My body started humming earlier this week. A kind of electric feeling, the itchy sensation of my skin being turned inside out. I felt like I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t sleep. At first I thought it was the coming of the lunar eclipse, then the grief over the death of Dolly. And both of those things were true. But the other truth is that my body remembered the coming of the anniversary of Katrina long before my mind made the connection. That happens most years. On August 28, 2005, my dad talked to our elderly neighbor who had stayed behind; he told him the streets were dry. The next day, when the levees broke, my childhood home flooded with over four and a half feet of water.

This year the grief of this time is compounded by the devastating flooding in Nepal on Wednesday, when an entire landscape of buildings and homes, a whole community was wiped out almost instantaneously. The death toll is over 500, with 2,500 still missing. We know that each of these numbers is a universe, a human being who is part of a community, who holds inside them the meaning we all carry. Hurricane Katrina was one of many clarion calls--for global warming, for climate catastrophe, for the need for better infrastructure, for the danger and impact of systemic racism. I remember having the distinct feeling at the time, in my mid-twenties, that things had to change. How could they not? How could we live through this, how could anyone witness an entire city underwater, all the death and all the suffering, and not do something? But the hard truth is that too many people in power bow to billionaires and too few are willing to fight for the interests of the people. So many amazing grassroots organizers have been working for so long, but until more of us wake up and demand better of our leadership, our planet will continue to crumble. Like our beloved Dolly said, to not take care of the earth is “just mistreating Mother Nature—that’s like being ugly to your mama.”

A year ago, I discovered this video in a random file folder on my computer. It’s me in 2007 singing Bruce Springsteen’s song “My City of Ruins.” Originally penned as an elegy for Asbury Park in New Jersey, the song became an anthem for New Orleanians. One of the core memories of my life is when Jazz Fest in New Orleans happened in 2006, just nine mere months after the city flooded. It poured that day in the Fairgrounds. Bruce Springsteen, someone who first got together with his singer wife in New Orleans, had a long and storied love for the city. We wept in the rain together and threw our hands up in the air, shout-singing as he beckoned us to “Rise Up!” I look back on this baby me, this tender soul who had just experienced the raw grief of losing her memories, losing her home, who was experiencing the collective loss of not only all who died and suffered but seeing, in a new way, how easily she and everything and everyone she loved could be abandoned by those who were supposed to care. I look back at her and I thank her for everything she did and dreamed. That tender younger version believed we could be better. I’m older and wiser now, and I know we must be.

In a tribute to her impact and legacy, nearly 100 percent of my social media feeds over the last forty-eight hours have been all about Dolly Rebecca Parton. This isn’t because the algorithm knows I loved her. This is because everyone loved her.

Here we are, in this moment of collective grief, having lost not only a musical icon but one of the best humans to ever human. Everyone has something to say: about how amazing she was, about the impact her music and presence made on them, about how saddened they are she has left this earthly plane. What a testament to a life well-lived that everyone is grieving her absence so viscerally. The world feels dimmer without her bright, bright light.

I have been thinking about what I might want to say, but it has been a challenge because sometimes my brain, body, and heart don’t operate at the warp speed we have come to expect in terms of responses to cultural moments.

Yesterday, my whole body was humming, and I realized, in a moment of clarity, that Dolly’s death is coinciding with the anniversary of a cultural moment that had a deep impact on my life and the life of my community: the landfall of and levee breaks following Hurricane Katrina. My body is trying to hold so much at once. I am a triple water sign. I am full of water. Years ago, I found a gif of the silhouette of a body with the waves of the ocean flowing up and down it.. I haven’t found a more accurate portrayal of what my emotional landscape feels like most days.

