Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s wintertime home and school, is situated in the rugged desert landscape near Scottsdale and set against a backdrop of the McDowell Mountains. Having lived most of my life near Wright’s renowned Fallingwater house, I heard about it a lot over the years and was always a little turned off. It felt gimmicky. “I’m gonna build a house on a waterfall!” OK, who cares. Only recently did I watch some videos of Wright’s buildings in the desert southwest, and that was when his brilliance and vision clicked for me—maybe because I, too, have been so inspired by the otherworldly landscape of the desert (I also had no idea how long ago he was designing these homes). That began my deep appreciation and reverence for his site-specific, “organic architecture”—in all regions. I became so enamored with his work, I visited some of his houses in the Ohiopyle region, spent the night in one, and wrote a whole story about it. But his work in the desert southwest remains my favorite.

EXTERIOR

THE TEXTURES

INTERIOR

Big thank you to for taking me to this place! I was so full of wonder and inspiration and so grateful to get to see it in person (after watching videos and buying the literal book about it while visiting Wright’s houses in Ohiopyle).

You can see the full Daytripper flip book here.

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I finally exited the highway toward Eufaula Lake, drove down a small state road and looked to be going to the middle of nowhere (closed gas stations, vape shops, weedy lots), when the maps app suddenly announced, “You’ve arrived!” The only landmark in sight at that moment was a fenced-in, abandoned house on my right. I pulled into the next road to turn around—only to notice an old, faded sign with the name of my campground. The road didn’t quite look right though—very long, quiet, grass growing in the cracks of pavement. I tried another route and eventually spotted an entrance booth. The woman behind the window had been expecting my arrival, then proceeded to tell me about how her kids had convinced her to try waxing for the first time and it was itching her and making her kind of squirm around—and they also got her to try microbladed eyebrows, she went on, because she could never draw hers on evenly, and I think she would have just kept talking had I not tried to gracefully exit the conversation by slowly rolling away. My site had a gorgeous view of the lake, but I was too hot to make dinner, so I just ate more trail mix. It was too hot to do anything, really, even journal, even just sit there. The campground was full of big RVs running their generators, and very few people were outside. The bathhouse looked like it had been used by no one but me. I couldn’t spot a tent anywhere. But the sunset was glaring, demanding attention. I kept leaving my van to take photos: sinking sun, gentle waters, silhouettes of trees, an occasional bird coasting across the horizon. I took refuge in the natural world as the sunset seemed to stretch on for hours that night. I got lost in it the same way I get lost in the skies over Pittsburgh, New Mexico, everywhere. The next morning, as I was arranging the van to head out for Texas, a camper stopped by, curious about the van. He had an RV and was thinking about switching. I showed him the fan I’d used all night to keep cool. “Just make sure you have some kind of ventilation system,” I told him. “This did not work.” He was probably in his 60s and told me he’d lived here all his life and used to live at the base of the mountain across the lake. “We’d ride horses on the mountain, and you could see everything,” he said. “Everything’s changed.”

I survived the heat (just barely) and have continued to take photos of the sky wherever I go.

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Where does this story begin? Seven years ago when I was homeless and living on the road? Or was it when I eventually decided to stay in New Mexico that year? Maybe this story begins three years ago, when I left the desert, or five days ago when I left Maryland to finally go back to the desert after four previous attempts had failed. Is there ever really a concrete beginning or only small clues along the way, experiences that can be pieced together in retrospect to see the full constellation of a thing?

The trip—and I was thinking of it as such—started slowly and unremarkable, as most cross-country trips do. It was raining that morning, a Wednesday, when I drove into the office. I worked until lunchtime, then headed to Best Buy to pick up a phone mount for my van. I ran into a guy I know through the local art scene who was looking for a phone charger, so we talked briefly—about his upcoming art show and my upcoming trip—and when we ended up checking out at the same time and walking out together, I figured, “Do you wanna see the van?”

I showed him my modest desk and sleep space, the battery pack, the toilet. “I hope I can figure out this phone mount because I’m gonna be using the map app nonstop.”

“O wait—you mean, like, you’re leaving right now for the desert?”

“Yeh, right from this parking lot.”

We hugged and I plopped the phone mount in a cupholder to deal with later, then slowly exited Frederick, one stoplight at a time, and headed toward the interstate, toward my long-awaited desert reunion and the storage unit holding my tangible life, while drizzling rain in Maryland gave way to scattered thunderstorms down I-81 south.

This trip had been postponed four times, as life repeatedly intervened—my dad died, I fell in love, an apartment buyout that dragged out longer than expected, then pneumonia. Every time I made a plan, the trip was overtaken by enormous life events.

That first day, I headed for a campground in the hills of Virginia and arrived in a storm, but the rain pounding on my van was peaceful, creating a little cocoon where I could organize my workspace and bedding for the night and settle in. When the rain let up a couple hours later, I ventured outside to find the bathhouse and cook some soup on my campstove, which I hadn’t fired up in years. I slept good and woke to the sound of crows talking to each other (or maybe me) and swam in a lake before getting back on the road.

The next night was pleasant as well, as if my story wasn’t picking up much pace but leisurely making its way across the country. Day two brought my first animal medicine: a turtle looking to cross a very busy interstate in Tennessee. The last time I saw a turtle (honestly) was 2023, when I’d put everything in storage and had gone fully nomadic again. I dreamt of an albino sea turtle then, and turtle imagery and literal turtles seemed to be cropping up everywhere, homes on their backs.

I stopped at a diner mid-afternoon and felt like I was farther south, overhearing a woman in a thick Southern accent talking to the waitress about dyeing her hair: “Nothing wrong with a little chemical help, my mamma always said.” I stayed with a friend of a friend that night, also named Lauren, who I’d gotten to know in an online artist group. A tacos and talking kind of night, a back porch kind of morning.

So far, smooth.

Then I watched the temperature climb past 100 in Arkansas, eventually hitting its peak at 103—and this was not dry heat. The heat took hold and didn’t release its grip for days.

And I was not expecting it. I’d driven this route in summer and had never hit heat like this.

The sun shines down into my van cabin and hits everything. You can’t hide from it. You can’t shield electronics from it. I couldn’t even charge my phone because it was overheating. un beams in through both windows and the huge windshield that gives me those panoramic views I love, hitting my arms, legs and chest, the big black dash and black leather seats. Despite running the AC nonstop, I was sweating and getting a little nervous about camping in Oklahoma that night, where the high was supposed to be 99 and the low in the 70s wouldn’t hit till sunrise.

I’d survive, I figured.

I finally exited the highway toward Eufaula Lake, drove down a small state road and looked to be going to the middle of nowhere. I eventually found the campground and my campsite overlooking the lake. I walked to the bathhouse, peed, and headed back for my campsite, wondering how there could even be any pee in me as I’d been sweating all day in the van and now profusely since getting to the campground and setting up.

I was too hot to make dinner, so I just ate some more trail mix—a huge bag I’d made before leaving Maryland that was slowly shrinking. I tried to journal. Hands and pages too sticky. I couldn’t imagine how I would survive once I closed the van doors. I have no ventilation system in the van, and the van, as I quickly learned, absorbs a lot of highway heat and is very slow to release it.

I took refuge in the natural world and shot photos of sunset over the lake. After dark, I hung my head out the van door for a while, as there was an ever-so-slight breeze, but then I thought, what if a raccoon or something jumps in on my face? So I shut the door and tried to lie perfectly still, because every movement would cause more sweating. I pointed a small fan at me, checked my phone and the “Severe Weather Alert: Possible threat to life or property. Heat index values up to 109 expected.” Put the phone down, then picked it up again, somewhat desperately, asking AI what the odds were that I could die in my van in the night. (From what you described, this does not sound like an emergency right now …)

I continued to lie still, hour after hour, unable to fall asleep, still sweating, then drinking more water and electrolytes—which made me have to get up and pee—which made me sweat more. Eventually: sleep. I woke only once around 4:30 a.m. to pull a light sheet over me and drift back until sunrise.

