angeles are probably the closest thing that we have to a Neverland in the real world: it’s full of dreamers and pixies and pirates and if you listen closely there’s a tick-tock croc counting down the clock of cultural relevance for anyone who takes things too seriously. I love it for this, and I will defend it until the end of the world; it’s not perfect but no place is and there isn’t anywhere else that makes dreaming big dreams the cornerstones of its whole existence. But it’s lately been under attack by pirates and dragons and the bad guys are hurting people that I love and so it’s triggering my inner Wendy, my inner mama unicorn, the part of me that wants to turn myself into a house and make things safe.

What it doesn’t do is make me want to run. It makes me scared that I’ll be chased out; I’m an immigrant without citizenship, and even though my skin is the right color I have the wrong voice. It makes me scared that I’ll be forced to leave my home, and I don’t want to leave my home.

Home.

In the context of everything that is happening, in the moment where things are under human threat, this much crystallizes: that this place is home. House or no house, it’s home. It’s funny that the fires didn’t fully convince me of that, but ICE did.

Maybe I really am a Wendy. Or a mama unicorn. Maybe home isn’t where your heart is, but where your heart expands.

Maybe home isn’t what you choose, but what you brace yourself to lose. Maybe you find it where you need it, and the only way of loving it is to wrap your heart around the idea of letting it go.

Maybe you don’t even need to be there to do that. Wendy most loved Neverland after she left it, after all.

I’m not going back to my mom’s house again, I don’t think. That’s okay.

I’ve felt this many times, but never thought of it as an urge so much as a kind of felt curiosity: a longing to know what it might feel like to tumble through the air into the unknown. Even that doesn’t quite capture it — it’s almost more of an urge to recapture a feeling that you somehow already know, like déjà vu but with falling. It’s a sense that you can not only imagine what it might feel like to tumble through the air, you already know what it would feel like because somehow, you’ve already experienced it. You already know the sensation of losing your footing or your grip and feeling the ground slip away from you; you know the drop in your stomach, the electric pulse of alarm down the back of your neck and your spine, the sudden pounding of your heart, the sensation of nothingness as everything gives way, the flash of familiarity, the ohyeahright I know this feeling…

You know?

Anyway, that was what I felt as I tumbled over the edge of a cliff on a mountain in the south of France last month.

Pilgrimages are usually pretty straightforward. Usually they just involve a lot of walking along a fairly well-trodden and often pre-determined path — the Camino de Santiago, for example, or the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). They can be physically taxing — part of the point, arguably, is to push yourself physically — but they usually aren’t inherently dangerous, for the most part. A pilgrimage is not a quest, in the strict sense: the pilgrim goes in search of something, but the search isn’t for something that can be found on the literal path; it’s for something that can only be discovered on the spiritual path, through the step-by-step movement of a journey that has its fullest unfolding in the heart, soul, or spirit. It’s not meant to be a thrilling adventure. You’re certainly not supposed to fall off cliffs.1

In any case, I was not on a pilgrimage last month, not technically. Figuratively, spiritually, certainly — there’s much to be said about simply being in a state of pilgrimage, even if you’re not walking — but technically I was in France to co-lead a retreat and facilitate a storytelling journey for a small group of women. Which is to say, I was responsible for supporting the creative and spiritual pilgrimages of others, not my own, and so going off into circumstances under which I might fall off of a cliff by myself was not on the agenda.

The frame of the experience (and the name of the retreat) was Writing The Heroine’s Journey, which was a little bit tongue in cheek because I am more than a little bit critical of hero’s journeys and some of that criticism extends to standard frames of heroine’s journeys and even kindred journeys and really any journey-focused story framework that draws heavily from the hero’s journey structure and/or connects itself to the idea of a monomyth. My use of it (for the purposes of the retreat, and beyond) leans pretty heavily deconstructionist: interrogating the idea of the hero or heroine in women’s stories, and unpacking the whole framework of journeys. For the retreat in France, we were going to be walking both a figurative and literal landscape, navigating the archetypes of both figurative and literal heroines — ourselves, as authors and as protagonists in our own stories, and Mary Magdalene, whose lore dominates the landscape of that part of France — and exploring, unpacking, and crafting our own stories. This involved a lot of walking up and down mountains, as it happens.

I use the words we and our, because this was absolutely a shared experience, but again, I was there as a teacher and a facilitator, not an explorer. It was not my journey. My personal impulses and desires and curiosities were not part of the map, so to speak; it was crafted very specifically to meet and serve those of the participants. So even though there was one teeny-tiny nagging curiosity that I was carrying from my personal journey/pilgrimage the year before, that nagging curiosity was not going to have a place in the experience, unless some unlikely window of opportunity opened up.

Which it did. Of course it did.

It was on the third full day of the retreat. The focus of this particular day, outside of the story work, was a hike to the very top of the Massif de Sainte Baume, where you can find the Chapelle du Saint-Pilon as well as spectacular views across the valley below, over the dragonspine-like ridge, and all the way out to the Mediterranean Sea. The spot that you climb to is directly above the Grotto of Mary Magdalene, and it’s where Mary is said to have been flown by angels seven times a day for prayer, which makes sense, because it’s a steep and rocky climb and hiking up there just one time in a day is an intense workout even if you’re not a holy person slowed down by robes. Doing more than once honestly wouldn’t be doable without divine assistance.

It’s a long way up, and a long way down. On the hike back down the mountain there’s a fork in the road: one path takes you around to the hike up to Mary’s grotto, another is the main pilgrimage path—the so-called Chemin des Roys— another goes down a different way that takes you more directly to the monastery and its hostellerie, and then one more goes to a clearing directly beneath the rockface underneath the grotto. Beyond this last area is a very, very narrow trail that snakes along the tree line of the mountain, where the forest meets the cliffs; it’s the path that people sometimes take when they’re trying to find le Grotte aux Oeufs — the Cave of Eggs — and it is a notoriously tricky way to get there.

This was my nagging curiosity. I wanted to see if I could get to the Cave of Eggs on my own, taking that path. I had been there the year before, up a more straightforward route from the valley below, but I wanted to see if I could find it myself, by myself, the hard way, for reasons that I can still can’t quite explain to myself or to anyone else. It was just an urge, un appel, a persistent whisper in my psyche. Or it was ego. Or both.

Again, I had no intention of shoe-horning this into the retreat experience; I was fully prepared to let it go until my next visit. But as we made our way down the mountain after our hike to Saint-Pilon and got to the fork in the road, the group began to split up. One wanted to go on her own down the secondary path; two others wanted to go ahead on the Chemin des Roys; everyone could just meet back at the house, which wasn’t that far from the mountain. Here, unexpectedly, was an opportunity to explore the other trail.

I’ll walk Susanna to the other path and then check out the goat trail and then head back down that way, I told , my co-leader. I’ll meet you all back at the house.

I won’t regale you with the details of walking the winding, narrow mountain path; this isn’t a hiking blog. I will say that it was spectacularly beautiful, if a little throat-tightening at times. It was early May, so the path was abundant with mountain wildflowers and blooming trees — wild daffodils, lupine, lilies and apple blossoms — and where the path opened past the trees along the rocks, the whole valley came into view. Birds sang and swooped along the tree line; butterflies came so close I thought they’d land on my shoulder. I was a pilgrim and a Disney Princess all in one.

This, I thought, this is church. My heart was so full I thought it would burst.

Still. It was a tricky trail, as advertised. There were places where it branched upward and the sensible thing seemed to be to keep right and keep gaining elevation. The Cave of Eggs is in the rockface of the mountain, after all, just at the tree line, so why would one go down? I knew that this was one of the common mistakes that people make on this path — they assume that they should keep moving upwards and then find themselves too high up, headed back up the spine of the mountain to the top. So I kept left, angling down.2

But as I forged along, I started to doubt myself: had I gone too far? The wrong way? I was tracking my distance relative to the monastery down in the valley; whenever I broke through a clearing and could see the valley below I’d look for it and try to gauge my distance. How far had I hiked? Had I missed an upward turn and somehow gone past the cave? It was hard to tell how far I’d come — the monastery was literally a thumbnail on the landscape below, and it’s difficult to translate thumbnails into real distance when you’re walking along the side of a mountain nearly 3000 feet from the ground and the thumbnail is a mile or two away.

I began looking for a path up into the rocks. I knew that I would eventually have to wind my way around at least part of the rockface to get to the cave, so the right path had to curve in that direction. It just had to. It didn’t make sense to curve away and down from the rocks. So I looked for a way up.

There were many narrow cutaways through the bushes and into the rocks, but I finally saw one that seemed promising. It looked more well-trodden than the others, like it had been walked recently, and it arced up into a bank of much larger rocks. It didn’t ping my Cave of Eggs radar (which I’d been hoping for) but it all looked very cave-ish, and heading in a cave-ish direction seemed to make more sense than going deeper into the woods. I congratulated myself on being a sensible hiker, and clambered up.

And found nothing. The path ended beneath an unclimbable wall of rock with a steep cliff-drop on the other side. This wasn’t the right way. Ugh. Branches were snagged in my hair and my zen was turning into frustration. How did I get this wrong? Why didn’t I stay on the path? Did I have to turn around and climb back down? It was so frustrating. Couldn’t I just find a way to climb down here and call it a detour rather than a wrong direction? I grabbed onto a branch and leaned over the edge of the cliff to see.

You already know what happened next.

I knew that I was falling before I was fully in the air. I knew that it wasn’t just a slip and that I hadn’t just slid down the rocks. No, the branch had broken and I was fully tumbling forward, away from the rocks and into the air. It was an actual somersault, a flip forward and over, which turned out to be a blessing because if I’d slid I’d have scraped myself against the rocks and if I’d just splatted forward I would have broken my face. By launching, somehow, into the air and flipping over, I cleared some danger. But still, I was falling and while falling I was thinking exactly what I’d always imagined I’d think if I fell over some significant height: oh, right, yeah, of course, this is what it feels like. Déjà fall.

And then: oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I was falling over the edge of a cliff. This was not good. It was a small cliff — 7 feet high or so? — but still. The fall felt interminable, like I was tumbling through time itself. This is what it feels like. This is what feels like. Oh shit this is what falling feels like.

I landed on a bed of damp leaves and wildflowers and pine needles, cushioned by my backpack, right at the edge of the trail that I’d just left.

I lay there for a moment, winded. Was I hurt? Would I even know if I was hurt? I didn’t have any experience falling over cliffs, so I didn’t know. I did know that the wind had been knocked out of me and that I was definitely sore. But sore was good, right? I could feel everything, including a deep sense of embarrassment, which made no sense because I was alone on the side of a mountain with no witnesses other than an owl that had hooted just as I hit the ground. I felt my backpack beneath me; it held a sweater, a journal, a gnome, two large mostly empty plastic water bottles, and some fistfuls of wildflowers and pinecones. I could hear the water bottles crunch as I shifted my weight, and I hoped that they hadn’t leaked and soaked my journal (priorities).

The backpack had broken my fall, as had the bed of flowers and foliage. I got up and checked myself for blood and jutting bones. Everything in my body seemed to be in the right place, and there was only a bit of blood on my hands and forearms where I’d been scratched by branches and rocks. I moved my limbs; everything was working, everything was in place.

Except my glasses. Bizarrely, I checked the top of my head to see if they were there, because that’s always the first place that you look for your glasses when you realize that they’re not on your face. They were, of course, not there; I scanned the ground around me and realized immediately that there would be no finding them in the leaves and bushes even if they had somehow landed nearby, which itself was a stretch given that they had a whole mountainside to fly off into. There was simply too much foliage and underbrush; that, and I couldn’t see for shit.

All there was to do, then, was to continue hiking across the side of a mountain, bruised and half-blind. Because of course I wasn’t stopping; the mountain had tossed me back onto the correct path and so who was I to not continue following it? What would be the point of falling of a cliff if I just got up and turned around and went back the way that I came? Sure, if I’d been hurt I’d probably have thought and done differently, but I was just a bit banged up and scraped and sight-impaired and in any case I was on the right path. The mountain wanted me to find the cave. It had tossed me off a cliff to make sure that I would find the cave.

So I did.

It wasn’t actually all that much further along, and my instinct that it was somewhere in the next bank of rocks had been correct; I’d just gotten cocky and started climbing too soon. Within a few minutes I saw the where the path forked and curved upward into a narrow passage into the rocks and knew that this time, I had found just the right spot. I clambered up and there it was: the Cave of Eggs.

To say that I was exhilarated doesn’t even capture it. I was elated. I had found it. Half blind and a little battered and more than a few twigs in my hair, but still. I had found it.

I stayed for a while, reveling in having the cave all to myself. I might have sang into it, as one does.3 At one point three young French guys appeared from the opposite trail; if they were startled to see a middle-aged woman with pine needles in her hair and dirt and blood on her cheeks, they hid it well. I asked them to take my photo and they obliged and then continued on their way. I decided to take their appearance as a sign — it showed exactly where the route down the mountain was — and so I said goodbye to the cave and headed into the woods.

Getting down the mountain was in some respects more difficult than getting to the cave itself — the forest was dark and full of fallen trees and slippery rocks and I was only able to see a few feet ahead of myself without my glasses. But I knew that if I just kept heading downhill I’d end up in the open valley with line of sight to the road. So I just forged my way along, taking my time and watching my steps, and eventually made it all the way down and out of the forest and onto the path home.

I messaged Patricia. So you know, I texted, I’m safe and en route back.

The “I’m safe” was superfluous. I had not been gone all that long, all things considered; even with my fall, I was still within a very reasonable timeframe for hiking across the mountain and back down to the valley. I knew that Patricia would have been watching the time closely and waiting to hear from me, but the ‘en route back’ would have sufficed. No declaration of safety necessary.

Except that there was a need, for me. I think that I needed to declare it, not as a statement on having survived a fall (which Patricia, thankfully, did not yet know about), but as a declaration of my state of mind — or more accurately, my spirit. The word “safe” derives from the Latin salvus, which can be translated as “not injured” or — more accurately — as “whole.” I wasn’t thinking about this at the time, of course, but this was absolutely my state of mind and spirit. I felt whole. Despite the minor injuries and the impairments of lost glasses, scraped skin, and sore muscles, I felt more fully myself, more wholly myself, than I had in a long time. When I texted, I’m safe, perhaps that’s what I meant: I’m whole. Perhaps that’s what I most wanted Patricia — and myself — to know in that moment.