Dolly was also a deeply feeling person. It was apparent. I wish I had gotten to meet her. But what I felt to be true about her is confirmed by the stories of so many. That she cared deeply about everyone she met, that she had a giant heart. One of my other songwriting and musical heroes is Gillian Welch, who, on her Instagram, told a story of her 10th birthday. We all remember how much birthdays meant as a kid–they were everything. Welch wrote about how she had a big slumber party planned but instead she fell ill. But since friends were already on the way, some of them were at her house–she heard the laughter and fun while lying sick in another room. The next morning, Dolly was coming over to rehearse for a television show with her parents, and she knocked on her door to say: “Oh honey, I heard you were sick and your party was all ruined. I’m so sorry.” Dolly was there to be the consummate professional, to rehearse for a show,, but she also took the time to connect with this sweet little girl who had just had the worst birthday. Dolly’s care was boundless and ever-present.

When I was a kid in the eighties, Dolly was ubiquitous, but mostly as a punchline to a series of really dumb, lazy jokes. I haven’t seen many folks talk about this in the headlines–how incredibly cruel the world was to her: perhaps because some wanted to take her down a notch, to try to siphon her tremendous power, to dim that giant light that radiated so brightly from her. I remember with fondness her Christmas specials with Kenny Rogers and I knew some of her songs and loved them, but one of my first real memories of her is in caricature from others: as the blonde lady with the big boobs. In such portrayals, Dolly was dismissed as a bimbo, a Southern woman with a strong accent and no substance. In an interview, Barbara Walters was straight-up mean in her line of questioning to Dolly about how she looked, about why she didn’t choose to dress more palatably. I imagine that had something to do with some unspoken rules Barbara herself felt she needed to follow to succeed as a journalist. You can feel the anger and judgment in her interrogation: how Dolly chose to style herself is simply not how a “serious woman with ambition” dressed.

I hate that this cultural stereotype was my first introduction to Dolly as a child. Not as a genius songwriter, a spectacular singer, a fashion icon, a philanthropist and businesswoman, but as someone to be laughed at, not with. Because even if Dolly had constructed her look and identity, and was, supposedly, in on the joke, as a kid, I didn’t know the difference. I also learned, in the way she was treated, that women who chose to show up bold and brash and embodied and unapologetically themselves were destined to be the subject of ridicule. As a result, it took me a long time to get to know Dolly in a real and substantive way–and a long time to get to know, and allow myself to be, myself.

I did, though. Over time, as I undid my own internalized misogyny and patriarchal nonsense and grew into my own, I got to know Dolly. I got to know her beyond the pop hits and movie roles of hers I loved. I got to know her incredible songwriting, her skills as a vocalist and musician (how she played a D chord so clear and true with long acrylic nails is unfathomable to me). I got to know her caring heart from every encounter I saw of her on video. I got to know her compassion and work for justice by witnessing her speaking up for the rights of everyone, particularly those pushed to the margins: women, workers, immigrants, queers. Some people criticized her for not being “political” enough and Dolly herself didn’t claim that title. But there she was: recording Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Deportee: Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” about the devastating plane crash killing immigrants being deported on her “9 to 5” album. There she was: writing “9 to 5,” an anthem for workers being taken advantage of by “the man,” long before Bezos or Musk were on the scene, and mimicking a typewriter with her acrylic fingeranils. There she was: writing early songs about unwed pregnancy in “Down from Dover” and “The Bridge,” being told by mentors that if she released songs like that, she’d never get any play on the radio. There she was: not mincing words and saying in a 2020 interview: “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” There she was: taking the money she received from the publishing rights of Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” and investing in a Black neighborhood in Nashville, calling it “the house that Whitney built.” There she was, during the pandemic, donating a million dollars to help scientists develop a vaccine for Covid-19. There she was: founding the Imagination Library, in honor of her dad who didn’t get the opportunity to read and write, and, in doing so, sending more than 330 million books to children; she secured her reputation in young readers’ minds as “The Book Lady” long before any of them knew she also wrote and sung some songs. Dolly lived for eighty years so there are too many examples to record here. But there she was. There she always was.