The next morning, I opened the van door and saw a jogger listening to honky-tonk harmonica. I opened my phone to see an email from my next campground in Texas: “BURN BAN is currently in effect … Heat Advisory in effect.”

I was camping in a big metal box in the middle of a heatwave.

Back on the highway, the temperature started climbing again, and then jumped in leaps and bounds—111 by the time I crossed into Texas. The van started heating up again as soon as the sun was high in the sky, and again everything—including me—was overheating.

I stopped at Cross Ministries, where a huge cross visible from I-40 towers over bronze sculptures of the Stations of the Cross. I wandered into a gift shop, always thinking about souvenirs and Christmas gifts while traveling, and the woman working immediately said, “There are no restrooms—don’t even ask” (I hadn’t asked, but I could see she was distraught, sitting in front of a fan and looking defeated).

She told me everyone had left today—all the employees, even the plumber, so when there was an issue, she simply had to close the bathroom. Everyone had fled town because of the heat.

I told her that I was just making a quick stop to see the cross and had to jump back on the road to get to a campground before the gates closed at 5:30.

She seemed a little taken aback. “Where are you camping?”

“Palo Duro Canyon, just south of Amarillo.”

“It’s gonna be hotter in the canyon,” she warned me, with a look that told me she knew exactly what she was talking about.

“Really? I thought it would be cooler.”

She shook her head.

Back on the interstate, I started to smell the sagebrush coming into my van, even with the windows closed (although the wind was so loud, I wondered if I’d left a van door open). As I exited and began taking smaller roads toward the state park, the temperature was at 109 and I began to worry.

“Extreme fire danger, no campfires,” was really all the ranger at the entrance booth told me as she handed me a map and waved me through. I’d chosen the campsite farthest down the park road when I’d looked at photos online a week prior and it looked like the one with the best views.

My van crept down a winding switchback road until it reached the canyon floor—and then kept going, past red-rock cliffs and cactus and hoodoos until I finally got to Mesquite Campground and my site, eight miles from the park entrance. I had no cell service and no shade.

I stepped out of the van onto desert—finally desert—and did a double take at my feet. They were swollen, the right one extremely so. My sandal had left an indentation, and my ankle had disappeared. An elephant’s foot. It was so alarming, I sat in the back of the van and took photos from every angle, though no one would want to see that (except maybe my doctor) and I couldn’t send them to anyone anyway. My mind flashed back to my dad lying in bed years ago when we lived in Hagerstown, both feet and ankles swollen. It was related to the heart and kidneys, he’d told me. Were his feet elevated or his head? I wish I could remember.

While my mind ran through possibilities (is this heart failure? is this just from two days of extreme heat and sweating?), I tried to rig up the van to diffuse heat. There was about three feet of shade from a juniper tree that I backed my van toward, as close as I could get before hitting a boulder. I velcroed my blackout curtain across my driver’s side window where more sun was coming in, opened the sliding doors and back doors, and sat there, sweating, drinking more water and electrolytes. It was so hot, I didn’t even have an appetite.

That’s when it sank in that I was eight miles into a canyon with extreme fire danger, a swollen foot, no cell service to look up what might be medically wrong with me, and no way to cool my van. With no one to talk to, not even AI, my mind started running wild, and I fought it. Had I seen the steep, winding road leading to the campsite or my swollen feet before getting there, I would’ve gotten a motel.

Instead, I took a cold shower, stood under the water, washed my hair with soap, stayed there until I felt cold.

When it was still extremely hot at dusk, I quickly pitched my tent, if a bit haphazardly. I suddenly realized I had a bunch of things to do before it got dark, because if I was going to leave doors and windows open in my van, I couldn’t be throwing on all the lights and attracting bugs. I also tried to put up a screen across the van’s sliding door, clipping it to the walls and tying it around bungee cords as best I could.

But the smallest bit of physical exertion also meant I was pouring sweat again. And when I finally lay down: do I elevate my head or my feet? Because neither the van nor tent was level.

As the sky grew dark, I heard my first yipping of coyotes, somewhere down in the canyon, and smiled. I sat inside my dark van, still sweating, trying different positions, trying the five-inch fan again and a dampened towel around my neck. I kept the front windows cracked but closed the doors, trying to drift to sleep. I was so tired. Then I started hearing something against the sliding door—an animal? No. It was my tent. The winds had picked up. I hadn’t staked the tent down, and now it was butting against the van door beside my head. I dug out some rope in the dark and quickly tied the tent to the van side mirror so at least it wouldn’t blow away down the canyon in the night.

An hour or so later, I decided to move myself and everything essential into the tent where it must be cooler. No moon, no interior lights, just a red headlamp in my hand out of necessity. But once in the tent—on a tilted, rocky ground—the winds were so strong, the loud, billowing tent smacked me in the face, then came in and hit me from the back, every couple minutes or so another whoosh of tent fabric.

So I gathered my bit of stuff in the dark again—sheet, pillow, phone, keys, headlamp, water—and moved back into the van. I lay there for more hours, more sweat, more anxieties about my swollen feet.

But sometime around 1 a.m., maybe from sheer exhaustion, I just let go. The heat simply never broke; I did. I don’t know how else to describe it. Everything was so far out of my control, I had to allow myself to break open to receive it, whatever it was.

I remembered the etymology of the word crisis, which I’d just discovered a few weeks ago: from the Greek krisis: a turning point; a decisive moment when change must come, for better or worse. Originally, the change in an illness that indicated recovery or death. Literally: judgment, decision, choice.

I had been looking at this as a trip back to my beloved desert after years away. But the road did not agree to be recreational just because I framed it that way. I may have a home to return to now, but apparently that does not make me immune to road medicine.

I opened the back van door that had been closed for hours and leaned out to look up at the night sky, and then I stepped out into it.

I let myself be enveloped by the movement of that warm air. I took photos of the sky, mesmerized. I could see the Milky Way, saw a shooting star, and heard coyotes somewhere in the black night. I relaxed, somehow, into this perfect moment. Nothing had changed. It was still hot, my feet were still swollen, and I still didn’t know whether I would sleep. But I had stopped fighting it all.

It was 90 degrees when I drove out of that canyon at 9 a.m. As I approached the New Mexico border that afternoon, I started to see those small sunflowers along the highway, which I’d completely forgotten about, and then whole fields of sage.

When I saw the yellow WELCOME TO NEW MEXICO banner above the highway and my van drove through as if crossing a finish line, I immediately started sobbing and had to take the next exit.

I walked inside the New Mexico Welcome Center to use the restroom and was still crying while peeing, washing my hands, using the blow dryer, and wandering into the big lobby to see if they might have a New Mexico road map, when a woman behind the counter greeted me.

“Hi, would you like a New Mexico recreation guide?”

“I was actually hoping for a state road map.”

“Here you are,” she said, handing one to me. With pen in hand and hovering over a large notebook, she then asked, “What state do you live in?”

I had to pause to figure out the correct answer, run through a mental list: Pennsylvania apartment, Maryland license and plates, New Mexico still feels like home—I don’t know the answer.

“I used to live here but haven’t been back in three years,” I said. “I’m just a little emotional.”

“Well, welcome to New Mexico,” she said. “Or welcome back.”

I clutched the road map as I went back outside to my van, the New Mexico flag waving in the wind high above me.

The road out here was grueling, but I am good and safe and in AC atm… more road stories to come, although hopefully not this dramatic!

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It’s not homesick, not wanderlust, not even saudade.

The Spanish word querencia may be closer—not quite “missing a place,” but a deep, almost instinctive pull toward a place you feel you belong and continually need to return to. Querencia can mean both the tendency to return to a beloved place and the place itself.

The Galician morriña describes a longing for one’s land, usually a homeland, but I would like to think it applies to a chosen home as well.

Morriña for my querencia?

I call it desert longing.

•••

On the acupuncture table once, I had a vision. It happens a lot when I get acupuncture. I wanted clarity on whether to stay in New Mexico or live back East again—how to rectify these two places, make sense of it, decide.

The vision showed me I was not of two minds but of two hearts.