Hi, just checking in. I’m whole. Back soon.

That’s what makes any journey a pilgrimage, I think — it makes one feel whole, or even just closer to wholeness. It’s a lived reminder that as you navigate the inevitable cliff-falls of life, you can always find your self on the path — your most whole self, even (not to get too spiritually twee here) your most holy self. That’s all that holiness is, maybe: wholeness. Many theologians would disagree with this on translation grounds; I’m relying on the Old English etymology of the word “holy” here (hal and halig, from which we get, respectively hale / whole / healthy and holy) and turning it to my own purposes. So it is, admittedly, a stretch. Greek is more standard for translating the word “holy” in religious contexts, and the primary Greek word for holy, hagios, actually means separate or set apart; so does hieros, which is closer in meaning to “sacred” than “holy” but the sense of separateness still applies.

But maybe that’s fitting, too — to pilgrim or to journey in any context is to separate yourself from a fixed place. It’s answering the call of the void, in a way: you feel a sense of possibility in the unknown, and you let yourself get drawn toward it, even if it means letting go of the things that attach you to permanence, things like roots, home, solid ground. It means letting the ground give way so that you can tumble forward, away from the things that keep you rooted in place. It means letting the tumble carry you, already knowing what it feels like to have let go. Maybe the tumble scares you; maybe it breaks you. That’s the risk, obviously. That’s why it’s hard.

But maybe it’s what puts you on just the right path.

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Interested in joining me in France in 2026? We have two sets of dates upcoming, in May and December. I promise that I won’t lead you off of a mountain, literally or spiritually. Find our more here: https://www.sacredparis.com/writing-the-heroines-journey-sainte-baume-pilgrimage

Also! Speaking of the sacred! As threatened, I started a second newsletter for the purposes of writing shorter things on a wider range of topics that have less to do with my personal Eat Pray Love journey. It’s called Sacred(ish) and it’s topically adjacent — the name is a giveaway — in that it’s more than a little woo but in a here is also some philosophy and history and science kind of way. A little feminist theology and literary theory alongside some astrology and tarot and crystal-hoarding, all in shorter form. A snack box of spiritualish things, I think I called it in the first issue last week. A charcuterie of the sacred. For nerdy weirdos who like witchy things; please subscribe if that sounds like you!

A lot of that has to do with the fact that my mom is no longer here, and she was the biggest enthusiast about my birthday; she was genuinely exultant, year after year, that the universe brought me to her. It’s not just that I miss that — I do, very much — it’s also that she died in May, on Mother’s Day, just a week before my birthday two years ago. The day of her death was also just a few days before my son’s birthday and two weeks before her own. This month used to be wildly celebratory (it also holds my grandmother’s birthday, and — if we bend the calendar edges a little bit — my niece’s), and now it’s complicated because although those birthdays are still rich occasions for celebration, they’re also tangled up in a timeline of grief.

It’s very Demeter-coded, in a way — springtime, motherhood, birth and death all in one story. Mine isn’t so mythic — Homer wouldn’t have written any epic poems about me crying into grocery store birthday cake and inventing rituals involving boxed wine — but it has some aligned thematic flavors: the heartbreak of the separation of mother and daughter, the complicated bargain of springtime, the bittersweet relationship between death and renewal. Boxed wine and layer cake in this context are just another kind of offering; I wasn’t going to eat them anyway.

I spent the anniversary of my mom’s death in Paris.

My mom never visited Paris. The furthest out of mainland North America that she traveled was Hawaii, although she would have loved to have gone further. When I was younger my parents just couldn’t afford it; later, after she and my dad divorced, she was in constraining relationships that didn’t give her the kind of freedom that would allow for seeing the world. We talked about it a lot, though. I was going to take her places with me, just as soon as she was on her own.

One of the great tragedies of her death was that it occurred barely a month and a half after she had finally gotten herself on her own. We were already making plans: she’d come live with us, and she and I would travel. Greece first, probably — she had a long-standing Shirley Valentine fantasy — and then all the other places. But then her doctor said that she needed a surgery, and that surgery killed her, and that was that. So she never got to see Paris, or London or Barcelona or Santorini or any of the places that we talked about.

Which is why it meant something to be in one of those places on the anniversary of her death, rather than some place filled with real memories or tangible reminders—it allowed me to carry our story forward. To continue writing it, through footsteps down cobbled pathways, in a different way. As I said in my last post: walking with her is a way of being with her.

My friend and dear collaborator suggested a little ritual to mark the day: flower petals in the Seine. I loved this idea. We’d already spent a night at Sacre-Cœur,1 where I’d lit candles for my mom, and I had plans to spend some time in another chapel that day and later do an obligatory wine toast, but I wanted something more, I don’t know, unique? Something more specific to who she was. Something that would connect my mom to Paris, and to my experience of Paris.

Flowers in the Seine was perfect because my mom was a river sprite. She loved water in all of its forms — pools, lakes, the ocean, deep bathtubs — but rivers were her favorite. She had a special river in British Columbia — the Similkameen — but her favorite spot there is hard to get to even if you aren’t coming from thousands of miles away. The Seine is also hard to get to if you don’t live in France, obviously, but on that particular day it was the closest river at hand.

(Goddesses are often connected to rivers; there are obvious things that can be said about that — water as feminine energy, etc — but for the purposes of this story I’ll just point out that the Seine is associated with and named after a particularly powerful Gallo-Roman goddess, Sequana. Sequana, whose name probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘flow’, was revered as both the goddess of the river and the goddess of healing, and her temple at the source of the Seine in what is now the region of Burgundy was a site of pilgrimage. Pilgrims came from everywhere seeking healing and wish-granting; pretty much everything that we know about the cult of Sequana comes from the archaeological record of these pilgrimages. Hers is a story told through the record of footsteps, through the remains of a narrative forged by walking and seeking. Of course her river would be perfect for a pilgrim ritual.)

The Seine is, however, a busy river. Especially late in the day, during the golden hours before sunset, when people gather along the banks in pairs or groups with wine and food, or alone with books, dangling their legs over the walled edges. It’s beautiful and romantic and it will make you fall in love with Paris even harder, but it’s a little inconvenient for finding a quiet place for a ritual at that time of day. So I just wandered the banks, trusting that the right place and the right moment would just make itself known to me.

I had chosen to walk the right bank, but when I got to the Pont Neuf I decided to cross over and wander along the left. The Post Neuf crosses the Île de la Cité, where you’ll find the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame; it’s breathtaking, a beautiful jewel of an island nestled at the heart of Paris, and it’s hard to just walk past it, so I didn’t. There’s a lovely little greenspace at the western end called the Square du Vert-Galant, the tip of which juts into the Seine and is shaded by a majestic willow tree, the Saule Pleurer de la Pointe. I knew that it wouldn’t be a good spot for my ritual — of all the crowded spaces along the Seine at that time of day, this would be the most crowded — but I wanted to visit the tree. And so I made way down to the busy square and along the walkways edging the Seine, crowded with people sat along the ledges drinking wine, and pushed my way through the thick curtains of the willow’s branches to the westmost tip… and found myself mostly alone.

There were a few people there, but they were tucked away to the sides of the promontory, hidden in the low-hanging branches; the furthermost point — the tip of the green spear where the willow branches part and you can see the Seine and Paris spread out before you as from the prow of a boat — was empty. A beautiful, quiet open spot to sit, the perfect place to toss some flower petals into the Seine. Which is exactly what I did. Rose petals, each one a prayer and a message for my mom. It was as though the universe — or more likely, Mom herself — was providing me with the most perfect place in Paris to make a ritual of my grief.

And then the tubas started.

And the trumpets. And the drums. Just as I tossed the last petal into the river, a brass band struck up their instruments nearby and launched into the most exuberant, off-key performance of some wildly celebratory but completely unidentifiable song, if you could even call it a song. It was loud. It was an onslaught of sound.

But it was also, somehow, perfect.

First of all, Mom would have been delighted. Delighted. She would have laughed and laughed and declared it the thing that truly made the experience a story. She was always looking for the thing, the detail, the moment that made an otherwise ordinary experience a Story with a capital S. (Even in her last days, at the hospital, she would whisper to me, after some absurd moment: “You better write that down, Cath. That will make the story.”) The intrusion of the loud brass band into my picture-perfect Parisian grief ritual was exactly that — a Story Moment, the “holy doodlebug” thing that took it from being just a poignant entry in my journal to something to write about Substack. I had so many lovely encounters with street musicians in my weeks in France, mostly ones playing beautiful, melodic odes on piano (literally in the middle of a bridge) or cello or violin, or crooning sad love songs (or in one case, an operatic aria near the Louvre); the poignant version of this story would have a discreet violinist emerging near the willow and playing Clair De Lune. The Judy Connors Version of this story — the Story Moment version — has an out of tune marching band.

And there was this, too — it was a reminder, a necessary one, that sacred moments don’t require perfect conditions. They just don’t. We live in messy, noisy world. Some of that noise and mess is beautiful and a lot of it is not beautiful (a lot of it is terrifying) but the beautiful, the bad, and the terrifying of it all is exactly what makes the sacred so important. We experience the sacred — whatever that means for any of us — more deeply when we find it or create it amid the noise. Even more so when we look for the sacred in the noise. That brass band wasn’t interrupting my experience — it was telling me something about it. Something about listening for and looking for the beauty in the human experience, as messy and painful as it can be.

That’s a lesson that I keep telling myself that I’ve already learned, but if I’m honest with myself, it’s not a lesson that sticks. I keep wanting things to get easy. I keep looking for the sanctuary. I cling to the idea that on the other side of the struggle is some kind of Edenic reward, a state of being whose soundtrack is Bach’s Cello Suites, not a janky marching band.

Which is not realistic, and also not what I really want. The Garden of Eden was pretty boring, after all. The world is more interesting when we notice that there’s beauty in the noise.

I didn’t spend very long in the Square du Vert-Galant after the band got going, because although I can embrace my lessons I can also choose to take them in moderation. I walked back to the neighborhood where I was staying and went to my favorite local place to have a glass of wine; the waiter brought it to me with a side of ice cubes, which I took as another sign from my mom because literally only my mom would do that.2 I once saw some graffiti on the other side of the world that said everything will end, but the word ‘end’ was crossed out a replaced with the word ‘happen.’ Everything will happen. I put the ice in my wine glass and thought about that.

Everything will happen. When I blow out the candles and wonder what to wish for, I’m now wishing simply for that.

P.S.: I’m thinking of starting a secondary newsletter that’s less… long. I’m committed to keeping this space for my indulgent rambles, but there’s shorter, more newslettery stuff that I’m interested in experimenting with and I don’t want to jumble things up (not least because I don’t want this personal writing space to become about something else.) If you have an opinion on whether this is a good or bad idea, please let me know (and other suggestions for how to parse out one’s writing are very very welcome.)

I always tell my own storytelling clients that the most valuable advice I can give them is to just keep weaving the story. Even when it feels shitty or untrue or inauthentic. Even — especially — when it feels like it’s not the right story, whatever that means. Stories emerge on their own schedule, I say. But they only emerge when you keep tending them. Write, draw, record, scribble, scrawl whatever misshapen thing is there because you never know when the beauty or the truth or the real shape of it will appear.

So this is what I try to do, as my own way into doing the workouts that I would otherwise avoid. I allow myself to follow whatever over-intellectualized reflection tempts me, knowing that it’s all bullshit but that it’s all fertile bullshit, like literal cow manure, the kind of shit that makes things grow.

I can’t promise when the growth happens, not to myself, not to anybody. But I have faith — hope, in the strongest terms — that at some point it will.

A long time ago, I used to teach a course on utopias in political thought. I loved it, because it combined two deep nerd passions that ran through my work — philosophy and storytelling— in a way that addressed a core question: what kind of stories do we tell when we’re deliberately imagining a better world?

We don’t talk as much about utopias as we used to. We talk more about dystopias or near futures or speculative fiction—these are usually about the futures that we don’t want. Or if we’re leaning into optimism, we talk about hopepunk or solarpunk or some punk-adjacent neologism that is meant to indicate that although we might be optimistic, we’re edgy about it. In an age of cynicism, hope must above all things be cool.

Utopia, in the meantime, has become a shorthand term for an impossible state of being; “utopian thinking” is that particular affliction that has people dreaming up fantastical notions like a world in which everyone is treated with dignity and care. It’s the stuff that we’re told is nice to fantasize about, maybe, but never gonna happen. This is aligned with the origin of the term but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The word “utopia” can be translated from the ancient Greek as “non-place” (u-topos), but it can also be translated as “good place” (eu-topos).1

The operative root of the term is place, and the invitation (it’s a squishy one) that the term offers is for us to consider whether the kinds of places that we can imagine for ourselves when we are at our most hopeful are impossible places, or good places, or both. The further invitation is for us to consider whether the impossibility of a thing is a point in its disfavor: is it worth pursuing things that we think are good even if they seem impossible? Might there be some value in actively exploring the landscape of the impossible, and embracing the challenge of impossibility as itself a good? Isn’t every act of the imagination a kind of engagement with the seeming impossible?

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The other week I co-led a retreat for storytellers in the northern reaches of California. It took place mostly in an old manor in the town of Fort Bragg, where the sea meets the redwood forests.2 It’s a place outside of time, which was fitting, because the whole point of the retreat was to play outside of time, in the no-place of the imagination where time has no meaning and nobody is cynical and you can build castles and cloud cities and forest nations in the future. We called the retreat Once Upon A Future, and together we made stories that could be told around the campfires of those future places and that could live in the libraries and museums of those futures, and it was magical. I shared there the core belief that I usually share in those kinds of experiences, which is that stories are magic and that they are also technology and that the real exercise of imagining the good places of our near and distant futures isn’t a utopian one (in the sense that we usually mean it — that is, impossible) but a poetopian one — a poetic exercise of making those places real through the exercise of our imagination. It’s taking the original Greek root of the word poetry — poeisis — and working with its core meaning, which is to make, especially in sense of inventing, or bringing foreword something that didn’t already exist. (I’ll spare you the deep dive for now — you can watch me talk about it here). And that’s exactly what we did. We came together as poets and imagined our way past the impossible. It activated my hope, and not in a punk kind of way.

(The stories that I am not telling here: the conversation that I had with an old redwood tree; the conversation with a raven at Glass Beach; the yoga visitation in which my dead cat came and forgave me for trying to avoid that one dark corner of my grief. I can tell you the details, but I can’t yet tell you why they matter, how they made me feel, what they all have to do with why I feel so vulnerable in the world, why the future-making work is so scary and so necessary.)

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A pilgrimage is also a kind of future-making exercise, and a poetic/poetopian one — a journey of imaginative place-making. I’m forcing this comparison but I think that it works. When we go off in search of something — meaning, hope, home — we are activating our minds and hearts towards imaginary versions of those places. We make those places as we seek them out. We imagine the places that hold the things that we seek, and in imagining them, they become real.

That’s why a pilgrimage is always ongoing: the place is not a destination, it is a horizon. It is no less real for always being just a little ways ahead of us. It is no less powerful — it is all the more powerful — for being just a little ways ahead of us.

I am forcing the story here a little, nudging it toward more interesting plot points. This week I’m back in France, heading soon from Paris to Sainte Baume in Provence, where last year I explored a unique and mythic magic in the lore of Mary Magdalene. This time, I’m co-leading a story journey — a heroine’s journey — that pulls on the poetic threads of that extraordinary place with a small group of pilgriming women. We’ll walk the mythic imaginary; we’ll make poetry of that place, and make place out of that poetry. I will say many pretty and poetic things about it. I will also push myself to find the real poetry in it, perhaps the hard poetry in it, the poeisis that is like childbirth, messy and slippery and sometimes so painful that you black out.

Writing our paths reveals new paths; writing the future gives birth to new futures. That work is poetry. It’s a poetry of hope.

My journey in France dovetails with the anniversary of my mom’s death. It was her death that propelled me here last year, so it’s fitting. But it’s also a way of being in poetic communion with the landscape of grief, of staying creatively connected to that loss. Not in the sense wringing beauty out of sadness (although there is that), but in the sense of making place out of emptiness.

That’s also a kind of poetopian exercise: a way of imagining a impossible home — a place, for example, where you find the people you’ve lost. France might seem an odd landscape for this: my mom and I never spent time in France together, and it’s halfway around the world from where I last saw her. But the place that I last saw her was Kamloops, B.C., which is a scraped up hockey bag of a place and I have no desire to go back there unless I absolutely have to. Being at home with my mom now means inventing new landscapes for our connection. It means pilgriming.

Pilgriming holds me to the path where I can always find her. And if that path involves Paris, so be it.

And now I force the story back to writing, working a different muscle.

I posted a Substack note about a month and a half ago about looking for what I called the wanderers and the stragglers — other writers who are just plodding along the path, walking (writing) just for the sake of the journey, not racing ahead to lead the pack. Ironically, the note took off; I suppose that it hit just the right chords for the algorithm to pick it up and share it. I have mixed feelings about that. I’m so glad to have found all the voices that I did (I’m still going through all of the 570+ comments and am committed to reading the Substacks of every single person who responded), and to feel a sense of companionship among the plodders. But at the same time it hits a dangerous nerve, the one that worries that it’s not enough to just write and be read, the one that wants the comfort of the known path and the shortcuts and the better assurances of being able to make something of it all.

Anyway. I followed it up with writing something dense and obscure about the Garden of Eden. And now I’ve written this meandering reflection on poetry and utopia and pilgrimages and forced myself to just let it be whatever it is. Maybe one day a post will come where I play with formula and flirt with my inner suppressed content strategist and Editor In Chief. Maybe I’ll get in my own head about needing to make this A Thing — don’t we all want our things to become Things? — because getting so much attention with that Substack note reminded me of what it feels like when something you’re proud of becomes a thing, when a certain muscle flexes and feels strong.

And then I remind myself that the note wasn’t what I was proud of — it was just a throwaway comment that happened to click — and that I’m not here to write throwaway comments that click.

I just want to do the pilgriming. We’ll see how far that path unfolds.

That’s the whole problem right there, of course. We’re destructive beings. We’re loving, generative beings too, but we really lean into taking things apart. We’ve been destroying things for basically all of recorded history. Sometimes we just destroy each other; sometimes we destroy entire ecosystems. We’ve recently worked our way up to the entire planet, which we haven’t yet quite accomplished but are working very hard at. So although we say that we love life, and we mean it, there’s some darker part of us that seems to want to smash it to bits. We do this with a lot of things. We knock over blocks just to see them fall, because we want to confirm to ourselves that they fall. We smash things because it reminds us that we’re breakable.

That right there, basically, was the challenge in preparing my talk. I’ve never been entirely convinced of the claim that we just need to love life, earth, and nature more if we’re going to do better at not messing up the world around us. The story just never seemed to cohere. We actually do love life a lot — we obsess over having more of it — but we really can’t seem to help ourselves from kicking it around.

So I decided to go back to one of the earliest stories about life and the world to see if I might find a more revealing path into the theme, and then crafted a talk around that. Here’s how it went, roughly:

San Francisco | April 24, 2024

I want to talk about one of the best-known stories ever told. Probably the best-known; James Cameron might disagree.

In the book of Genesis, in the Bible, we are told that God gave us dominion over the Earth. More precisely, we are told that we are put on the earth to “tend it and keep it.” The way it goes is this: God creates everything, and then notices — having done the epic work of creating the universe and especially this particular planet — that he’s overlooked basic gardening, horticulture, and environmental management principles. He’s forgotten, for example, to create any means for watering the soil, so he makes rain. He also decides that for some reason this garden can’t take care of itself — a design flaw of his own making — and that it needs someone to do the gardening. So he makes us. Well, he makes Adam and Eve, who are both proxy and (if you believe this stuff) progenitors of us.

God makes Adam and Eve and he puts them in charge of the garden and gives them explicit instructions to tend it and keep it. To take care of it, and to put it to healthy use. He puts them there to be gardeners. Caretakers. Stewards. It seems like a pretty sweet arrangement, if you think about it. A magnificent plot of abundant land, all for them, and all they have to do is take care of it and not ask questions, and also follow just one super easy rule about not eating the fruit of just one particular tree.

We all know what happens, of course. Adam and Eve — or rather, we, because this is really a story about us — screw up the job and God kicks us out. We didn’t neglect the garden, exactly, but we certainly failed to obey its rules. We decided that we wanted knowledge more than we wanted paradise. And because we wanted knowledge more than we wanted paradise, we fell. We lost the best gift ever given to us.

Every eco story is, in a way, a Genesis story — a story about how we lose paradise. Every story about environmental crises and every story about post-collapse scarcity and every story about how we are destroying the earth is a story about our fall. In all of these stories, we fail in our stewardship of the garden, we fail to uphold our sacred pact, we trade the beauty and abundance of the garden for something that we are told we can’t have. We aren’t satisfied with the bounty that we’ve been given and so we insist upon something more and because of that we fail and we fall and then we need to find a way to survive our self-imposed exile from abundance and beauty. Every book or movie or show about human-created disasters is a kind of retelling of the story of our original biblical fall. And there are so many of these. We love these stories. They terrify us and thrill us and they do basically nothing to make us act any differently.

And this is such a curious thing: very few of the gajillion cinematic and literary iterations of our wildly influential bio-traitorous origin myth — the ultimate cautionary tale — have ever influenced us to do anything differently. Why is that?

Here’s why I think it is: I think that it’s because our failures — failing miserably at our sacred duty, messing up our job as stewards of the earth, getting cast out of the garden — don’t actually bother us. I’ll go a step further: we are fully comfortable with our failure. Perhaps it’s that we’re resigned to it, but I actually think that it’s more than that. I think that our failure is narratively interesting to us. It is, frankly, a good story. We are failed heroes, and failed heroism makes for really interesting storytelling. It opens up possibility for a redemption arc! And for sequels! We are in no hurry to redeem ourselves because that would foreshorten the story. We want all five Avatar movies, and a Marvel cinematic universe with a limitless stream of flawed heroes! A solid, conclusively redemptive ending — an ending where we restore the garden and live happily ever after — would rob us of that.

We love a failure story. We say that we love success stories, but do we really? We scoff at the idea of happy endings; we associate them with fairy tales and mark them as childish, as unrealistic. We like stories that make us bite our nails and worry about the characters. And yes, of course, we like to see our favorite characters make it through their trials and triumph in some way in the end, but still we wonder: what happens next? Will there be a sequel? Another season? In real life, we go on and face more trials; we go on and fail again. And so we look for that pattern in our stories.

Which points to a deeper reason why we are so attached to our failure story: it tracks to our expectations of ourselves. It reflects our experience of our own contradictions: we can want to succeed, but still architect our own failure. We can long for something, and still sabotage ourselves in seeking it. We can love a thing, and still hurt it. We worry about our propensity for failure and so we seek it out and try to understand it, even embrace it. To fail is human, and we struggle to understand and accept that. It is, I think, the knowledge that we want most to grasp—why can’t we be as gods and create perfect, fail-proof gardens? We eat this fruit and our tummies hurt, and then we eat more.

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Back to biophilia. Does anyone doubt that we love life? That we love our Mother Earth? Even the most rapacious billionaires cherish and protect their (excessive) share of her, except perhaps the ones who want to flee to space, but even they dig deep into her skirts and make safe spaces for themselves within the folds. There’s no question that we love her. We love her in the same way that we love our human mothers. But here’s an uncomfortable truth: we are, collectively, very comfortable hurting mothers. We never hesitate to blame mothers. If Mother Earth were a human mother we would complain about her not taking better care of us. We would blame her for not doing more to protect us. We would tell her that she was too harsh with us, too strict, that she punished us too much, that she restricted our freedom, that she didn’t put us first. We would tell her she traumatized us. We would tell our therapists, she didn't love us enough. Our therapists would tell us that it’s okay to go no-contact with her, that we have to put ourselves first for once.

I’ve often wondered if it would be different if we identified the Earth as Father. Would we respect and fear Father Earth in ways that we don’t our Mother? Would respect and fear earn better behavior from us? Would we be more inclined to obedience? And when we did disobey (we always disobey) would we say that we deserve his anger, his punishment? We brought it on ourselves, we might say. We were rowdy kids. We might still go to therapy, but we wouldn’t tell Dad what the therapist said.1

We pay attention to the things that we fear. We often take for granted the things that we love.

I am painting us with a wide, sloppy brush right now, but I don’t think that I am coloring too far outside the lines. Sometimes we stand up to the things that we fear, sure. And often we take good care of the things that we love. What I’m saying is, it’s not enough for us flawed, fail-happy beings to simply say to ourselves that we just need to love life more if we’re going to preserve it, or love the Earth more if we’re going to save her. We have always loved these things abundantly. But love is not a simple story. When Virgil said that love conquers all (omnia vincit amor), he didn’t mean that love overcomes everything, all obstacles, he meant that love overcomes everyone. Love isn’t always soft and fluffy, floating in on dove-like wings: love is also a spinning, many-eyed, terrifying beast-wheel of an angel2 that knocks us on our asses and leaves us quaking. We do weird shit because of love, because love is longing; because love is messy and unpredictable and complicated and crazy-making and also the thing that we want most in this world; the real reason, maybe, that we always eat the fruit.

And it’s not just love that we need to rethink: we also need to reconsider this idea that we need to save Mother Earth, because for one, she doesn’t need saving (she’s going to be here long after we’re gone) and two, that savior story is not serving us, at least not in the work of our own survival. We’ve been working that story for millennia and look at where it’s gotten us. We need to liberate ourselves from hero’s journeys in which we cast ourselves (or more ordinarily, just a few special ones among us) as the heroes, where Earth is the thing to be saved, where there’s a redemption arc that takes three trilogies to work itself through and then still leaves room for multiple spin-off series. We don’t need to junk these stories entirely, but we do need to imagine some alternatives. We need to get curious about what else is out there for us, on the vast landscape of human possibility.

We could offer this prompt for a story: what happens after the garden? The Bible version is not super interesting; it’s a lot of “so-so beget so-so; so-and-so beget so-and-so” and so on like an interminable Ancestry dot com marketing email. What if we rewrote another story entirely, based around questions like: what do we make? What do we create? How do we use our brave curiosity to imagine something better than the garden? Remember that the garden is just one piece of a vaster world — what are the stories in which we generatively embrace the vaster world and explore all the horizons of possibility?

We need, in other words, to keep eating the fruit. We need to stop berating ourselves for our fall, for our failure, and ask ourselves: what better knowledge -- what stories — can we create to make a better world beyond the garden, one that does not claim ownership of the garden but rather expands its possibility? What if we took “be fruitful and multiply” and re-authored it to mean: be fruitful and multiply the bounty of your imagination? In which case, eating the fruit is a necessity, because it allows and encourages us to see beyond the walls of what was supposedly created for us and see everything through the lens of greater possibility. The earth not as our mother, or our father, but perhaps as a home in which we are just guests. God not as a divine male architect and builder and ruler, but as a kind of sky, an open space of energy and light. The fruit of the tree of knowledge as just a neat piece of lore in a cool story. Everything as story, always as story—as a blank page or empty space into which can we pour all the magic of our imaginations, and then explore freely, enchanted, wondering at what parts of this extraordinary world we’ve made up and what parts were always there outside of us to discover.

We don’t need to catalyze biophilia. We need to catalyze the bio-imaginary. Solarpunk. Hopepunk. Lovepunk. Movies and shows and books and poems and songs and games and experiences that inspire us about what’s possible.

We need to stop telling ourselves that we need to love “her” more, our so-called Mother Earth, so that we might be more motivated to save her. We’re not good at saving, and in any case, she is not here to be saved. She is vaster than us, and the most interesting stories that could be told about her would seize that opportunity. She / them / it / us IS the opportunity.

She is not a character: she is the whole plot. She is context, she is background, she is canon, she is landscape, she is camera, she is pen, she is voice. She is thriller, she is horror, she is sci-fi, she is comedy, she is romance, she is mumblecore, she is documentary, she is fairy tale. She is God, whatever that means.

We need to stop trying to narrate our way into convincing ourselves to love her enough to save her. We love her already, and that hasn’t been enough. Because saving isn’t the real path. Imagining is.

*Gratitude to the magnificent redwood forests of Mendocino County, California, for appearing in this story. And to the magical for the topmost picture of my unkempt feet and the beautiful fallen tree. Thanks too to for inviting me to be an Earth Day provocateur.