I saw my East Coast heart with hundreds of strings attaching it to people, homes, jobs, the past—all the messy complications of life. My emotional heart, the one that has formed connections over 40-odd years. The strings tie it to this place, this heart that loves particular people, has history, belongs to a family and community, and knows the deep human intimacy of being connected to people and place across decades. It is the heart that yearns for connections but drowns in overwhelm because of them. This heart transforms through grief and vulnerability, often stumbles its way through, but also sings karaoke with my niece on Christmas.

My heart in the desert is the one I came in with. It’s been in me since I was born. It is free and unspoiled. Connected to God and the natural world because there are very few human connection options. Without the static, and with an archetypal high desert sun shining down, this heart feels certain, wild. It lives in a place quiet enough to hear its own song. My body thrives there too.

Each place activates a different heart, each one calls like a siren song.

So I’ve created a third life: my homebase refuge in Pittsburgh, frequent Maryland visits for work and to be with the people I love, and the desert fills out the landscapes of my daydreams until I can venture out to see it in person again. Can a life arranged this way satisfy all of these hearts?

•••

I’m leaving the East Coast for the desert this week. It feels surreal and also completely commonplace; I’ll just drive there, one hour at a time.

I’m going for my soul but also to retrieve my tangible life. Items that would not fit in my hatchback in 2023 were packed into a storage unit before getting back on the road (and ultimately landing back East and deciding to stay for three years). When I retrieve my belongings, am I bringing my old life home or removing the final scrap of evidence of a life that exists in New Mexico?

So much time has elapsed since desert life, and I’ve never entered New Mexico in this context (because we never step into the same river twice). I’m returning this time not to a state I’d passed through once in my twenties or the place visited in my thirties but a spiritual home where I spent four transformative years entering my forties.

I lived alone out there during the pandemic and found that my closest companion and confidant became the land itself. My muse, my sanity, my education. My connection to God, my connection to myself. Nothing rivaled it. We were all in those times together but each living out such individualized stories.

I’ve never gone back to New Mexico in this way. I don’t know how it will greet me. Reunions are always a surprise.

Will the chamisa and crows remember me? Will I remember all the turns to take onto back roads into forests and wildlands I used to drive? Will it feel like home or a former home?

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hey, lovely people … welcome to this month’s audio postcard—a collage of thoughts, questions, and insights recorded in the moment as voice notes to you, wherever you are

CONTENTS:

Couch discovery + more thoughts on home

The atmosphere a projector creates

Change = good (transformation revisited)

Read more

The recycling trucks are making their rounds through my dreams, rustling me awake and interrupting this placid lake until all memory of it is gone and I can’t get back in. So I slip out while he is still snoring, pass a lady walking a tiny dog and a jogger who’s out of breath but still says “morning” as she passes. I can’t imagine running for sport, much less this early. I drive past my good friend in the rehab center next to my office—twice a day, I drive past this place and have only stopped once, when I first got back to town. She told me she hadn’t been outside in a month after I’d said something about the lovely weather in passing, and the next minute I was convincing her to get outside, figuring out the process to do so, trying to attach legs to her wheelchair and wheeling her out to freedom—which I imagine felt something like an inmate’s first car ride after release. Her husband walked behind us as I wheeled her to the community garden. We stopped for photos along the way, posing and smiling in the sunlight, as if everything were perfectly normal, as if nothing had changed since he shot photos of us at the beach every year as part of our annual tradition there. She is my soul mom, after all. Soul family, the ones we choose. And here I am too busy to stop because, why? I have to get to work and run errands and hit deadlines? I introduced her to David, who runs the gardens, and we took more photos—including David in some (I’m surprised we didn’t include the fireman who had walked over to talk to us, too). But again today, I drive past and she is only thought, and my mind quickly shifts to the van and its upkeep and cleaning and prepping it for the next adventure—which means confronting not only the new hornet nest but my love/hate relationship with the van, how it’s an artifact of a past life but also my bridge back to it. I have chosen to stay, to build something in a place and of a place, but my time on the road held a certain stillness I’ve never found while standing still. Later I’m walking through town (our usual after-dinner stroll) and pass by a hip-hop show, wave to friends across the way, then run into an old friend who is about to perform on another stage. He tells us about his double pneumonia from the Delta variant of Covid, how “ever since, I’ve just been living like an old man.” He can’t even be 40 yet. We walk away thinking we have been moving slower since Covid too.

★ What object in your life is both an artifact of a past life and a bridge back to it?

★ Who or what have you driven past without stopping, all the while wanting to?

★ Who is your soul mother, or soul father, or soul sibling—the family you chose? How did you know?

★ Recall a moment you helped someone taste freedom after confinement—or someone did this for you. What did it feel like?

★ What annual tradition have you kept even after everything around it changed?

★ Have you ever found stillness in motion? Where does your mind go quiet: moving or staying?

★ What have you chosen to stay for—and what did the choosing cost?

★ Finish this sentence and keep going: “Ever since, I’ve been living like ...”

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The long bridge stretches out before us for what looks like forever—a tiny stretch of another shore out there somewhere—and I drive the van because there is nowhere else to go but upward and shooting out over the water, even when I’m suddenly feeling faint like I am about to have a panic attack or pass out or both, my whole body shaking, legs jerking, hands—“just hold my hand,” I tell him, and he squeezes it for what seems like miles over Oregon Inlet—until we hit dry land again and I pull over immediately, get out, dig food out of the cooler, can’t find a fork but will eat with my hands if I have to. I shovel pasta salad into my mouth with a spoon, waiting for the shakes to subside. And finally, they do, and my whole body calms.

We are only about 45 minutes from our destination but nine hours into a drive that started this morning, and my body clearly needed something other than protein bars, potato chips and caffeine.

With only an hour or so of daylight left once we reach the campground, we head for the beach—because we are here; I finally made it. The water is too choppy to swim, but “Thank you, mother” and “I missed you” said out loud as I wade in her waters and hold my hands down to feel the breaking waves and crouch down to feel it over my whole body, mother ocean. I haven’t seen her in years—years since I floated on my back and rolled with the waves, letting her take me. Years since I watched that calming lull of water washing up onto sand, painting those big, foamy U designs on the shore, crisscrossing in lazy patterns.

Our usual after-dinner walk becomes a very different experience: to the sound of waves, leaving a trail of footprints. The beach narrows at one point during high tide, and the surf has formed a wall and there is no dry beach left, just dunes rising between us and ocean. He doesn’t want to get his feet wet, so we walk as close to the wall as we can. “This reminds me of one of the dreams where you’re between the surf and the ocean and then the tidal wave comes and there’s nowhere to go,” I say with a laugh, knowing he’ll know what I mean. He has no idea what I mean. He rarely dreams of water, he says, which surprises me. I don’t know which of us is the odd one, but water is a recurring motif in nearly all my dreams—swimming in it, being pounded by it, fearing it, looking for it, following it. I thought water was archetypal—for everyone.

I wake the next day in our tiny cottage swollen and stuffed up with a slight headache like a migraine is forming, the way dark clouds are forming on the other horizon opposite the beaches, and we know we only have so much time.

It has been storming off and on since we got here, whole roads flooded, trucks showing off in puddles, rip current warnings and high winds but then patches of sun and calmer waters, pockets of time when we head to the beach, and I can walk through the shallow, clear waters that bring tiny fish swimming up toward the shore and then back out to the ocean, in motion with each wave.

I eat fried food and cheeseburgers and fall asleep to the sound of thunderstorms and sleep perfectly in some blend of mold-illness gluten haze, but somehow it doesn’t matter here, or I don’t let it. Even the tap water that tastes like sulphur and the cabin mattress whose springs dig into me each night and leave me with a backache—nothing bothers me here. I just head back to the ocean.

This was the first time in months—since March, I think—when I’d had the luxury of choosing what to do, when it wasn’t part of a long line of “now do this,” “now do this,” “now do this,” and trying to keep up.

I could paint my nails. I could read. I could do nothing.

My life had become a series of deadlines packed so airtight, the completion of one only meant I could move on to the next. My whole life had become a deadline. Even the things I wanted to do felt like deadlines. If it was doable, even remotely possible, it would be penciled in.