It was always something childish that I wanted to give up, and always something that didn’t quite follow the rules, which are that you’re supposed to give up something that you value, and that you’re not supposed to use it as an exercise in self-improvement. I was forever offering to give up things like tomatoes (something that I hated) and fighting with my sister (something that I was supposed to give up anyway), and my parents were always gentle in their explanations that giving up tomatoes and slap-fights was not in the spirit of Lent. So it usually became something like giving up Barbies or chocolate chip cookies, or reading under the blankets after bedtime.

I don’t think that I ever made it the full forty days with any of my sacrifices. That didn’t matter. It was the trying that mattered. It was the exercise in play-acting sacrifice for any length of time, the imaginative exercise of considering the question: what will I give up. And then putting on the costume of sacrificial devotion and seeing what it felt like, to give something up, to go without, for some higher purpose. The effort itself would then shift the question — from when can I have cookies again? to will this help me see God?

I didn’t understand it perfectly as a kid, but the deprivation isn’t the point. Deprivation doesn’t help you see God, no matter what the white male insta-shamans tell you; you can’t just go out into the wilderness and vision quest it through sheer force of willed starvation. You might see something, but it’s not God, because whatever God is, it isn’t something that shows up in the spaces of absence. It shows up in the spaces of connection and love and longing. The whole point of the Lenten practice of given something up isn’t to put you in a state of suffering, but to put you in a state of want.

And it’s not just any state of want, it’s a state of intentional want, a kind of elevated desire. It’s a state in which one’s longing is purposefully focused toward something higher. You’re meant to be hungry, but not for cookies or bourbon or coffee or extra reading time. You’re meant to be hungry for God. Which sounds kind of dirty, but that’s also sort of the point. Longing loses its force and its magic when it’s stripped of its viscera. There’s a reason why even the most traditional religious rituals usually involve food or wine. Devotion is erotic, in the philosophic/idealistic sense: it is the deeply felt longing to get close to the source of truth, beauty, or the good.1

Anyway. I spent a lot of time in the week before Lent wondering whether I’d formally observe it by giving something up. I’m about as lapsed a Catholic as they come, but I do love my rituals, and if ever there was a moment in life for committing to deep spiritual contemplation while maybe also currying favor with divine powers, this one is certainly it. But I couldn’t decide what I’d give up. What do you give up when you’ve been struggling through an era of loss? What can put you in a state of sacred longing when every idea you ever had about longing just got exploded? What do you choose to give up when you’ve already been forced to consider the question, what if you lost everything?

When the fires came two months ago, there was only time to grab a few things. I’ve told this story already, but still. I grabbed odd things, sacred things, useless but beloved things. There wasn’t any opportunity to really consider the question, what do I hold onto, and so the balance of giving up and holding on was really left up to God or Spirit or the universe or whomever was guiding my hands through the dark, grabbing whatever was both precious and within reach. And so after we’d fled and found a safe place and were doing an inventory of what we’d grabbed (crystals, cookbook, passports, journals, too few photographs, a half-empty bottle of bourbon, no pants) the question shifted from what did we leave behind to what did we lose to what if this is all that we have now? This flimsy wicker box filled with almost nothing, these remnants of a life given up to flames.

We were not in a state of deprivation. We were in a state of loss, and so of longing, for things that no longer had a shape in our imaginations.

We spent days in that state, a liminal state in which we believed that our home would burn and that we’d lose everything, that in running from the fire we had given up everything that we had in exchange for our lives. We were grateful of course (all that matters is that we’re safe, I said, lying, to anyone who asked how we were), but also decidedly not grateful, because that particular state of actual and imagined loss was shitty and painful and it was hard to see any good in it, never mind God.

But of course I was not trying to see God in that experience. I had no longing to see God in that experience, and in any case, seeing God would not have been the point. There is no point in loss, in hurt, in grief. There is no utilitarian calculus to these things. Loss, hurt, and grief are not means to other ends. They are the ends.

I got very angry at someone on Instagram during the fires for waxing poetic about how the destruction would yield opportunity for more beauty. Out of destruction, creation, he said; I lost my mind, sitting in my barren desert shelter, discovering what it feels like to be well and truly triggered by something that you see on social media. There’ll be time for searching for meaning in all of this, I responded, rage-typing my heart out on the tiny keyboard of my phone with one hand. But right now — while people are losing everything — is not that time. The time for contemplation isn’t in the moment of loss. It’s in the moments that come after. That’s true whether the loss is imposed upon you or you offer it willingly. You set down the Barbie dolls or the chocolate chip cookies or literally everything that you own and then you give it a minute before asking yourself, how does this feel? And, can I go on this way? And, what will I need, not to replace what I’ve given up or lost, but to carry me forward?

If I am untethered, what will hold me?

If I am unmoored, what will guide me?

If I am at a loss, what will fill me?

If I am alone, who will I draw to me?

If I am without hope, what will I long for?

I still don’t have answers to these questions. Hence the gravitation to Lent.

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The ancient Greeks had a term, aporia, which literally means to be without resources or to be without direction. It’s a state of emptiness, and disorientation. It’s a state of questioning —What do I do? Where do I turn? What direction do I go? — and for that reason it is, a according to the philosophers, a rich state, perhaps the richest. It’s the state that is necessary for the purest practice of philosophy, when all there is to do is ask questions. To be hungry in one’s curiosity, to long for answers; to lean forward, eager to seek. To be hungry like a spiritually voracious wolf. This is where the transformation of one’s consciousness occurs, Plato argued — in that erotic state of longing, fueled by the awareness that one can only fill the empty spaces of one’s soul by asking questions. By seeking. But that requires that one acknowledge the emptiness, that one confront it. Get comfortable with it, which is to say, be made strong by it.2 One way to do that is to move into that space intentionally. To choose it. To empty oneself; to give (something) up.

To give up can mean a lot of different things. It can mean to give up a thing (let go of something) or to give up on something or someone (let go of a hope or expectation). It can also mean to surrender, to “just give up” (let go of a purpose). I’m giving up cookies for Lent; I’m giving up on politics; I’m giving up, I surrender, I’m done. It’s so interesting that we conflate (or that I, here, am conflating) giving up with letting go: letting go implies a release, whereas giving up implies an offering. It’s right there in the word: giving. What are we giving or offering when we surrender? To whom or to what are we offering it? The history of the colloquialism suggests that the recipient of our offering is to God, literally or figuratively (Let Go & Let God, the Hobby Lobby wood art says); your mileage may vary. But the question of what remains: what is it that’s been offered? It’s not the actual cookie, obviously.

I think that the thing on offer is longing itself.

We love longing. We lean all the way in to longing. We give (give!) in to it freely, the impulse to fill our souls with things without question. The pleasure of the cookie, the joy of the Barbie doll, the weight of the expectations of others, the attachment to life or faith or whatever. These are all worthy things — I will defend the value of cookies and Barbie dolls to my death — but if our longing for these things is unconsidered, unquestioned, then the things are just filler. The truth is, though, that we like the feeling of fullness, even (especially?) when it’s unexamined. We like a full soul-belly, and usually the filling is easier when we don’t look too closely at the filler. Does eating more cookies make me happier? It does. But why? Why is it filling? What desire does it satiate? And — what space is it taking up? The question of Lent is not a question of giving up the cookie (I promise that this is not just the justification of my cookie habit), it’s a question of giving up my hunger for the cookie and replacing it with a hunger to understand why I love the cookie, so that I can then redirect that hunger to something better. So what I’m offering, what I’m giving in the practice of giving up, is the unthinking attachment to longing itself; to wanting things, without question.

I spoke with my friend Sarah about Lent and loss and longing the other weekend. I told her that I was trying to give up self-doubt for Lent,3 but that I’d already fucked it up because I gave into self-doubt the first time I tried to write about the whole thing. She told me something that she shared with her kids: that’s it okay to mess up your Lent commitment, if you make it up somehow. Giving up negative self-talk? If you slip, you have to do positive self-talk. Setting aside self-doubt? When you stumble, take a confident action. Denying yourself cookies? If you accidentally eat one, forgive yourself and chase it with an apple. Create your own gentle practice of reverse penance: reward your slip-up with self-care and self-love. (Something that I’ve always liked about Catholicism: you’re expected to fuck up, so there’s always a path to making good on your mistakes.)

This post, of course, is that confident action, the gentle penitential prayer against my own self-doubt, the rejection of the voice in my head that said, don’t post that, it’s too long and too weird and too self-indulgent, and in any case, we’re well into Lent so who cares? Publishing this post now is a way of proving to myself that I do trust myself, that I am capable of pushing back on doubt, that I can say to myself I got you. It’s an offering to me.

It’s me asserting to myself that I can hold myself, I can guide myself, I can fill myself. And not in the mode of, I am a lone wolf who doesn’t need anybody else, but in the mode of, I am part of the universal pack that is connected to everything and supported by everything.

Everything—God, Spirit, the Universe, whatever it is. I give things up to it because it’s through doing so that I learn what it feels like to replace want with wonder, longing with love.

Which, sure, is a lot of pressure to put on a cookie,4 or Barbie dolls, or coffee, or a generalized anxiety disorder, or any of the many other things that I have given up or tried to give up over the years. I’d rather look at it as a way of holding those things differently, and seeing the sacred in them and in my relationship to them. Or seeing the sacred, full stop.

If nothing else, it’s just a way of being differently in the world, for a minute. Of experiencing the world differently for a minute. Of experiencing ourselves differently for a minute. I think we need that right now. I sure do.

I fell in love with it anyway.

My field wasn’t metaphysics, strictly speaking; it was political philosophy. But I stood with Aristotle on the assertion that metaphysics was fundamental to any philosophic inquiry, including the political, and as I’ve already noted it’s pretty hard to do any kind of philosophy without considering metaphysics so over the course of almost 15 years of study I became pretty well-schooled in that area. You might think that studying metaphysics would make you super open to Belief, with a capital B — to faith in the radical possibility of all things being possible, including God and unicorns — but it doesn’t, not really. It opens you up to considering those things, sure — I could debate the essential possibility of unicorns for hours, to say nothing of their relevance to the mythos of certain orders of political rule and the narratives of Silicon Valley — but it also trains you to question them, relentlessly. To be a philosopher is to be a skeptic of all things, including belief itself.

And I was trained in a philosophic discipline that was almost fanatic in its commitment to intellectual rigor, with little tolerance for flights of philosophic fancy. If much of philosophy is a weed-fogged basement full of giggling misfits riffing on life, the universe, and everything, we were the nerds in suits sitting upstairs in the well-appointed living room, drinking good wine and debating the significance of the precise declension of a word in the original Greek text of Plato’s Symposium. Everything was — everything had to be — subject not just to questioning, but to rigorous investigation and analysis.

All of which is to say: it was the most open-minded of times, it was the most close-minded of times. I would not have been caught dead using a tarot deck for anything other than a rigorous analysis of the significance of esoteric symbolism in Renaissance political thought (which, full disclosure, I did). It made me a really, really strong thinker, but it impaired, in some pretty significant ways, my basic capacity for belief.

A memory (or two):1

It’s very early spring; in Toronto, that means that crocuses are blooming even as piles of exhaust-stained snow persist in frozen clumps against recycling bins and wrought-iron fences. The air is cold but in that fresh way that beckons you to loosen your scarf to feel the air, rather than pull it close to protect your skin. I’m walking home from my tiny office — a walled-in cubicle, really — in Robarts Library on the university campus. It’s a short walk, straight up Huron Street to Bloor and the Annex, where we live. I’ve only just turned onto Huron when I notice that I’m being followed by a squirrel.

It’s a white squirrel, which is odd. I know too much about Toronto squirrels, because one of my best grad school friends, a London transplant named Zoë, is perpetually outraged by them. She has been living in a state of war with Toronto squirrels from the beginning of her doctoral program when she discovered that they were extremely successful at getting into her room on cold nights; we have had endless discussions about the relative cunning of Toronto’s Eastern Gray squirrels versus London’s apparently much stupider basic gray squirrels, which is how I know that Toronto’s smartest and most common squirrels are gray, that its red squirrels are equally cunning but much less common, and that it has almost no white squirrels except for a small clan living in a park on the other side of town. I have never seen a white squirrel in Toronto, until now. This one must be far from home.

Whatever. I am not that interested in squirrels, Zoë’s battles notwithstanding, so I keep walking. The squirrel keeps pace. It scurries along just within my line of sight, off to my left, along and over the mounds of snow and sprouting shoots of green. I stop, it stops. I go, it goes. It’s definitely following me. I’m not carrying any food, and it seems fat enough that it shouldn’t be desperate enough to get close to a human. I stop and look around to confirm that I’m alone on the street. I turn to the squirrel.

What do you want?

It sits up on its haunches and looks at me. It says nothing, of course.

We stand, facing each other, not two feet apart. It occurs to me, bizarrely, that I know it. Her. Him. It (she, he, they) sits up a little straighter, as though it’s about to extend a paw. The sense of familiarity is so strong that I feel frozen in place; I feel like I’m at a cocktail party and someone whose name I can’t recall has pinned me in a corner and I’m desperate for them to give me some clue about who they are. The words how do I know you stick on my tongue. I know this squirrel, somehow, but one doesn’t just stop on the street and conduct interviews with rodents; the movie Ratatouille is still a few years off and in any case I’m in my Disney-hating era and wouldn’t have been inspired by it anyway. I have been known to chat with animals but that’s mostly with my cat, not random squirrels, and definitely not in public on the university campus where students or colleagues might see me. There is no space for whimsy here; I’m not going to entertain any meaningful communication with this squirrel. Still, I face it, and we stand there on the sidewalk like two undergrads about to exchange notes on an upcoming midterm.

It occurs to me, fleetingly, that the squirrel is actually someone, a spirit in animal form; I swat the idea away almost as quickly as it occurs to me. My mom insisted for years that her mother appeared to her as a fox after she died, and later, as a dragonfly; I used to love those stories but I’m a scholar now, a student of philosophy, and I know the difference between belief, thought, and understanding. This squirrel is not my grandmother. This is just a white squirrel that has somehow wandered out of Trinity Bellwoods Park and made its way across town to the university campus to ask for food. I turn away and walk home.

When I get there, my husband is home, which is unexpected because he was supposed to have taken our cat, Sam, to the vet for a routine appointment. But it means that I get to tell him about the weird white squirrel. He’ll laugh, because it’s ridiculous–dude I talked to a squirrel. I craft the anecdote in my head as I hang up my coat; I’m about to launch into it when I notice his face.

It’s not a good face.

Wait. I hold up my hand to forestall the answer that I know will come. Where’s Sam?

I refuse to let myself believe that Sam, who’d died unexpectedly during a routine procedure at the vet, moments before the squirrel had appeared to me, had bodysnatched the squirrel and somehow taken its form. I also resist the other unexplainable experiences in the days and weeks following his death: the time that I felt him brush against my legs while I waited for the elevator in the library, the times that I heard him calling from the bathroom, the many times I felt the full weight of him against my back while I lay crying in bed. I’m devastated by his death — he’d been my beloved companion for years, for longer than I’d known my husband; he was my comfort, my constant — but I can’t let myself accept the comfort of believing that his spirit persisted. It didn’t fit the current story of me, the story of me who reads Plato in Greek.

I reschedule my qualifying exams. This is no small thing; these are the exams that take you from doctoral student to potential teacher, that qualify you to call yourself expert enough in a subject to teach it. You don’t just call in sick. But I do. I make up a story about why I need to reschedule; “because my cat died” would not be considered a serious reason.

I allude to something vague and ovarian, something to ward off questions, and then go to ground to survive my sadness. I hide in my grief, struggling to make sense of it, but there is no making sense of grief, which is why belief or faith can be such a solace, which is why the absence of belief or faith can feel like a wound in the body of loss.

I think about going back to Huron Street to find that squirrel; I can’t, because I’m supposed to be sick and venturing near the library would risk seeing my teachers and peers. I am sick, but not in a way that I can explain to anyone serious, which makes me feel unserious, which makes me double-down on my resistance to anything that might make me believe in anything other than the cold finality of loss.

I let it slip in a phone call with my mom that I can sometimes sense Sam near me, which is a mistake.

Of course he’s there with you, honey. Of course he is.

I don’t tell her that can’t let myself believe that.

Maybe, Mom. Maybe.

I can hear her shift the phone from one ear to another.

Do you remember when Pansy died?

Pansy was my cat when I was about seven; he got hit by a car. I saw the whole thing happen and went mute for weeks. My mom has told this story a thousand times.

You saw him get hit by that car, and then you went mute for weeks. You didn’t say a word to any of us, you didn’t even cry. We were so worried; we took you to the pastor. You just went silent. Nothing, not a single word. Then one morning you came downstairs and said, “it’s okay now, Pansy’s in heaven. I saw him in a dream with Jesus.” And then you sat down and ate your cereal like nothing had happened. You went back to normal, like everything was fine; Pansy was in heaven so it was all good.

I sigh. I know, Mom, but we were, like, super Christian.

I really believe that you saw him in heaven. Her voice is firm.

You don’t even believe in heaven anymore, Mom.

I can hear her shaking her head. Maybe not, she says. But I believe that you saw him.

I do remember that dream. I remember it as clearly as I remember anything. It’s more vivid than the actual memory of Pansy getting hit by the car. In the dream, Pansy was very clearly in heaven; it was the storybook version, the kind that you see depicted in children’s illustrated Bibles, with rolling green hills and flowers and Jesus in flowing blue and white robes, surrounded by lambs and cows and small children. In the dream, Jesus was standing alone on a dirt path near the top of a grassy hill, holding Pansy in his arms. He didn’t say anything; I remember that distinctly, because seven-year-old me found it strange that he didn’t use his voice. He just somehow communicated: it’s okay.

And I believed him. I believed him even more when I woke up that morning and felt Pansy laying on my bed, nestled against my legs, the vibration of his purr thrumming through the blanket. Pansy was safe in another world, somehow, but also still with me. It was all okay.

I don’t remember any of the other details of the story. I have only the vaguest memory of seeing Pansy getting hit, and then the crystal clear memory of the dream. Everything else – the moments after his death, the days of not speaking, everything that happened before and after the dream -- is just fog. In a way, I only really fully remember Pansy because of that dream.

But it was just a dream.

There’s not a lot of classical philosophy that takes dreams seriously. Plato skirts around the subject; there are passages in the Timaeus where Plato has Socrates say that the gods communicate with mortals through dreams, but the gods are figures of myth for Plato so these claims need to be taken with a grain of critical salt. He does, however, talk a lot about realms beyond the one that we perceive with our limited human senses; for him, and for Socrates (who we know best through Plato), the whole purpose of philosophy is to orient ourselves toward these higher, better, realms, these orders of existence in which truth has a form and can be perceived. There is, he says through Socrates in the Phaedo, an invisible world that is divine and immortal and rational to which the soul departs upon death, and thereupon dwells in bliss. This is one of the reasons why Socrates willingly accepts his own execution and drinks the hemlock, because of course a philosopher — whose whole life’s purpose is the pursuit of truth —would not resist the liberation of his soul into that realm.

I don’t tell my mom about the Phaedo, during that phone call about Sam. I might have; I could have said that maybe Pansy, and by extension Sam, had let their souls take flight to that invisible realm and that somehow my own soul was able to perceive this and maybe it all made some kind of philosophic sense, after all. But I don’t. I don’t allow myself the consolation of philosophy, at least not that kind, because it doesn’t fit the story that I’m currently trying to tell about myself.

I’ll be okay, Mom, I say to her before I hang up the phone. I’ll be okay.

I know that I’m lying. I don’t tell her about the squirrel.

It takes me years to tell anyone about the squirrel. It’s a secret that I keep to myself, in a distant, closed-off part of my soul that I hold separate from the parts that attend to ideas and seriousness and philosophy. It’s not until another, harder grief rattles the walls that keep those soul-spaces separate that I remember the squirrel and set it free. By that point I’m no longer a practicing philosopher, as it were, which is actually ironic: I should have been most curious about seemingly unexplainable things back when I was most immersed in the work of philosophy, not after I’d given it up. It occurs to me, perhaps too late, that it was deeply uncurious of me to refuse to interrogate my own skepticism in the moment when it was most challenged. A good philosopher would have asked more questions when confronted by a possibly possessed squirrel. Shouldn’t I have wanted to not just understand the squirrel, but my entire posture of resistance toward the possible meanings of the squirrel? Shouldn’t I have wanted to delve deeper into the metaphysics of belief, and explored all the possibilities surrounding it? Mightn’t I have plumbed Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Leibniz for insight into how and why we imagine — why we believe in — things beyond the material world? (Years later, I come across a comment on a Reddit thread on Leibniz and multiverses: the commenter, explaining his rejection of Leibniz’s theodicy and ‘possible worlds’ theories, states “I'm certain this could have easily be explained to Leibniz, once we slapped God's human-projected dick out of his mouth.” In the moment of reading that comment I regret deeply having ever been a cynic, and also having not read more deeply in Leibniz.)

All of which is to say: it takes me years to figure out that I was not as good a student of philosophy as I thought I’d been. I had resisted the hardest questions, the questions that I should have been asking all along, the questions that, really, I had wanted to ask all along. I had missed opportunities for learning. I had missed the opportunity for what might have been a connection to something beyond my own material experience, or at worst might have just been a good conversation with a squirrel.

I missed the opportunity to not only interrogate my capacity for belief, but to expand it. To ask myself, what does it mean to believe, not just in philosophy, but in practice.

I’m trying to do that now.

I’m being hard on myself. All writers are hard on themselves, at least the ones for whom writing isn’t just a mode of production, but a practice.1 It’s difficult to not interrogate one’s own practices; by definition we seek some kind of improvement or progress through our practices, material or spiritual, and so the quality of the practice matters. And if the practice is, for any reason, a deeply personal one, then the impulse to self-criticism becomes more acute: the things that we do to serve the deepest parts of ourselves are the things that often provoke our deepest anxieties and fears. We don’t just want to do these things well; at some level we need to do them well. How terrible to let ourselves down.

And then there’s the ego, and pride, and all that messy human stuff connected to worrying about what other people think. It’s a terrible thing to let ourselves down; it’s even worse to do it in front of other people. This is why personal writing is such a radical and brave act, as I said some weeks ago: it is one of the most vulnerable things that we can do. It’s a kind of baring of the soul; it’s taking the precious tendrils of ideas and dreams and speculations and explorations and longings that live in here (*gestures vaguely to chest*) and putting them out there and saying, look, these deserve to be out here in the wide open world. It’s an assertion of the right of our inner worlds to find expression in the outer world. It’s an assertion of our right — and by extension our desire, our longing — to be heard.

So, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to do it once or twice; it’s super-duper hard to do it again and again and again, to make a practice of it, to try to make it part of your ongoing lived experience of being in the world. And to do it on a schedule. And to not worry about how it’s received.

That last part is impossible. To make a practice of writing you have to get comfortable with anxiety and fear about what people might think about your writing. This is true even if you never publish or share your writing: once words are on a page in the world, actual or virtual, they are discoverable, and because of that they are alive and available for witnessing. Writing is spelling is spellcasting: you bring something into the world that was not there before. It’s magic, and it’s more than a little unnerving to use it, because it’s a magic that you draw from your heart and mind and spirit and it exposes you. There’s no way for that not to be vulnerable, not if you genuinely care if your magic is good.

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Anyway. I started this Substack because I wanted to a) force my own practice of personal writing, b) push against my own perfectionism relative to writing, and c) rediscover my courage. I wanted to confront and overcome my tendency to overthink the words that I put out into the world, to find the flow of my own deepest storytelling instincts, and become, if not fearless, more brave.

And that’s been hard, as I knew it would be, but this week it was super hard, to the point of almost derailing me entirely. The irony is that I’ve probably written more for myself this week than I have in any given week for years; the writing itself has not been the problem (for this I am wildly grateful). The problem has been my inner critic, or at least one in particular (I have a whole chorus). One of my loudest inner critics when it comes to my writing is my inner recovering editor-in-chief, the chief content officer and creative strategist who knows way too much about how to get words out into the world in ways that click. She has been very loud of late, and insistent that I should worry about which words I share and when, about whether they’re the right words for the right moment and the right audience and, you know, the times and all that. How are your words going to find an audience, she has been whispering, if you’re not thinking strategically about them? You do want an audience, right? You should think more about that. Why aren’t you thinking more about that?

I argue with her. I tell her that finding an audience wasn’t the point of the Substack. It’s always the point, she says. You know that.

She’s not wrong, which is the core of the problem. I do want people to read the words that I put out into the world; that is, after all, why I put them out there. So I never have a good answer for her when she pushes me on that point, and last week was no different, and that is why you are currently reading a post that I wrote about not writing, because I didn’t want to not write just to spite her and I didn’t have any better ideas about how to shut her up.

I wrote three and a half draft posts last week, which is a lot even though none of it made it here.2 One was about Lent and spiritual hunger; another was a reworking of a memoir piece about an early confrontation with my own cynicism (featuring ghost cats and a conversation with a squirrel.) There was also a revisitation of a talk I gave last year about the book of Genesis and the myth of the Garden of Eden and its relevance to the stories that we tell about taking care of the earth. And then there was the half post, which was related to International Women’s Day and that I never finished—that’s the one where I finally realized that my inner critic / content strategist had fully taken over and that I was chasing a goal that I didn’t want to be chasing.

It didn’t start out that way. I didn’t set out to write about Lent because it was timely; I wanted to write about it because thinking about Lent catalyzed some reflections about spiritual hunger and the power of giving things up and what it even means to ‘give things up’ in a time of deep loss. So I wrote it, and enjoyed writing it and was pretty happy with it, but then Ash Wednesday slipped by and I thought (or rather, my inner content strategist leaned in and whispered) damn, the moment has passed. No one will be thinking about Lent anymore; no one will read this. So I paused, and turned my attention to the two other pieces of writing, which felt more evergreen, but then the memoir piece all of sudden felt too personal3 and it seemed that the Garden of Eden post should wait until closer to Earth Day, which reminded me that International Women’s Day was coming up, at which point (I now recognize) my inner content strategist had almost entirely taken over.

But I fought her.

I have feelings about International Women’s Day, specifically about activism fatigue and the exhaustion that comes from having fought to change a story for a very long time, and under certain circumstances that would be a meaningful thing for me to write about, but I wasn’t in that moment writing about it for meaningful reasons. I was writing about it because that annoying voice was telling me that I should write about it for timeliness and audience reasons. I was shelving other writing in service to a content calendar that didn’t even exist and that I certainly didn’t want. So I paused and asked myself: did I even want to write about International Women’s Day? No, I did not.

And also: fuck content calendars. Fuck content.

I did not return to my writing practice to create content. There are many good purposes for content but content in and of itself is not storytelling; content is just narrative or informative material (from the Latin continēre: to contain). At the most basic level, a lot of content is exactly what its names implies — filler — and the world already has more than enough of it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; under other circumstances, I happily create content. I have been an editor and purveyor and manager and distributor and strategist of content, which is why I have that inner critical voice yelling so loudly for my attention. But I don’t want to be that anymore, at least not in relation to my own creative work. I don’t want to make content. I want to make stories.

So. I resisted the voice. Which in the moment felt like it might become a stubborn (and self-defeating) refusal to write, but I reminded myself that I wasn’t really arguing with my inner critic about writing, I was arguing with her about posting. I had, after all, written a whole bunch and was just waffling about what writing I was willing to share with the world right in this particular moment. It was that critic-induced self-conscious waffling that was giving me trouble. And I so decided to push past the waffling by writing into the waffling, which is why you are reading the unapologetically self-indulgent navel-gazing mess of words that you see here.

If this is what resistance looks like—this oddball exercise in writing about not writing—then so be it. At least it’s honest (I think). If nothing else, it is an assertion — to myself and to the world — that I am writing for the experience of it, for the joy and pain and terror and satisfaction of running headlong onto the landscape of my own storymaking and not caring (mostly) if anyone follows me. It’s writing for the purpose of experiencing the magic of writing, which is its own reward. And that kind of writing is most powerful when it allows itself to forget that anyone is watching.

So.

Write like no one is watching.

Write like no one is watching.

If in doubt, write about writing like no one is watching.

Whatever you do, just write. Post if you feel brave. Remember that your words are magic.