When the calendar turned to July and I was still busying myself with projects and visits and trips and new endeavors, to the point of complete overwhelm, I started to wonder, worry even: when will my summer begin? I hadn’t even gone swimming yet.

I had a moment of clarity on the Fourth of July while up in Pittsburgh. I’d planned to be back in Frederick for the holiday, but I was so close to finishing the final final edit of a book, I couldn’t seem to break the momentum. I heard kids in a yard down below me in an above-ground pool, a woman floating in an inner tube, laughing, being loud. I put on noise-canceling headphones and continued to work, perfectly aware that I should maybe ease up the reins a little, that maybe movement had become compulsive. But I was so close to the finish line.

It reminded me of another Fourth of July, nearly 20 years ago, when I was on day one of a kidney cleanse where you eat nothing but watermelon for two days, and I was feeling quite faint while smelling neighbors’ cookouts wafting through my yard in Mountaindale. Have I always been like this?

Still in the midst of book edits, as if transfixed by the light of the laptop and only stopping when I needed food or sleep, I heard fireworks going off. I looked at the time—after 9 already—and headed for the roof to see if I could spot some displays. Instead it was a whole rooftop party up there, wine and margarita, chairs set out, “Oh, I wanted to introduce you to someone!” kind of thing. Deborah motioned someone to come over and meet me—a young woman, a new resident. When I tried to make a break for the door after some time, they both spotted my exit attempt and stopped me—“Are you leaving already?!” “It’s just that I am at the very end of the final final final edit of a book I’ve been working on for, like, 20 years,” I explained, but they had a lot of follow-up questions and wanted to order copies and we were suddenly planning a movie night to watch “Wild” together.

After I left the party—successfully—and retreated to my apartment, I realized summer is short, it is here, and if I don’t let it in, I’ll miss it. I probably should have drank some red wine when offered a glass. Take the holiday. Don’t be so clear-headed and logical and logistical all the time. After the edit, I would abandon all other projects, temporarily anyway—put everything down, wipe the calendar, take on nothing more, let my nervous system catch up. I had been talking to AIs too much and ping-ponging every 10 days from one city to another to hit doctor’s appointments and vehicle registrations and events and generally pushing myself too hard.

I still had one jam-packed week to get through before driving to the ocean campground I’d booked, but there was an end in sight now, a destination. First: complete 72 Hours on Monday and then drive from Pittsburgh to Frederick—but not without exiting spontaneously to a wilderness area that would not have a restroom or gas station but a creek and flowers I could pick for a car bouquet. I drove down a gravel road, muddy in parts from the storms that had just rolled through, and came upon a swimming hole with no one around. Without hesitation, as if God was saying, “We are giving you the opportunity to start your summer now,” I changed into swim bottoms in the front seat of my car and walked over to the water, got in wearing bra and tank top, and swam around, floated on my back, cool mountain water: this is summer. Summer is a verb. I arrived in Frederick wearing the clothes I’d just swam in, walked downtown blocks hoping passing cars and people would realize it was a bathing suit and not underwear but also not caring.

Next: complete two weeks of work in one so you can take time off, get to the overdue doctor’s appointments, host a party for freelance writers at the Blue Elephant on Friday—and pack the van with drinks bought on a Costco run, but also pack it for the beach. Pick up three 20-pound bags of ice and lug them across the gas station parking lot without them breaking and then across Fifth Street to load into the massive cooler you’re borrowing from The News-Post, order pizzas as people are starting to arrive, lean on your sister—“Can you pick up the pizzas and drop them off?”—and catch her showing up with her blinkers on and two kids in tow, one of whom wants to come to the party.

So they did, a stroller and a princess dress among writers and artists talking and connecting over Frederick’s art scene and the fate of the building we were standing in and the brilliance of the recent SilverVox Film + Music Festival and asides and nods and detours outside and laughing. This is summer—people coming together, iced drinks, sweat, spontaneity.

The party was supposed to run 5 to 9, but sometime around 8, I said, “Are you guys done? Like, maybe we should pack up. It’s a million degrees in here” (it was)—leaving just enough time for me to clean up, drop the cooler back at the office, decompress, and get enough sleep for an eight-hour drive the next day to the Outer Banks.

I didn’t mind when it rained all day at the beach and I was in a cabin with no bathroom and the weather alerts were showing dangerous rip currents. Summer had finally begun, and at the beginning, summer always feels endless—like it will go on forever. The ocean was just a bonus.

On the rainiest day of our stay, we swam in the campground pool and watched movies, and I made a run for my van mid-afternoon to look for my mold binder because I badly needed to detox from the humid, damp weather. There in the bottom van drawer were two canisters of cholestyramine powder, and behind them, I noticed the box containing my stepdad’s ashes. My mom had given them to me just before I got sick in the spring, which turned into pneumonia, which postponed my drive out to the desert. He wanted his ashes scattered there in Northern New Mexico. In the haze of illness followed by the nonstop motion of spring unfolding into summer, I’d forgotten I had them. But there I was in his other beloved place: Hatteras. A place he returned to year after year. Immediately I understood the trip was not just for me but for him. I asked my mom for her blessing, and she gave a resounding yes—scatter his ashes at the ocean.

The rains were gone the next day, so we headed back for the beach, me now carrying half of Z’s ashes in my basket among such ordinary things as bottled water and sunscreen. When the sun came out, I walked a good way past people, till there were only seabirds in the surf.

“Where do you want to be?” I mused to myself or maybe to him. “Everywhere,” I heard.

I brought a child’s plastic bucket to collect shells and also to carry the ashes in a small container. I cried a bit, thinking of all the times he was here in body and soul at Hatteras, and now he is only this. And, without much ceremony, I took the container, stood in the ocean, said my small goodbye, and poured the ashes out into the wind, into the waves. I don’t know if I expected something else to happen—nothing did, at least nothing out of the ordinary, but as I started to walk back toward the people, a huge bird swooped overhead and I was looking up at its underside, soaring and hovering in the sky above me.

This essay was originally published in 72 Hours / The Frederick News-Post.

I hope you are making space for summer.

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welcome to this month’s audio postcard—a collage of thoughts on etymology, art imitating life, when a typo is more than a typo, the freedom of having no map, and inevitable endings

CONTENTS:

Etymology

A book I’ll be thinking about for the rest of my life

Art imitating life

When a typo is more than a typo

The second puberty and the freedom of having no map

Inevitable endings

Read more

I keep having dreams where someone else is driving my car. Last night in a dream, Linda is driving me to Scottsdale in my car (not sure why) and she’s doing the entire drive all at once—30 hours or something crazy like that—and I’m in the backseat gazing out the window when I start to notice the mountains covered in saguaro cactuses. I’d wanted to be here in my van, and I start to list in my mind all the things that I don’t have on-hand—my wildcrafting gear, my campstove, road food—but ultimately I don’t care. The only thing that matters is I’m here. I woke up with the clear knowing that the desert will always feel like my spiritual home. That feeling will never go away. There has been a part of me lately, the part of me that has grown comfortable with my life here, back East, that was worried or at least questioning if my return to the Southwest would feel unfamiliar by the time I get there—the same worry, in fact, that I had on the road in 2019—that I might not connect with it anymore, that its magic was held within a specific time and visit. I’d traveled up the entire West Coast and out to the San Juan Islands, then looped back inward through Idaho, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. While I sat at a campground picnic table somewhere, the idea of returning to New Mexico to stay there—rather than heading back to Pittsburgh for the winter—rose to the forefront of my mind in a way that it hadn’t previously. It wasn’t a fantasy. It was a question: could I do this? Should I do this? And was New Mexico always going to feel magical like it did when I was last there? I couldn’t get my answer until I crossed the border, this time from Colorado down through Raton Pass, but the answer was instant. Every feeling came rushing back in.

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This is how a man looks, a 95-year-old man, a month before he dies: teeth have left black holes in his smile, and his smile is like a child’s, and the remainder of his hair is white and glistening.