Here is what I discovered about the anglerfish during my emotional journey tracking her journey:

1. Smol

2. Female

3. Not as scary looking as I had been led to believe about anglerfish

4. Might have been sick

5. Might have been escaping a hostile environment

6. Almost certainly was not, actually, seeking the sun

7. Very unlikely to have been in search of a whole new world

8. Had very probably not made a deal with a sea witch

9. Died almost immediately upon reaching the surface

10. Was relatable as f*ck

I was not alone in being sad about the anglerfish. A not insignificant share of the Internet was also all up in its collective feelings about the anglerfish, and was coping by making memes and TikTok videos, which I found reassuring. That little hashtaggable anglerfish meant something to all of us. We were holding hands on an emotional journey.3 It didn’t take long for the naysayers to come out, of course; this was to be expected, because there’s nothing that the mansplainier parts of the Internet like to do more than explain to people why they’re wrong. That anglerfish was not seeking light! There was nothing poetic about her death! Stop anthropomorphizing, losers.

There’s a level at which I totally get this response: there are far greater horrors in the world than dying anglerfish, and it’s very possible if not likely that some of those horrors (climate-related) have something to do with her death. We should absolutely be in our feelings about those horrors, and we should probably be creating more Internet content about them. And yes, we should be as moved and catalyzed by science as we are by vibes. What good are vibes when the world is burning?

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But here’s the thing about vibes: they’re the abstractions of our feelings, they’re the energy of poetry and of music and of story, and they’re not at all at odds with science or reason or being clear-eyed about apocalypses. In fact, I’d argue that vibes, via story, art, music, poetry, etc., are essential to our ability to engage with things like science and reason and logic and the like, and to our ability to survive apocalypses.

There’s a reason that so much learning happens through story and art and music and poetry, because story and art and music and poetry activate empathy, and empathy opens not just our hearts, but our minds. It expands the horizons of our moral imaginations. It powers our ability to see beyond ourselves, which we must do if we are to be able to think and dream and ideate beyond the limits of our own isolated experience. It unlocks our capacity to imagine and connect with the experiences of others — all others, including anglerfish.

How radical to empathize with an anglerfish! A creature that we’ve long thought of as terrifically ugly, even horrifying, a monster from the deep, a thing (we absolutely tend to regard monsters as unsouled things) that should defy empathy suddenly becomes the focus of our care, and that’s pretty extraordinary. This being from our nightmares swims into our imaginations in a beam of light, and instead of recoiling, we reconsider it. We see that it is small, and vulnerable. It’s still got sharp teeth, but in the filtered underwater light, those teeth become thread-like protrusions of vulnerable, breakable bone, and it seems so fragile and so somehow, while swimming upward to the sun, “it” becomes “she” and gets a little closer to us, or us to her. We start to see her, a delicate creature of nature, and we start to see ourselves in her, and we imagine that she — like we — must be a being of light who can’t help but be drawn to the sun.

By giving her an identity, we ensoul her. That ensoulment is necessary for (a precondition to? Which comes first, the ensoulment or the empathy?) our ability to empathize with her. And the more we empathize, the less monstrous, the less alien, the less ‘other’ she becomes. The more her story world expands to reach ours, the more that we can see ourselves within it.

What we see there: a world full of darkness and shadow and light, and an ensouled being, moving towards light. Why she moves in that direction doesn’t entirely matter; the mystery of her movements opens space on that landscape for us to apply our own stories as maps for meaning-making, and brings us closer to her. We see that she carries her own light, which feels significant: do we not carry our own light? Why do beings with their own light sources go out into the sun, or gaze at the moon and stars? What drives us from our safe havens toward brighter open spaces? Are we all just journeying out from underworlds that we don’t recognize as such? What light yonder?

We summon metaphors of moths and sunflowers; we tell stories about Icarus and Raven. We suspect that any living thing that loves warmth and light must have a soul, or at least a spirit, for reasons that none of us can fully articulate. We turn our golden faces into the sun. Any being that turns to the sun, to the light, must be like us, we think. We know this at the level of our bodies. We feel this in our bones, our veins, our cells.

We like things that are like us. They don’t have to look like us, but they have to have the semblance of a soul. We don’t know what that means exactly, but we think that we know it when we see it, or the possibility of it. We cry at Pixar movies because we believe, somewhere deep down, that toys and lamps and clownfish and robots and bao buns could have souls; that belief brings them alive for us, and not just in the sense of liberating them from the confines of the page or screen. Like clapping for Tinkerbell, we bring them to spiritual life. When we believe that something that is not us has a soul, we activate their spirit with our imagination.4 And when we do that, we create an imaginative landscape upon which other beings have souls and that imaginative landscape is very much alive and important because anytime we’re on it, we are forced to keep our minds and our hearts open to the possibility that life, the universe, and everything are bigger and more complex than we could possibly understand. And that maybe, just maybe, we could love everything that’s there.

The Disney version of the story The Little Mermaid gets criticized for what many interpret as the sexist message driving the story: that the heroine, the titular little mermaid, Ariel, gives up her voice — and her home and her family — for a boy. What such critiques usually overlook is that Ariel feels the pull of adventure long before she ever sees the boy. She longs for a whole new world because of course she does: it is fully and richly human to chafe against being held in place, to want to follow our curiosity and discover new things, to look toward the horizon and wonder what’s there, to consider risking everything just to see it for yourself. That love becomes the catalyst for the mermaid’s exploration — the thing that gets her off her tail and into bargains with sea witches in order to make the journey possible — just maps to what has been true for women and girls across all of history and most cultures: you usually don’t get to leave home for any reason but the one that connects you to a man. It’s why we don’t see many journey stories for women and girls: the only feminine journey is the one that takes you out of one home and into another. If that journey actually involves a love that you choose for yourself… well, that’s a radically liberatory thing. And liberation is the kind of thing that many beings will risk everything for.

In the Disney story, of course, Ariel’s risk pays off and she lives happily ever after with her legs and her voice and her prince. In older versions of the story, she is turned into seafoam and dies. For many, those tales would read as cautionary: if you leave home and family, little lady, you’ll probably die. For some, those tales would read as a dare: you could die, but also, you could be free. For a few, an inner voice would whisper: it would be worth it.

There’s no flight from home or pursuit of romance in the anglerfish’s story (that we know of), but it’s still a very gendered story. I don’t even know if we know the sex of the anglerfish, and I’m not going to look it up because it doesn’t matter: the Internet gendered her and that has shaped her mythos in so many ways.5 The gender assigned to her serves to underscore her vulnerability, of course, which deepens the pathos of the story. We love a small damsel confronted by a distressing world: a princess surrounded by dragons, a demi-goddess in the clutches of Hades, a mermaid indebted to a sea witch. We root for them to be saved; sometimes we even root for them to save themselves.

It’s still gendered even when our heroine is not a princess, but a monster. Our heroine emerged from a dark underworld, a terrifying being from the depths who became something close to beautiful in the glimmering light of the water-filtered sun. This, I think, is where she most deeply triggered our empathy, or at least the empathy of those of us who have ever felt trapped in the murk and dark of our own bodies. She is every female-coded being who has ever lurked in the darkness of her own culturally-imposed shadows, convinced of her own monstrousness, cleaving to her own small light, wondering if anything would be different — if she would be different — in other waters. She is every she or them or we who ever dreamed of escaping from an underworld and going in search what might be found outside, no matter the danger. This is where folklore meets National Geographic, and where our anglerfish becomes not just text, but poetry: she becomes a little mermaid for our own dark time, propelling herself toward a brighter light, knowing that the journey might kill her.

There is of course no lack of pathos in what is likely the real story: that the anglerfish’s habitat became toxic due to ocean warming from climate change, which caused the anglerfish to become sick or disoriented and therefore end up in foreign waters. There’s no heroine’s journey in that narrative, but it still doesn’t preclude stretching our imaginations and our empathy. If our anglerfish is just an un-ensouled casualty of climate change, what then? Does it really serve us to look at the poetic possibilities of the anglerfish and say, no, ditch the poetry, better to distance ourselves and not identify in any way with what might have happened? Until relatively recently in human history we were live vivisecting dogs for science, telling ourselves that their cries of pain were akin to the pinging of wires in machines, because dogs couldn’t possibly feel pain, because dogs couldn’t possibly have consciousness, never mind souls. We still do terrible things to animals — we do truly terrible things to other humans — on the basis that they’re different enough from us to not matter, to not count, to not warrant empathy.

We don’t care about anything that we can’t write a poem about. And when we stop poetry, we stop caring.

When we strip anything of poetic possibility, when we deny poetry for or about other beings or the world or ourselves, we expand the space of difference between us and within us. We widen the space of difference to a fucking gulf, an uncrossable chasm, and in the space of that chasm we become the horrors. We become unsouled, in practice at least.

But we can bridge, even fill, that chasm with poetry — with art, with music, with story, with love. To treat anything as a worthy subject of poetry is, again, to ensoul that thing; it is to accord that thing beingness and to recognize it as a being, as a part of being. It’s to transform the moth or the sunflower or the anglerfish from thing to being, and to introduce the possibility of identifying with their being, perhaps even to loving their being. To go from it to them, from other to our own.

This all sloppy theology and even sloppier philosophy, I know. But still. We need poetry about that anglerfish in the same way and for the same reasons as we need any and all art: because if we can’t imagine the soul of an anglerfish and weave that imagining into story, we can’t really do it for anything. And if we can’t do that, we’re lost.

I saw someone post on Threads, responding to criticism about being poetic about the anglerfish, “here I am, being poetic as fuck among the Horrors”6 and I thought, this, this is whole point. This is what we must do, all of us, if we’re to survive, and maybe thrive. Be poetic as fuck among the horrors.

Be poetic as fuck among the horrors.

If that means crying for the beautiful little mermaid heroine anglerfish, so be it. I’ll share my tissues.

(Links to Threads)7

“THANK YOU,” she said, in all caps. “I’m so tired of hearing about men’s journeys. Fuck their journeys.” She repeated this for emphasis. “Fuck their journeys. When do we get ours?”

Excellent question, full marks. In a world in which the very idea of an epic journey implies a hero, and the idea of a hero implies a man, what does a woman’s journey — or the journey of any human who doesn’t identify as a man with heroic potential — look like? If we only understand heroes’ journeys as masculine — as we must3 — how does the dominance of the hero’s journey shape our understanding of stories as journeys? Of stories, full stop?

The core problem is right there in the word that Campbell used to describe the hero’s journey: monomyth. Monomyth means single story, and the context of its use almost always describes a single dominating story. That is to say, it’s a story form or structure that is said to reflect or contain all of the possibilities of a single foundational human story, one that explains all of human longing and that draws from what Carl Jung described as the collective unconscious. The hero’s journey is not only held up by its diehard adherents as the monomythical structure of story — it is the monomythical story itself, the most important story of all stories, one story to rule them all.

Historically, when I’ve spoken about the problems with hero’s journeys, I’ve argued that the answer is not to push for more heroine’s journeys, wherein a female or feminine-coded character is dropped into the role of the hero. Nor is it to swap in so-called “kindred” journeys, where the single heroic character is swapped out for a group. Even when those journeys are tweaked to accommodate some slight differences, they tend still to simply repeat what is in effect a savior narrative: a story about a character or characters discovering their power/s and saving the world. And savior narratives, no matter how you parse them, are dominating narratives: they’re stories about how one extraordinary individual or one group learns from their journey how to rise above common experience to do something amazing that everyone else should be grateful for (“we learned how to work together and stopped Thanos from obliterating half of you! You’re welcome!” Note here that Thanos also thought that everyone should be grateful for his efforts to save the universe in the way he saw fit). This isn’t a bad thing in itself; as fantasy entertainment it’s fine (not so fine when those are the only stories that are told at scale, but that’s an argument for another time). It’s when we take too seriously Campbell’s assertion that such stories are actually true reflections of a universal human spirit that can be distilled into models for understanding ourselves — maps for meaning that become maps for personal journeys — that I get a bit twitchy. Anyone who has ever cringed at the overuse of the word “journey” to describe any arc of experience — someone’s healing journey, or self-discovery journey, or what have you — will probably get the gist of this. There’s a seeming self-centeredness — main character energy, if you will — to any heroically framed journey narrative that I think most of us intuitively believe to be problematic.

All of which is a just a longwinded way to explain that when I’ve spoken critically about hero’s journeys in the past, I’ve not just been critical of heroism, but of journeys — personal storytelling with heroic arcs — as well. Maybe not directly—perhaps it’s more that journeys got caught in the crossfire of my various critical volleys on heroism—but still. Some cringe has always crept in, and my critiques of hero’s journeys have carried, I think, the thread of a critique of journeys full stop.

The tidy, logline-friendly plot turn here would be for me to say: and then I went on a journey of my own. But tidy plot turns are themselves a source of cringe, and even though this one wouldn’t be untrue—I did, in fact, go on a journey and it did change my mind about some things—the heel-turn for me wasn’t really because my own journey changed my mind about journeys (although it did do that). The real heel-turn was that it changed my mind about cringe.

I’ve long been deeply reluctant to frame my own explorations of self and soul and spirit as journeys because to do so felt like an overwrought and self-indulgent cliché — “the Eat Pray Love of it all,” I snarked dismissively to someone while describing one of my early journey-centered posts here, disdaining my own efforts to craft a narrative journey for myself because, ew, the vanity. But here’s the poetic irony: punishing myself with charge of vanity for pursuing a narrative journey is precisely what feeds the dominating, punitive white supremacist patriarchal beast that does not want me or any woman or POC or immigrant or [insert differentiated identity here] having journeys and sharing them. Eat Pray Love, as it happens, is an extremely rare account of a journey undertaken by a woman, one among very, very few in a vast landscape of journey narratives authored by men, many of which reside at the core of the literary, philosophic, and religious canons of multiple cultures across history. And therein lays the problem, and the question: can a woman’s journey really be cliché when there are so few accounts of women’s journeys in any cultural canon? Isn’t the threat of cliché just doing the work of patriarchy here? Isn’t internalized misogyny just snookering me into thinking that lady journeys are twee and derivative and at best just princess versions of Campbell’s manly masculine hero structure?4 Isn’t it just tricking me into forgetting that there have actually been so few ‘women’s journeys,’ heroic or otherwise, that literally any publicly shared female or feminine account of a journey can be considered a radical act?5 In which case shouldn’t we unreservedly welcome and celebrate heroine’s journeys, and also define heroine however we damn well please? I mean, come on.