I drove to Pittsburgh to visit my grandpa after hearing he got transferred from his nursing home to the hospital.

His body is strewn with tubes—tubes in his nose, in his arms, his stomach, his throat, like he is suddenly plugged into life itself. He hasn’t been able to eat for weeks because food was going into his lungs, so the doctors are streaming nutrients into his body intravenously. He didn’t like the hospital food anyway, he jokes. Much easier this way.

I sit down on the small bed and realize how tiny his body seems. His lips are dry and scaling. He wants to tell me a dream.

“I love hearing dreams,” I say, scooting closer to him in the bed and leaning forward to catch his words.

His voice comes out in a mere whisper: “It’s a recurring dream,” I think he said. “I kept having it all night long.”

The house where my dad and uncle grew from babies to men, with the ivy and the garden and the bright kitchen—all of this had been converted into a hospital, in his revision, and the residents were mute. He asked for his wife, but no one could tell him where she was. He eventually found her in a little cot in a corner, scrunched into a ball like a fetus, while the others sprawled their arms and legs and sank themselves into big, cushioned beds.

I lean back, thinking of something I’d once heard—that my grandma never wanted to die in a hospital. That her dying wish was to go peacefully in her own home, where she’d lived most of her life. I wonder if this is his last nagging regret, bubbling up from his subconscious.

I think of the eight years when my stubborn self didn’t speak to him because I was angry that he gave his attention to his prized violin student, a virtuoso, rather than me—me playing second chair with the violin he gave me, him rarely showing up to my recitals.

I hand him my tube of chapstick and watch as he glides it over his lips in awkward strokes, eventually using both hands because they are shaking so much.

“Last night, I dreamt I was walking next to the ocean,” I offer.

“That means you’re going to have a long life,” he assures, in his all-knowing, grandfather way. Only later do I realize he was probably trying to make me feel confident about my own health issues, not interpreting a dream image.

In his soft, raspy voice, he tells me about trips he took to Europe and says I’ll go there, too, one day, if I want.

Suddenly I realize how bored he must be—and how disoriented, when he asks me if it’s morning or night, dawn or dusk. He can’t tell. He doesn’t remember when he’s slept; they occasionally give him sleeping pills for that, and mealtimes no longer serve as markers.

Of course, I knew the answer, but for a second I hesitated before telling him it was getting late, and I had to get going.

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The best thing just happened to me. I honest to god didn’t know if it was Friday or Saturday—and then to find out it is Friday made the whole experience even better. I had to check my laptop and see it there in black and white: Fri Jul 3. For weeks now, I swear every time I look up it’s 9 p.m.—or 10—and the sun has gone down and I don’t know how we got here. It’s felt like all one day, like wasn’t I just getting ready for bed, and now I’m doing it again already? Somewhere along the way, I stopped all the recording and listmaking that had run my life up until now—the morning notes, the commonplace book, nightly journaling, tracking everything. It just fell away naturally, and I didn’t care. I don’t know which came first—the busy blur of activity leading to less time to record it or not recording things making life feel like a blur—but there are whole days missing from my “logs.” May 4 is a mystery. No morning notes, nothing in the planner, nothing written anywhere. Where was I and what was I thinking? And does it matter? As someone who has so meticulously documented every day of my life, it is more odd than problematic. I rarely follow the plan but I like having one, I make lists more as a self-soothing mechanism for an overactive mind than for any intention to check things off, and really, the most important things have a tendency to rise to the top on their own anyway. And so life continues. Half the year is gone. It is Friday. I checked.

★ What have you stopped doing since January? Was this helpful or something to revisit?

★ What storm did you weather in the first half of this year? What did getting through it make decisive for you?

★ What did your body know before your mind caught up?

★ Describe a day from the past six months when you came back to life.

★ Make your summer reading list—but only books you already own or can get from the library. (Reminder: you’re more likely to finish a library book. The deadline.)

★ The most important things rise to the top on their own. What keeps rising for you?

★ What’s the difference between maintaining a life and building one? Which are you doing right now?

★ Six months in: what’s the vow you made and broke? Was it worth breaking?

★ What would the version of you from January not believe about you now?

★ Pick one artform you consume but never make—music, collage, film, whatever—and make one bad thing in this medium before the year ends ;)

★ What did you read, watch, or listen to in the first half of the year that’s still in your body? And it doesn’t necessarily have to be the “best” thing you consumed.

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I woke up to rain in Pittsburgh today, and the storm clouds keep on rolling through—over the river, breaking. A perfect day to compile a summer reading list and then, with an iced tea with lemon, start digging into one of these.

Here are the 13 books I plan to read across the next 13 weeks.

Philosophy of the Home — Emanuele Coccia

Because I think (and therefore write) so much about home, place, being nomadic, etc., this title immediately caught my attention. It’s translated from its original Italian in which philosopher Emanuele Coccia argues that the home is a crucial moral and psychological space for happiness, not just a physical structure, and explores how domestic architecture shapes our relationships, identity, and connection to the world. The book posits that homes are where we cultivate love, create a sanctuary from the outside world, and envision our future.

Daily Life as Spiritual Practice: The Way of Transformation — Karlfried Graf Dürckheim

A friend sent me a quote years ago that was so striking, I printed it, framed it, and hung it on my wall for years to come. It continues to be my favorite quote to this day, but only recently did I think to find out who its author was (he had an interesting life, to say the least—a German diplomat, psychotherapist, and Zen master) and find the origin of this quote. The origin is this book, which is also eerily similar to my own soon-to-be-published book (Dear Road) not in structure but in theory / teaching. Here is the full quote, which I have carried with me for 15 years:

The Way Of Transformation

The man who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass courageously through it, thus making of it a “raft that leads to the far shore.” Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise within him. In this lies the dignity of daring. Thus, the aim of practice is not to develop an attitude which allows a man to acquire a state of harmony and peace wherein nothing can ever trouble him. On the contrary, practice should teach him to let himself be assaulted, perturbed, moved, insulted, broken and battered - that is to say, it should enable him to dare to let go his futile hankering after harmony, surcease from pain, and a comfortable life in order that he may discover, in doing battle with forces that oppose him, that which awaits him beyond the world of opposites. The first necessity is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter all that is most perilous in the world. When this is possible, meditation itself becomes the means by which we accept and welcome the demons which arise from the unconscious - a process very different from the practice of concentration on some object as a protection against such forces. Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened.

The Story of My Heart — Richard Jefferies w/ Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams

With comparisons to Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, Richard Jefferies immediately piqued my interest (plus, I trust Terry Tempest Williams to not lead me astray). Here’s what the front of the book says:

In an enchanting used bookstore in Stonington, Maine, Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams came across a rare copy of The Story of My Heart, an autobiography by nineteenth-century British nature writer Richard Jefferies. Considered a nature mystic by his contemporaries, Jefferies developed his understanding of “a soul-life” while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this little-known writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In a foreword and responses set alongside Jefferies writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of “cosmic consciousness.” Their exploration of Jefferies deepens their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

Famesick — Lena Dunham

If ever there were a celebrity memoir I might read, this would probably be the one, as it delves into chronic illness and that reckoning with “what really matters?”—one that I’ve faced myself a few times. I’m not a huge fan but not not a fan and did enjoy Girls, and this memoir promises a frank reflection on her rise to fame and her struggles with chronic illnesses (endometriosis, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome).

Walden — Henry David Thoreau

My dad, an English professor and lover of Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, was staunchly anti-Thoreau, and I grew up hearing about how the writer was a fraud whose experiences living in the “wilderness” were actually his experiences living on Emerson’s property, where Walden pond is, and fully funded by Emerson. So I never read Walden—or any of his work (though I did like Emerson quite a bit when I was younger). But as a friend recently pointed out, because Thoreau’s writing is so similar in spirit to my own—the natural world, memoir, spiritual reflection, the examined life—I thought maybe it’s time I read it and judge it myself. Walden is considered a foundational Transcendentalist work and a classic of American literature. In it, Thoreau recounts his two-year experiment (1845-1847) living simply in a self-built cabin by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He aimed to “live deliberately,” confront the essentials of life, and strip away distractions to discover what truly matters. I guess my dad thought his critiques of materialism and consumerism were a little hypocritical when he was freeloading off someone else’s success.