(What do the women think, one of my grad school professors would ask in any open discussion, by which he did not mean, let’s make sure that the women in the room have a chance to speak — we did not need his help on this — but rather, what are the women’s feminine points of view on the subject under discussion? As if our ideas could only be filtered through the lens of gender, as if our value to the field was simply as an extra set of eyes on a well-mapped and unchanging landscape. We cynical junior scholars would snicker over beer after class —ah, Ed, we would laugh, as if —but I think that his words stuck. The voice whispering what do the women think or what is the women’s take got caught in a gender-binary loop and I’ve been trying to silence it ever since.)

Obviously, my impulse to cringe at the idea of the journey in women’s storytelling wasn’t actually about journeys qua journeys. It was about an internalized misogyny hangover that had just lingered too long and too hard and fogged up my thinking. I’d been so focused on having the rigorous, serious, un-cringey take on heroic journeys that I’d thrown the heroine baby out with the hero bathwater and then taken apart the journey bathtub.

Masculine hero’s journeys are by definition main-character journeys, and we should absolutely be cringing at the way that those have long been and still are centered in the culture, because privileged men imposing main character energy on the world is core to the patriarchal problem. To that end, we do need to unpack and put away our attachment to the hero’s journey story structure and to heroes in more broadly. But we don’t need to reject or disdain personal journeys themselves. Arguably, we need to do the opposite, because there is a gap in our collective narrative imagination that can only be filled by the story-journeys that have long gone untold. In order to fill that gap, we need to get over our tendency to cringe — reflexively or performatively — at personal storytelling. Because that tendency to cringe really is a self-protective impulse. It’s a voice that tells us that we really shouldn’t share the stories of our personal journeys, a voice that asserts the lie that those stories are insignificant because they are not heroic, that if we were to put our stories out there they’d be revealed for what they are: minor character stories that don’t influence the shape of the world of all.

The lie of this, the false cringe of this, is what makes public storytelling about personal journeys — especially when those personal journeys are ones that we don’t hear much about in the public sphere — a crucial part of how we change the world, or at least nudge its shape towards something that better reflects the fullness and complexity of our shared humanity. Because the lie and the cringe are the problem. The lie silences us, and the cringe makes us judge those who refuse to be silenced; together they function to discourage us from taking seriously our own journeys, from recognizing their dignity and their value, and from recognizing and embracing the dignity and value of all personal journey stories. They do that so that narrow, dominating, monomythical stories can shape and rule the world. Which is why personal storytelling is an act of resistance: it defies the dominance of the grandiose monomyths and insists upon the dignity, worth, and force of the small story.

So. Resist the cringe and reject the lie that says that the small stories don’t deserve to be told. Insist upon small stories; insist upon your story. Be relentless in your exploration of your own journey, and unapologetic and unwavering in your efforts to weave it into the art that it wants to be. Do whatever it takes to get close to it, and once you have it in your arms, share it. Let others see how beautiful it is. Let them be inspired to explore and tell and share their own stories. Let them — let all of us — redefine heroism into something humbler, and truer to its original meaning as describing the work of someone who protects. Let’s be heroines who put ourselves in service of protecting stories, all the stories, including the ones about our own journeys, however messy and awkward and humble they might seem.

And let’s save the cringe for the man-baby overlords who play act as superhero protectors of their own egos and their hoarded wealth and power, and for the self-serving monomythical story arcs that they try to force upon the world. Fuck their journeys, for real.

If you are interested in exploring and writing your own narrative journey, you can join me in France in May for an heroic adventure that will be the most inspiring and delicious cringe-free zone. Yes, there will be yoni caves. More details HERE.

We might have been more prepared, but we weren’t. The Eaton Fire was only a couple of miles away and the Santa Anas were blowing hard, but still. We hung onto denial. The winds are blowing the other way, Kyle said. It won’t come in this direction. In any case, we didn’t have anywhere to go. It felt too overwhelming to even consider, an impossible thing to contemplate even as the power went out around us and left us in the dark.

We crowded onto the sectional in the living room, clutching our flashlights. We whispered about what we might do, if we had to, but we also reassured ourselves: we wouldn’t have to do anything, would we? The fire wouldn’t come this way. It just wouldn’t, how could it, and in any case the wind was blowing the other way. We told ourselves that the wind was blowing the other way. We fell asleep right there on the couch, believing that with all our hearts.

I’ve lost homes to fire before. The first time was when I was about six years old, and we lived on a street called Dogwood Crescent; some loose wiring in our kitchen caught fire in the middle of the night and set everything ablaze. I was the one who woke up and called out, waking my parents and allowing us to escape onto the roof outside our bedrooms. In my memory we jumped from the roof together, hand in hand, sailing safely into the sky like the Darling children in Peter Pan, carried by pixie dust before settling gently onto the ground, but then I also told my parents that Jesus had woken me up, and of course it didn’t happen that way. There was dust and grease and smoke and firefighters carrying us sobbing down ladders into a crowd of gawking neighbors. Our home burned to the ground; so did the dogwood tree in our back yard.

The second time it happened, I was twelve; our camper van exploded in front of our rural home in northern British Columbia the night before we were set to leave on a two-week camping trip. It burned the whole front half of the house clean off, leaving it looking like a nightmare Barbie Dream House, charred and black but open for play. By some miracle we were outside at the time, away from the blast, down at the end of the drive talking to a neighbor about our trip; we were going to be driving south to the Okanagan, as far as Osoyoos, where we’d swim and sunbathe and roast marshmallows and look at the stars. I remember the sound of the blast, I remember us rushing toward the house and seeing everything in flames, I remember my mom bent over the grass, crying and vomiting and then yelling for someone to check on the goats.

In both cases we lost everything. After the first, we recovered. After the second, we didn’t. It was the beginning of the end of many things for our family. You go on, but you go on feeling stalked by disaster, and when you feel stalked by disaster it wears down your nerves and everything feels harder. You go on, but you aren’t the same.

When the alarms went off the other week, it was barely 3:30am. We didn’t have to look at our phones to know what they meant; the sky outside was red, there was a roar in the distance, sirens blared outside. We sprung to our feet, hearts racing, trying to remain calm. The power was still out, so we fumbled around in the dark; we whispered, as though the fire might hear us and find us more quickly, a robber in the night. Grab a sweater, I said to Jasper. And maybe some of your treasures, just in case.

We’re coming back though, right?

Yes, of course, probably. I hope so. It’s just in case.

I held a flashlight between my teeth as I went through my office, moving things around my desk, asking myself, what are my treasures? Laptop, journals, an old birthday card from my mom. From my altar I grabbed crystals and sage and photos, a small velvet bag, a carving made by my dad. My mom’s jewelry, her old recipe box. I heard things dropping on the floor and told myself that they were things that wanted to stay. It was a sign, I told myself. You can leave things behind. You’ll come back. I heard the fire outside, demanding that we leave. I grabbed some sweaters that were sitting in a thrift shop bag by the door and left, only to return moments later to grab my parents’ ashes. Then we chased down cats, shoved them into cardboard boxes in the truck, and drove off into the night. We didn’t know where we were going, only that we had no choice but to leave.

We ended up driving out to the desert, where we have a modest cabin that’s currently uninhabitable because it’s been stripped to the studs as part of a stalled renovation. No water, no heat, no flooring, nothing at all beyond some stray tools and a refrigerator, which you would think would disqualify it as an evacuation landing spot. But we have three cats and one large dog and there aren’t a lot of places that you can run to in the middle of the night while dragging behind a small zoo, and above all else it was a place where we wouldn’t have to call ahead, where we wouldn’t have to wake someone and say the thing out loud — we’re in danger, we had to leave, we need somewhere to stay.

So the cabin it was, and it was as cramped and dusty and dark and cold as expected and on the first day one of our cats caught a lizard inside and placed it neatly in her food dish as if to say, look, look, we can survive here. It was full-on survivalist camp-out conditions but it was also exactly what we needed: a quiet place of our own, at the end of the world, a reminder that if we lost everything, it would be terrible, but it wouldn’t be the end of all worlds. There would still be this one, barren and dirty and derelict but, like all reno projects, full of potential. And there would be other worlds to come, expansions of this one, maybe, or brand new ones, crafted out of love and persistence. You could make this place beautiful, the poem goes. Maybe this shithole is all that you have left, but still: this place could be beautiful.

Later on I would realize that I hadn’t grabbed pants, which is also the thing I remember most from the immediate aftermath of our house on Dogwood Crescent burning down: the tragedy of not having your own clean clothes. I’d been wearing a nightgown when we escaped that particular fire; the family friends who took us in had boys my age, and they offered up their clothes, which was generous but also terrible because I was six and I had short hair and I didn’t want to look like a boy. I had wanted to just keep wearing my nightgown but my parents made me accept the rust-colored Wrangler corduroys and Snoopy t-shirt and I can remember crying angry tears as I put them on. I knew that it was wrong but I couldn’t make myself be grateful for the charity pants. They were an insult after the injury of the fire, a reminder that we had lost everything and were no longer ourselves, that we were now defined by our loss, by the things that we no longer had. Devastation underscored by ugly Wrangler cords.

You’d think I’d have learned from that experience, but I didn’t; this time, I rushed out the door in ratty sweatpants and a tired (but cherished) Taylor Swift sweatshirt and somehow forgot to grab any clothes other than the three sweaters in the thrift store bag. I mentioned this in a text to a friend the following day, when she messaged to see whether we’d been evacuated and how we were. Yes, I said, and not well. It had been horrible, terrible, and I’d left behind so many things. I saved a bunch of crystals but I left behind a magic mushroom chocolate bar that I was saving and also I forgot to grab a change of pants. You can be grateful to have saved things that were irreplaceable and still be mad at yourself for not being practical, for not thinking about the things that would make you feel normal. The mushroom bar wouldn’t make me feel normal but it was hard to come by and I’d been saving it for just the right moment and now I was living in a world where magic mushroom moments just might not matter anymore, and I didn’t have a change of pants.

But what is normal, really? I wore those ratty sweatpants for almost a week but it’s not like I’d never done that before. When Trump won the second time I wore pajama pants and a Wild Feminist sweatshirt and stayed inside eating cookies for days. When my mom died I put on one of her old sundresses and didn’t take it off until it needed to be washed, and even then I just swapped it out for a different one. I still think about how badly I wanted to just keep wearing my trauma nightgown when I was six. Sometimes wrapping yourself in what’s familiar is the most normal thing that you can do. Sometimes hanging onto what you know is what keeps you sane. Staying sane is how you stay ready to navigate whatever the new normal is when worlds are ending, or whatever you call it when everything changes everywhere all at once.

During the pandemic I taught an online course called Women’s Work, which was basically about witchcraft and capitalism and the ways that women’s modes and practices of sharing wisdom have historically been marginalized and disparaged, and about how reconnecting to those practices can be a means of liberation and survival. I talked a lot in that course about how the word apocalypse from the ancient Greek1 doesn’t actually mean destruction, but rather, revealing — as in, revealing things that have been hidden — and about how women’s wisdom has for so long been associated with cycles of concealing and revealing, descent and reemergence, death and rebirth. Destruction and creation. Eucalyptus is a feminine plant because its very name, so close to the word apocalypse, means to conceal;2 it’s known for being flammable, but also for releasing its heat-protected seeds after fires. It’s part of the myrtle family, which also includes primroses and pomegranates, long associated with Aphrodite. Love is rooted in the dark; love brings rebirth; love always involves revelation.

But revelation is often destructive, and destruction is almost always revealing — when everything starts burning you discover what you really care about. You learn important things: what you will reach to take with you when you start running, what you will promise to return to or to rebuild or to build anew, what seeds you will scatter when the destruction subsides. Those are mostly not material things. Those are things like friendship, family, community, hope. Those are things that we knit together with heart magic and hold onto with heart magic and protect with heart magic. Things that fire can’t burn. Capitalism and patriarchy tell us that those things don’t count if they’re not contained within houses and held together with money and resources, which is just not true, but — but — it’s also not not true, inasmuch as we need things to live and it’s sometimes easier to love your family if you’ve had a bath, and even more so if you have clean slippers and a change of pants. Houses are not just wood and stone and mortgages and lease agreements: they are the spaces of our protection and safety. They contain lifeworlds, the stuff of our lived existence.

Democracy is also a house, a lifeworld. We can wax poetic about how we have all the magic that we need to fight for the spirit of democracy and about how democracy lives in our hearts and that if democracy burns to the ground we can rebuild it but that doesn’t help much when we’re standing in our pajamas in the middle of the fire, when all we want is for the fire to stop, just stop, before everything is lost. It’s not like we keep the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a fireproof safe that we know will survive intact. We can’t just shove them in a bag and run. We can say (as I did in an unhinged text to another friend), homies are where the heart is, but we are not, in fact, all homies here and democracy isn’t family and friendship, it’s a flammable structure and it’s not insured and there’s no guarantee that we can rebuild it if it burns to the ground. And maybe that sounds over-dramatic but you should never apologize for being over-dramatic when there’s a fire on the horizon and you can’t tell which way the wind is blowing.

Anyway. At the end of the world, in an apocalypse real or imagined, you end up with a lot of unanswerable questions. What is home, what is safety, what is peace, what is security, what does it mean to carry both fear and hope on your back, what do you reach for when it feels like everything is about to burn down? What direction is the wind blowing, and do I have a change of pants? If I end up with nothing but some crystals, some cookie recipes, a Taylor Swift sweatshirt, and a community of caring human hearts, will I be okay? Okay might mean something entirely different at the end of the world, but that’s what we prepare for, I guess.

So that’s what we cling to. Whatever happens, we could be okay. And we could make okay beautiful.

I came across it again recently, and it was only then that I noticed the comment that must have moved my mom to keep this report card instead of others. In the section for Language Arts, my fifth grade teacher had remarked on my excellent language skills — par for the course in all of my report cards; I was a bookworm of a kid — and then stated this, on a separate line: Cathy’s imagination is absolutely first rate.

Of course my mother hung onto that. She was always the first and loudest to praise my imagination, but to see it validated in my academic record would have utterly delighted her; I’m surprised that she didn’t have it framed. That the comment might have had a critical edge to it — Cathy is always making up stories — would not have bothered her in the slightest. Of course she is making up stories, my mom would say. That’s what imaginations are for.