Meander, Spiral, Explode — Jane Alison

This is a craft book that challenges the traditional story arc, proposing that compelling narratives can follow natural patterns like meanders, spirals, and explosions, found in nature and art. As I like to experiment with form and deviate from all tradition, I was immediately excited when I heard about this one.

Kerouac travel journals 1949-1954 (and a possible re-read of The Dharma Bums)

Because I plan to be back on the road at some point this summer, there’s nothing like Kerouac’s bolting prose to get me in the spirit. I bought his collection of “road novels” a few years back and while I’ve read all of them, I’ve never read the travel journals excerpted in the back of the collection. Picking it up yesterday, I flipped open to land right on a description of the Ohio River—the same river I can see from my window—and thought, this is why I want to read this. I want to hear what he thought about all these places we’ve both traveled through and see how much they’ve changed over the past 75 years.

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. — Eve Babitz

To me, this feels like a quintessential summer read—sweat tinged, baseball games, eating fresh fruit, LA. I started reading it a couple summers ago but then lost my copy somewhere in Maryland. So I bought another, to pick up where I left off. The collection of essays is part memoir, part cultural history, part love letter to Los Angeles, published in 1977. If Joan Didion’s Los Angeles is one of unease and moral disintegration, Babitz’s is one of pleasure, beauty, sensuality and endless possibility.

Year of the Monkey — Patti Smith

Even though we are now in the Year of the Fire Horse, Patti Smith’s work is timeless, and while I really enjoyed Just Kids, Year of the Monkey sounds even more akin to my reading taste. From the book jacket:

Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland … Taking us from California to the Arizona desert, from a Kentucky farm to the hospital room of a valued mentor, Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape in a haunting, poetic blend of fact and fiction. As a stranger tells her, “Anything is possible. After all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.”

Also, her signature Polaroids are throughout.

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making — Makoto Fujimura

I enjoy books, like Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, that tie together art and spirituality, because I see them as intrinsic, too. This book is an exploration of the intersection between creativity, artistry, and Christian faith specifically. Makoto Fujimura, a renowned contemporary artist working in abstract expressionism and traditional Japanese nihonga techniques, argues that making is not just for professional artists but is central to human identity as image-bearers of a Creator God. He draws on theology, personal reflection, art history, and biblical insights.

Near to the Wild Heart — Clarice Lispector

I rarely read novels, but this one caught my attention because of how its writing style was explained. I tend to believe subject matter is secondary to writing; i.e., I will read a book about anything if the writing is interesting enough. I also like that it is described as being “less a plot-driven novel than an exploration of consciousness,” as linear narratives are typically what deter me from reading novels. Also fascinating: the book was published in 1943 when Lispector was only 23, and it was a breakthrough hit in Brazil. She writes in a stream of consciousness style (which I love) and her prose is more fragmented and intuitive than many other modernists (think philosophical reflections, poetic imagery, abrupt shifts in time, symbolic rather than literal descriptions, very little conventional dialogue, etc.). Many readers say they feel less like they are reading a story than inhabiting someone’s mind (yes, yes, yes). (Also: I don’t know if this book is having a moment or my algorithms are just getting strangely specific, but I’ve seen it pop up a handful of times recently in my feeds.)

Theo of Golden — Allen Levi

Recommended to me and a NYT bestseller, both of which, I couldn’t argue with. This novel tells the story of a mysterious stranger named Theo who arrives in the small Southern city of Golden, Georgia, and begins a campaign of anonymous generosity by buying portraits from a local coffee shop and returning them to their subjects, asking only for their stories in return. The book explores themes of unconditional love, kindness, connection, and the impact of quiet generosity, often with Christian undertones, as Theo’s actions change the lives of the townspeople.

All Fours — Miranda July

A friend sent me a copy of this when it came out in 2024, knowing I like Miranda July. I don’t know what happened when I got to page 84, but I got distracted by something and put it down for two years. Like Eve Babitz, I want to pick it back up, because it was such a fun ride … in fact the story of a literal drive when 45-year-old artist leaves Los Angeles on a cross-country road trip, only to stop at a roadside motel 30 minutes from home. Instead of continuing, she spends weeks transforming the motel room into a private sanctuary while embarking on an intense love affair. It’s about reinvention during perimenopause, so maybe this summer is actually divine timing for me to read it after all.

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Dedicated to the friend who went out before dawn, wandering the streets of her neighborhood in search of a blue moon. It was her birthday.

“Do you have plans today?” she asks casually as she draws my blood. I know she is drawing blood because I feel the needle prick and hear the clanking of vials—1, 2—as I sit here, looking anywhere else. “I’m gonna go hiking,” I lie. It’s the closest thing I can come up with on the spot for what I am actually planning to do once I leave here. The weather is perfect—like a postcard—and in truth, I will be walking in the woods but not to hike but to look for ghostpipe, an annual tradition. You go this time of year after the rains. You learn the spots and then return there, the way mushroom hunters come back to sites year after year for a harvest. Last year around this time, I set out, backpack filled with collection tools (mason jar, grain alcohol, scissors, gloves, permanent marker) and wandered into the muggy hills of Maryland in search of the elusive ghostpipe aka ghost flower aka Indian pipe aka corpse plant (also called “death plant,” at one point). There is something magical about this plant—its appearance and its qualities—not just a nervine but a pain reliever, and not just that but some ancient doorway into vivid, lifelike dreaming. The plant caught my attention because, as a lifelong insomniac, I’m always researching plants and supplements and foods and all the other tricks to help with sleep. This is one of them. Once you spot your first cluster of them, it’s as if your eyes adjust to see more, often slightly buried under damp leaves or rock. They are a soft translucence—a whitish grayish pinkish, a wildflower that bows its head down to the earth, growing from the decay of the forest floor. And when you clip them and place them in a jar and cover them with alcohol, the liquid slowly turns the most lovely shade of violet, the same way this plant seems to transform your dreaming mind. But I’m not going to tell the nurse all that. Here I am giving my blood to science and microscopes, to my doctor for a visit next week when she can tell me, “Well, everything looks normal, keep taking the B12 you’ve been taking.” They never find anything interesting. But once I’m outside again, in my element, I trade my sandals for boots, load my backpack, and set out for the ghostpipe hunt, not knowing what I’ll find.