The woo-girl in me chooses to believe that my mom wanted me to rediscover that old report card exactly when I did. One of the hardest things about losing her has been realizing that I lost the one person in the world who would always give me top marks, straight A-pluses across the board, especially for the intangible things that report cards ordinarily don’t account for: imagination, curiosity, kindness, spirit. If I ever had a flicker of doubt about how I was doing in life, I knew that my mom would always insist that I was doing her proud in all the ways that mattered; I was her heart, she would tell me. I was smart and ambitious and accomplished, but more importantly, I was kind and curious and full of stories. I could do anything. Anything I would do would make her proud. Losing her meant that I lost that: I lost the secure warmth of her belief in the best parts of me.

But then the report card reappeared, and it did so in a moment when I was asking myself, after a year of wild learning, “how’d I do?” And — obviously — it gave me an answer. Two answers, really: one, I can write my own report cards — be the source of my own pride — now, and two, I have one hell of an imagination. I can summon my own belief in my own damn self, and have it ride in on a unicorn-shaped participation trophy.

So in the spirit of imagination and self-grading, here is my report card for myself, for end-of-term of the year 2024:

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Language Arts: I always got good grades in anything to do with reading or writing, but I haven’t given myself top marks here because I performed well in these areas, but because I re-embraced my love for them and committed to it. I read for pleasure (over 50 books this year, most of them fiction or memoir)1 and I wrote for pleasure. I read and wrote things just for me, completely rejecting almost any impulse to do either of those things for any purpose beyond my own happiness and fulfillment.2 What was kind of amazing was that in doing so, I ended up reading and writing more this past year than I have in a very long time. And I wrote some good stuff. Maybe I will do something with it. A+, Catherine shows great potential in this subject.

Math: Math was never a strong subject for me, at least in grade school and high school; it’s the only subject for which I ever received a failing grade (10th grade math; in my defense this was also a year of pretty robust rebellion, and skipping most classes to go smoke and listen to The Cure probably didn’t help my grade), although that shifted somewhat when I fell in love with stats for a hot minute in college. And it’s not like math plays a particularly big role in my life now, but I’m still giving myself high marks because I turned a financially very lean year into a fine year full of discovery and adventure by mathing my own math in a way that served my real needs and also kept the lights on. Also I paid all my credit card bills in full on time and Experian says that gets you top credit score marks, so. A+, Catherine didn’t work hard and tackled the mathematical theorem that more = more.

Physical Education: I’m not a fitness girlie, but this was the year that I climbed a mountain (twice) and spelunked a cave and walked a whole bunch of miles, AND I napped a lot, which is good for my mental fitness, and those things are worth all the marks. A+, Catherine excels at napping and at sometimes walking in pretty places.

Art: We moved this year and it was brutal but it also took us somewhere beautiful, to a magical forest cabin of a home where I finally started putting up all the paintings and posters and photos that I love (so much wall space!) — a literal expansion of art in my world — but also where I watched more sunsets and listened to more music and invited people in and held story gatherings and all sorts of beautiful things that, I think, made my life more of a work of art. A+, Catherine’s appreciation of beauty improved dramatically this year.

Science: my academic field was political philosophy, but I studied it under the rubric of political science, a discipline for which I had to prove competency as a social scientist. This is something that I’ve always been proud of, and as an adult I’ve always been a little bit of a snob about analytical rigor and such, which made adjusting to the hippie-woo culture of southern California a bit of a rough ride at times. But this past year put my science side in more direct conversation with my emergent woo side than it’s ever been, and I have somehow kept the discourse not just civil, but generative. I am learning richly on both sides. A+, Catherine’s imagination is first rate.

Participation: there’s no capital-T Teacher here to remark on whether or not I was a joy to have in class (I was), but as the assigner of my own grades in 2024 I feel fully justified in giving myself all of the gold stars and a jumbo trophy for leaping into the Course of Life this year and participating with my whole heart, grief and fear and hope and love and all. I sat at the front, I stuck up my hand, I did extra credit, I wiped down the chalkboard, I played well with others. And for the first time in a very, very long time (in memory), I didn’t do any of it for the grades or the gold stars or the pats on the head. I did it for me.

And I’m so, so proud of me.

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2025 is going to be another gold star participation trophy year, I just know it. I can’t wait.

Emilia believed in Santa for a very long time; Jasper may still. We don’t talk about Santa in terms of truth or falsehood, real or fake, and we never have. Santa is a part of a story, and everyone in our family knows that stories don’t fall tidily into binaries of true or false. The Santa story especially. So every year cookies are baked or bought and carrots are procured and both are left out for Mr. Claus and his reindeer. Every year we talk about where Santa might be on his rounds. Every year we listen for hooves on the rooftop. I do, anyway.

I suppose that it goes without saying that I still believe in Santa, as I explain below. I believe in the spirit of Santa — the spirit of generosity and compassion and kindness. I believe that the real gifts dispersed by Santa are opportunities for us to embody and practice that spirit. I believe that Santa is the call, to all of us, to live in the posture of grace. I believe that we all need this.

So, this year, as last year, as next year, I explain why I am a passionate defender of Santa, and always will be, by resharing this story…

Tomorrow it will be Christmas Eve. And on Christmas Eve, my daughter will put out cookies and milk and a handwritten note for the red-suited gentleman who will visit our home and leave presents under our Christmas tree. She will also leave carrots for the reindeer who pull his sleigh, because, as she likes to remind us, there are no reindeer gas stations in Los Angeles.

I wondered, as we approached the holidays, whether this will be the year that she calls our bluff on Santa. But if the volume of her drafts of letters to Santa is anything to go by (we’re up to about six), this is not that year. Next year’s probably not going to be that year, either. I don’t see Emilia letting go of Santa until high school at the earliest. Maybe college. Maybe not even then. Because she loves Santa. A lot. Santa, for Emilia, is the very embodiment of generosity and happiness and joy and she can’t get enough of him. And all of this is fine by me.

I know that not every parent feels this way. This is the time of year when op-eds about telling the “truth” about Santa abound. This is the time of year when adults publicly parse their discomfort with the Santa story and take their stands against children being misled by that story. I just can’t do it, they say. I just can’t shake the feeling that my children need to be able to trust that all their parents ever told them was the truth.

They assert this, of course, because they believe that the story of Santa is not true.

This is a pretty widespread belief. In the real grown-up world, there’s no Santa. There’s no large man in a red suit running an elf sweatshop at the North Pole. There’s no all-knowing gift-giving jolly guy who sees kids when they’re sleeping and knows when they’re awake. There’s no round-the-world overnight gift-delivery system outside of Amazon.

Reindeer, we all agree, don’t really know how to fly.

But does that mean that Santa stories are lies? Of course it doesn’t.

A very long time ago, long before there was a Christmas or a Santa or anything of the sort, the Greek philosopher Plato argued that there is a very important difference between what he called “lies of the soul” and “lies in speech.” A lie of the soul, he said, is a lie that misguides the soul, that misdirects the soul away from truth. It’s a lie that causes the soul to become confused. A lie in speech — a verbal lie — on the other hand, might be as simple as a little white lie, told to avoid hurt, or it might be something more noble. A noble lie communicates truth indirectly. It says something that points in the direction of the truth, that orients us toward some greater or deeper understanding of something. It gets at what we might call “the right idea.”

Stories are often “noble lies.” They’re not true in the factual sense, but, when they’re good, they tell the truth better than any recitation of facts. This is the basis of origin stories; this is the basis of folklore and myth. This is why Aesop told fables. This is why so many people love Star Wars and Marvel movies and fairy tales — not because we believe that there are, actually, battles taking place in a galaxy far, far away, or snow queens in ice castles singing songs about letting it all go, but because the underlying stories tell us something true-ish about light and darkness and love and family and the fact that we all have really important powers.

So it is for the story of Santa. The story of Santa teaches something about generosity and compassion and goodness and the idea that all children deserve love. It teaches that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to give gifts without the expectation of reciprocation; it teaches that we should give because giving is its own reward. It teaches that the most meaningful kind of giving is the kind that quietly drops a little happiness into the figurative stockings of others and then slips away, red-cheeked and joyful for having shared such happiness.

I have never tried to convince my daughter that the Santa in the mall is the real Santa.1 I will never insist to her that there is, in fact, a real man in a red suit living at North Pole with a posse of elves. I will never try to make her believe. I will, however, tell her stories about Santa (of all varieties), and I will tell these in my most assured voice, with my most sparkling eye, with my most animated gestures. And if she asks me whether Santa is real … well, I suppose that I’ll be honest with her. I’ll say that real can mean many things; I’ll say that sometimes it’s enough to believe in something with all your heart to make that thing real in many of the ways that count. I’ll say that while there is no current evidence of a toy workshop at the precise location of the North Pole, that doesn’t mean that the spirit of Santa isn’t, in its own way, real.2

Because it is real. It is. I believe that.

Then I will put out the cookies and the carrots and tell her that it’s important to believe in things we cannot see, like love and generosity and gratitude and Santa, who is really about all those things, and more.

And I’ll do it again next year, and the year after that, and for – I hope – many, many years to come.

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And I hope you will too.

Happy Christmas.

Riding with the wind.”

— Little Wing, Jimi Hendrix

From the very first days of my daughter’s life, I knew that she would break my heart. Not for all of the reasons that parents usually fear — although there were those, too — but simply because I knew, from the earliest, that she’d be running ahead of me and ultimately away from me as fast as she could go. She was born with her eyes wide open, leaning out into the world like a baby bird on the edge of a nest. There was no period of nestling and nesting for her — she wanted to launch herself into the sky from the moment she felt air.

She turned 19 years old today, which is absolutely bonkers, not just because time flies but because she was born with a mental age of about 30 and a spiritual age of infinity and every year since has been a reckoning with the time-space continuum that started her off physically as a human infant. She is, of course, already flung well far from the nest, having headed off to college before she was even 18 in order to get started on the adventures that already felt too long delayed. That her departure to college coincided with the season of my mother’s passing made it a complicated period of grief: I was wildly proud of her, my beautiful bold daughter, and also deeply sad to be saying goodbye in a moment when the circle of life was too much with me. I am still grieving, in some ways, although it seems to me that I’ve been grieving since she was born, knowing as completely as I did that she was born to leave me, and that the process of her leaving would unfold over years and years and years, a lifetime of saying goodbye.

One her fifth birthday, I wrote her a letter:

Dear Emilia,

Today, you are five.

This is both totally extraordinary, and utterly ordinary. Which of these it is varies from minute to minute for me: in one moment, I look at you and I think, when did you become such a big girl? Where did that little baby go? Where has the time gone? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT YOU ARE FIVE? In another, I look at you and I think, wasn’t it ever thus? Have you not always been this little girl, this little big girl, this here-and-now person who is so completely and utterly you that any other yous, all the previous yous, are almost unimaginable?

That you are five and that you are you and that you become ever more you – ever more consistently you and ever more differently you – with every passing day is, for me, a joy for which there are no words. But it is also a sadness, an ongoing grief – a quiet grief, the kind that just hums, quietly, in the darker corners of my soul – and for that, too, I have no words. How do I describe the feeling of celebrating you and mourning you, all at once? How do I describe the joy that I feel in your presence, that also thrums with a nagging sensation of loss? The complicated happiness that is loving the incomparable you that you are now while also aching to discover the incomparable you that you will be tomorrow along with missing the incomparable you that you were yesterday, last month, last year? The sweet sadness that comes with yearning to find out who you will become while clinging to the you that you were?

You are, of course, always you. There is an essential, ineffable you, an unchanging Emilia who is the anchor-form of the baby, the toddler, the kindergartener, the girl, the essential being who is the Emilia that sings her Emilia-ness, always, the being who I know is constant, or as constant as anything mortal can be. But there is also the mercurial you, the Emilia who is always changing and growing, the Emilia who, a few weeks ago, would only eat sandwiches with butter and jam, but who now will only eat them with cheese, and then only if “the bread is warm but the cheese isn’t melted and MOMMY I SAID NO CRUSTS.” The Emilia who, last year, was going to be a drummer and a race car driver when she got bigger (“next year I think, Mommy, after I learn to tie my shoelaces”) but who now is going to be a snowboarder and rock star (“here is my secret, Mommy: when I hear a song that I like, I copy it in my head so that when I am rock star and have my guitar I can remember them and play them properly”) (on that playlist: Lady Gaga, Leonard Cohen, Journey and Hannah Montana) and who knows how to tie her shoelaces but does not yet know how to drive. The Emilia who will someday know how to drive. The Emilia who will someday, who must, someday, drive away from me.

Drive, or walk, or bicycle, or pilot a helicopter (probably pilot a helicopter), who knows. The point is that I do not yet know anything about that Emilia, except that she will leave me. That you will leave me. Ah, my heart.

This is the cliche of mothers, of course: that they clutch and cling and try to keep their babies babies. I don’t want to keep you as a baby. You will always be my baby, but that will be true whether you are four or five or fourteen or fifteen or fifty. And I’m dying to know what you will be like, who you will be, at fourteen and fifteen and fifty, to say nothing of tomorrow and the next day and the next. I adore who you are now, and it seems impossible that I could love you any more than I do at right this very moment, but I also know from experience that my love for you becomes, with every passing moment, ever more full, more complex, more replete with color and texture and depth and movement, as you become every more fully you, ever more complexly you, ever more replete with your you-ness. The cliche, then, is limited, misleading. I do not want to freeze you in time, lock you in the tower, keep you bound to my side.

But then again, there is still a tiny part of me – maybe a not so tiny part of me – that does want to keep you with me, that does want to hold onto the you that you are in any and every given moment, that does mourn the ongoing loss of these yous, that does struggle, in some moments, with the urge to pray to every god in the heavens to freeze time here, right here, and keep us here for eternity.

And then off you run, clutching your cheese sandwich and your guitar and your backpack full of dreams and schemes and bubblegum, and I think, go, go YOU. Walk the clouds, ride the wind, baby, fly on.

Fly on.

Happy birthday, baby girl.

Love,

Mommy

There have been 14 years of goodbyes since I wrote that letter; there are countless years of goodbyes still to come. But those goodbyes are ever and always what they’ve been from the first moment that she arrived on this earth to tell me that she had so many places to go — an expression of my fierce pride in her powers of flight and my deep faith in the strength of her wings.

Happy 19th birthday, Budge. Keep flying on.