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She looks up and notices the name of the road I’ve pulled into to watch the sunset, parked under a stop sign in the corner of someone’s yard: Sky View Lane. We laugh as people familiar with synchronicity. This reunion has been like every other in that everywhere we went (her mom’s house, Waffle House) becomes unimportant backdrop for a running stream of consciousness shared between two people, and it’s endless and has always been this way—one of those friends—but this time something pins it, an image to match the experience for once, a visual for our heady cerebral laughing sharing storytelling advice hybrid of a conversation. It’s not that we’d overstayed our welcome at Waffle House—I chose a 24-hour one and, if anything, the guy serving us seemed more interested than usual in our table—not surprising when “period underwear” and “everyone becomes a lesbian in Santa Fe” were said in the same breath as “mermaids and faeries” and “sixth grade crushes”—and god knows what else. I always see these reunions in bursts of conversation with the backdrop around us a total blur. So much to tell the other (“I think I’m going through a spiritual awakening,” “I shot my first vlog for that grant”) and all the things we didn’t even get to (the dream I had last night, the retreat we wanna lead together—literally journals full of content). She pulled out a small shoebox and opened it: “It’s the full archive.” Every note I’d written and folded and slipped into my pocket and crossed the street at night to wedge into her window in middle school. This is only half of them, she told me, when she left the box with me. The notes were uneventful, really, though they made me realize we had full lives then, as sixth graders, seventh graders. We were picking up books from the library and writing our own books and breaking up with friends and developing crushes and playing sports and going to dances and mad at our parents and riding the school bus and embarrassed and angry and jealous and in love—a whole world. One note was of the breakup variety. She’d apparently done something to piss me off one too many times, and I formally wrote a note saying I needed space (no memory of what she’d done or the note or what transpired after it). Puberty then, the second puberty now. When the AC at the diner turned our food cold before we could even finish eating, we still stayed another hour—because the conversation is its own entity and just plows ahead, regardless of the environment—but eventually my body interjected to say we needed to go somewhere warmer. We had nowhere to go and nowhere to be, so I suggested we just drive toward the sunset, find a country lane … and we ended up somewhere in Maugansville, parked at the edge of someone’s yard. Conversation keeps rolling along like two people who’ve been alone on a desert island for years and this is their first time talking to another human (because sometimes it feels that way), and we know we only have a few hours to cram in everything, and we know cramming in everything is impossible, but we try anyway and sit in the car watching the sun go down and the sky turn—dusky air thick with early summer humidity and the scent of cow manure—every so often noticing a particular cloud or color that prompts me to get out of the car, stand up, and take photos. But then we notice the sky behind us and all around us, transmuting into a dreamy pink. And so it becomes an adventure to find the best views. We circle around an unfamiliar neighborhood, passing the same house twice, catching glimpses of this magnificence—pieces of it, behind and in between and shining down on a very normal suburbia. Keep driving, keep guessing at turns, and then we hit the holy grail—a long open stretch of country road—the kind you can see like a ribbon laid out before you, and the sky a fiery red and pink now, more than 180 degrees and straight ahead and folding in around us—a color so loud you could almost hear it. I keep driving, everything glowing, shooting photos out the window as we move with it, wanting to stop but with nowhere to pull over. Still talking, mind you. After I drop her off, when the day has truly become night, I realize we forgot to take a selfie but must have taken a thousand photos of the sky—and what’s the difference?

FREELANCE WRITING CLASS!

If you’ve ever wondered about freelance writing as a side gig—or even a full-time gig—I am teaching a two-part class with writer beginning next week and intend to answer all your questions.

It is loosely geared toward teachers who are off for the summer (Erin herself is a former teacher who now works as a freelance writer), but it will be informative for anyone interested in pursuing freelancing (including high school and college students but also retirees).

For my day job as the arts and culture editor at The News-Post, I have personally brought on dozens of writers in the community over the years to contribute to 72 Hours, and nearly all of them had no background in journalism. If you are a curious person and enjoy talking to people and writing about it, freelancing is worth taking a look at. It creates never-ending opportunities! I have also met some of the most fascinating people over the years because of stories I was working on. (Also: journalism is a great excuse for shy introverts to engage with total strangers.)

Register here.

ICYMI: MOODBOARDS ZINE!

I have two copies left from the original run (w/ the perfect typo intact lol). If you want it, get it here (ships anywhere or free local pickup in Frederick). This is a project that spanned a year, where I documented my moods as the seasons changed by creating moodboard collages for each one.

So much is happening in Frederick! I will be covering four days of the inaugural SilverVox Film + Music Festival (Thur-Sun) … if you’re in the area, definitely worth checking out! I am most excited about seeing DIIV on Saturday night at the Weinberg Center. DIIV in Frederick! So my head has been spinning with the sheer volume of goings-on, but mostly life has been very good. Case in point: I took my niece to her first-ever baseball game last night (Frederick Keys). She loved it. She even snuck a selfie on my phone with the field behind her lol I’ve only been back in Maryland for five days and I feel like I’ve done enough to fill a month. I will be heading back to Pittsburgh soon to decompress…

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Over and over again these past two months, I was forced to slow down, like a rollercoaster in slow motion. I kept thinking the slow week would end and I’d come out the other side, alive with spring, but then something else stalled me. First the virus that had me laid up at my boyfriend’s house for days—the days I thought I would be packing my van for a cross-country road trip the next week. A sliver of light—a drive up to Pittsburgh—followed only by another 10 days in bed, because the virus had progressed to pneumonia. Then there was baseball, slow days alone in an apartment as the world outside came to life overnight. Another, brighter, ray of light—back to Maryland, where I can live again, sit outside on the patio in the heat, wear a sundress. But instead I arrive and get back to back periods for the first time in my life and my brain feels like fuzz and my body is just so tired. It takes everything in me just to get out of bed, the kind of fatigue where simply keeping my eyes open is an act of will. But then this morning, another ray of light, literally—after the days of rain had finally stopped. I pull the car over quickly as soon as I’ve left the house, because I need to take a photograph of this little tree that is weighed down by huge clusters of white blossoms—like pompoms, drenched from days of rain but still vibrant somehow, something so alive about them. I pull into the empty lot and stand in the road, letting cars pass on their own Sunday mornings, as I take several photos from various angles. It’s satisfying, as much as stopping to smell the roses might be, because something has changed, like I’ve come back to life. Like I’m the child and the spinster and this is my fairyland. That’s how it felt, like I was everything. Later that day, I am the driver passing by a teenage boy and girl who are walking alongside the road. They stop when he points to a patch of daisies, and then in my rear view, I could only assume that he leaned over the guardrail to pick one for her, and that she affixed it to her hair as they went on their way.

★ Think of a time your body made the decision for you. What did it force you to stop doing?

★ Write about a plan that didn’t happen and specifically the version of you who was going to live it. Where is that version of you now?

★ When did you last think “the slow part is almost over” and then it wasn’t? What stalled you, and do you think there was a reason? When did that stillness stop feeling like punishment and start feeling like something else?

★ Describe a small reprieve—one good day inside a hard stretch. What did it look like?

★ Write from the window. What are you watching other people do while you are stuck inside for some reason? Or what do you imagine others are doing?

★ Where do you go to live again? The place, the weather, what you’d be wearing.

★ Write about a season your body refused to sync with—when everyone else was in bloom and you were still underground.

★ What made you pull over your car recently?

★ Find the most ordinary thing you saw this week and write about it like it was the only thing that happened.

★ Describe something drenched and battered that was still, somehow, vibrant.

★ When have you felt like two ages at once?

★ Where is your fairyland? The patch of ground or even an indoors location that feels magical every time you’re there?

★ What was a tiny but meaningful gift you’ve given or received?

★ What have you been waiting to come out the other side of? Write from the version of you already standing on the other shore.

★ A year from now, what do you hope you’ll have stopped to photograph?

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“I’m trying to think of a way you could franchise it,” he says from across the table, and I remember instantly what I’d liked about him when we’d met once before, years ago. He thinks big. Somewhere on another timeline I am in my van in the desert and in another timeline I am still with M and in another timeline I have died from cancer or one of those infections my body couldn’t fight without intravenous antibiotics, but in this timeline I am sitting beside an old friend and the big idea guy, talking about my day job, after stopping by the library, after walking long lengths—in the heat—though less oppressive than it’s been—down downtown sidewalks, pretending I’m a professional crossing streets to get to the cafe, while joggers swerve like I’m the obstacle. I know it’s spring, but it’s summer, really—one of those days when the town’s whole spirit can be sensed—a “stumbling upon a book sale” kind of morning. But in the background is an unfamiliar body that’s likely low on iron just two hours into the day, bleeding again after the bleeding just ended, lightheaded and wobbly on the sidewalks, making its way to this work meeting. I think it’s my first official day of perimenopause, and who can I even tell? Who would announce it? But then, why don’t we celebrate this the way mothers and daughters and sisters and girlfriends talk about getting our first period? Why are there no menopause parties? Why is it that I’m only just realizing there is a secret cohort of women across the world experiencing this same thing right now, walking around their own towns: the second puberty, the rollercoaster, the something strange is happening to my mind and body. My familiar body. I’ve grown so accustomed to its sync, its cycles, the way my lust for life follows them and then folds, neatly, on time. The way I’ve come to know this rhythm as me. The way this rhythm has become my map for 30 years, and now I’m walking the streets of some foreign city. I retreat to my boyfriend’s house after the meeting—sit at his kitchen table, take an iron tablet, drink powdered electrolytes, make food, make art. We’re not each other’s audience, but “I like that part,” he’ll offer to me, or I to him, when we share what we’ve been working on. I move to the bed with my laptop and close the door because suddenly I’m watching an overflow of words stream out of me and I’m alive and electric and can’t stop. I had forgotten how to locate this place. I hadn’t been here in 20 years.

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hey, lovely people … welcome to this month’s audio postcard—a collage of thoughts, questions, and insights recorded in the moment as voice memos, one of my favorite mediums

CONTENTS:

An offering to God

Life is just a series of juxtapositions

Buying groceries for a hybrid life

Secret recordings

Spring cleaning in the van

On shaping and being shaped

Morning pages might be detrimental

Read more

We knew it was about to storm but walked outside anyway, and then just as we arrived at the farthest point—the destination, the little Brain Dead brick and mortar I’ve been wanting to see—and couldn’t see because the guy wasn’t even there—it started, first with wind blowing pollen, then light drops, then big ones—and like clockwork came the sirens, which always make me think of my dad (“it will be raining for less than a minute and the sirens start,” he would always say, and I keep finding him to be right)—and then the downpour, as we’re speeding through the homestretch to the front door. I quietly washed the dishes inside, trees waving violently in the backyard, started dinner while thunder was roaring. What I didn’t say when we first headed out and noticed the oncoming storm was I wanted to get caught in it. I wanted to be out, blocks away, drenched, and running. I wanted to feel it—feel something. Something like freedom or youth.

We didn’t know then that this was the start of five days of rain—solid, steady, and cold. The temperatures dropped thirty degrees and stayed there. I resent having to get out of bed in the morning and by dinnertime, all I can think about is getting back underneath covers. It isn’t ice cream weather anymore. The earlier part of the week—heat and swimming—felt like an old photograph found while cleaning a room.

My hair has doubled in size. I stand in the doorway, holding a hairbrush. “It doesn’t do this in the desert,” I say before I can stop myself. I know he’s tired of hearing about the desert—my hair in the desert and my skin in the desert and how I’m never mold sick in the desert, but we are in the midst of Biblical rains and everyone is morbidly tired and my mind just naturally wanders off to the desert. I have to braid it here. It’s the only way to control this uncontrollable thing.

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If you know me, I probably spammed you. Anyone who I’ve emailed in the past 20 years just received a party invite from me, except it wasn’t from me. It was from some hacker who got ahold of my email. First the automatic replies came in—8, 9, 10, 11, one after the next, people I hadn’t spoken to in years, telling me they no longer use this email address and would I please direct my email to another. I knew right away what had happened, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Next came a slew of emails and texts from people—“I’m not sure if this is real,” “My laptop seems suspicious that this is malware,” “Is this real or spam?,” “I’m having trouble opening this invite,” “I can’t seem to open this,” “It wouldn’t open for me.” From a friend in New Mexico: “I couldn’t open your invite but, obviously, can’t join whatever it is.” One woman simply asked to be “removed from this list.” Her name didn’t look familiar, so I clicked on it to discover I’d emailed her, just once, in 2008 about a Craigslist ad. I’d wanted to rent a barn from her to host a DIY art show. What shocked me was not that I’d been hacked but that all these people thought I’d invited them to a party. Maybe they’d imagined a housewarming or a picnic, maybe something more akin to that art show in a barn or a van party where we’d all caravan somewhere. I have no idea, but the irony was the spammer had inadvertently put me in touch with a bunch of random people, and it uncannily felt like being at a party where you run into people you haven’t seen in 10, 15, 20 years, like a reunion or a funeral. One woman, an artist in Frederick and honestly the most upbeat person I’ve ever met, said, “Well, it was such a pretty spam!” When it all died down, I was left with that feeling of having hosted an actual gathering—a wave of people, come and gone.

Sorry about the spam.

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✦ not snow but petals …

✦ On my morning commute, I pass by fields of dandelions in housing developments and they are just so lovely. It makes me happy to see at least a few residential properties are not dumping a bunch of chemicals to make their lawns dandelion-free. I’ve never understood it. Do people really not see the beauty in a grassy field spotted with bright yellow flowers? And to think they’re also medicinal and perfect for salads and stir frys!

✦ In a dream, I met a hobo playing tic tac toe, but hobo tic tac toe used four rows so games would last longer (played against yourself like solitaire)

✦ “Anger is showing you where a boundary has been crossed”

✦ Baseball has become one of those things I didn’t even know I was missing, and now I can’t imagine my life without it. Isn’t it funny how that happens?

✦ Collage made for a friend:

✦ a piece of art my niece made:

✦ A fever really puts things into perspective. Priorities become very clear and few (water and a bed, basically).

✦ “Why are all my best friends and boyfriends the oldest child?” “Because they don’t need anything” (my friend responded so quickly and matter of factly, it made me laugh).

✦ April views from the Pittsburgh apartment:

✦ Claude would be a Christian, apparently (interesting convo).

✦ “Home is where you can be yourself”

✦ Practical Magic 2?!

✦ A friend once said the days when you think you don’t have time to take the walk or get to the AA meeting are the ones when you need to do it most—because you do it and somehow that experience generates more time. I think this is because the experience generated more spaciousness in your mind. The same could be said about morning pages. The days when you “don’t have time” are probably the days you need them the most.

✦ “We’ve given vegetables too much power.”

@awkward_ecologyYou’ve been lied to you’re whole life. It’s time to wake up! #botany #fruits #vegetables #nativetiktok #plants

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✦ Why are we not sharing music like we used to? Because the algorithm does it better?

✦ Heard myself saying “you’re making me homesick for the road” and it caught me off guard

✦ I guess we are calling it organic water now?

✦ Per the internet: The Pittsburgh Pirates received their name in 1891 after being accused of “pirating” second baseman Louis Bierbauer from the Philadelphia Athletics. Other teams felt Pittsburgh acquired him illegally, leading to the “Pirates” nickname, which the club officially adopted in 1891 and began wearing on uniforms by 1912.

✦ A friend relayed an idea heard at a lecture, and it stopped me because it had never occurred to me—the parallel between the artistic process and Mother Mary birthing the Christ Child. I know, in some ways, we must not compare these things, but also it really does seem that important sometimes. Not THAT important but close. And we sometimes take for granted the art that has changed our life. What if those songs and books and films never existed. Someone had to choose to put everything else aside and birth that symphony or novel.

✦ Drawn to red …

✦ A reminder to trust those original visions—literal visions—because they are your intuition … and you already know so much … what will work and what won’t, what you want and what you don’t … even when the visions are subtle and quiet and come in a flash.

✦ My new thing is using the fake tarot readers on TikTok for affirmations

✦ old poem found:

Those little strings of things

that push + pull me ———

release them

and hold me steady.

The cords that tie me to any

person, place, or memory—

break down and dissolve them

back into the void from where they came

leave only my cord

to the source of all things

✦ What does your future self wear?

✦ I realized I’m more likely to finish a book if it’s a library book (the deadline).

✦ You know what never ceases to be unsettling? Every time I scroll the wire for “Religion” stories for my day job, nearly every one of them is horrific.

✦ I woke up (sick, actually) in a Frank Lloyd Wright house last month for a travel story I wrote for DayTripper magazine. Here is the view of the morning room, with my legal pad of morning notes on the bed.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t appear to be online, but maybe I’ll share at a later date.

✦ Recipes on rotation: GF gnocchi sautéed with greens and perfecting chicken meatballs (w/ shredded sweet potatoes, parsley, spring onion, etc.). My GF pepperoni rolls experiment also turned out not half bad.

✦ When things seem bad, just remember Earth once went through a period where it rained every day for a million years.

✦ I rarely follow the plan but I like having one.

✦ A quick Google search because I glanced over at the game and didn’t understand what was happening. It was bewildering to see pitches this slow:

✦ I finally got back in my van for a little spring cleaning and discovered the hornets have built nests again, which is a drag, but mostly it was nice to be in the space again after several months. It’s almost like returning to a (very small) vacation home for the season.

✦ The high of being in alignment with God is better than anything else, so why would your aim be anything else? Why would you do anything that pulls you away if you know that?

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