Another thing she was: accountable. I learned in the incredible podcast series Dolly Parton’s America about her “Dixie Stampede” dinner attraction at Dollywood. Dolly was a white woman who grew up in the rural south, but when that event was criticized, she changed the name. “There’s such a thing as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that,” she told Billboard. “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody….As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

I saw Dolly live only once when I was in my mid-twenties and living in San Francisco. She closed out Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. I don’t remember too much except there were some sound issues and it was packed; I was very far back. At the time, I hadn’t dived too deep into her catalogue, and I wish I could go back to that younger self and say: Go to the front! Listen closely! Pay attention! You are in the presence of an icon! When I looked for photos of that performance, I saw Dolly was wearing a turquoise dress and playing a turquoise guitar; turquoise is my favorite color, my power color. I had gotten tickets to see her in Las Vegas before her residency was postponed and then cancelled. I had been so excited to witness her voice, her music, her presence live.

At the beginning of lockdown in 2020, I moved back to my hometown of New Orleans. In 2021, Mardi Gras was cancelled for only the 14th time since 1857. New Orleanians felt the loss of that in our sinews. I don’t know how to explain how joyous Carnival season was in 2022. We had just experienced such enormous grief, and we desperately needed to be together—we needed a space for creativity, connection, and catharsis. That Mardi Gras, I will never forget when I went to a parade and saw a group of big-wigged blonde women–brimming over with sequins, eyes dripping with false eyelashes–strutting down the block. They were the Krewe of Dolly, a marching krewe created in honor of Queen of Country Dolly Parton. I knew immediately I had to join.

For the last three years, I have been part of the Krewe. We dress up in glitter and sequins and march in parades, but also, most importantly, we are the local partner for Dolly’s Imagination Library and help get books into the hands of kids in New Orleans. A good portion of our krewe is made up of educators or former educators and, across the board, members are as passionate about our childhood literacy efforts as our festive participation in Carnival.

Beyond dressing up and supporting childhood literacy, one of the most incredible things about being a Dolly is the warmth and delight directed our way. Like founding board member Annie Wentz said in The New York Times, it’s not about us. It’s simple: Everyone loves Dolly! So when we parade down the street, crowdmembers cry, they smile the kind of wide smile that hurts your face, they laugh, they want to hug us, they want selfies. They sing Dolly songs along with us at the top of their lungs. To be a recipient of that kind of love and affection, simply from getting Dollyied up, is such an honor. And the reason we are greeted that way, the reason people shout, “I love you Dolly!” is because of the way she loved all of us, even if she’d never met us.

_{Above: Dollys marching in the Bosom Buddies parade during Carnival 2026 with the Bras Band Brass Band playing 9 to 5.}

Like Dolly, I am a songwriter, singer, musician, and performer. Dolly modeled for me how to take up space and be your authentic self. She also honored herself and her gifts as she shared them. She didn’t give half her publishing rights to Elvis when he wanted to record “I Will Always Love You,” even though she was up all night crying, because she knew didn’t want to give that up. And then, almost two decades later, Whitney Houston made that song one of the most gorgeous, most famous bittersweet love songs in history.

Dolly’s legacy isn’t only her music. It’s the way she embodied kindness, compassion, fierceness, and glamour. It’s how she ceaselessly used her resources and platform to make others’ lives better. Hers was a life of creativity—and of service to the greater good.

And there is something else.

There is one truth that cuts to the core for the legions of us that were told–countless times, in countless ways–that we were too much, too different, too brash, too bold, too loud. Dolly told us the only limit to our lives was our own imagination. Dolly held our faces in her hands—as she liked to do with those she met—and told us we are just right exactly as we are. She told us we could be tender and strong. She told us we mattered. We needed to hear that. And we needed to hear that from someone who lived that truth with every part of her being. In being her authentic self and shining so bright, Dolly showed us we could do that, too. She made us feel possible. What an incredible gift and enduring legacy.

Here are a few favorite Dolly things I want to share with you.

I love this reflection by my friend Julia on Dolly and love.

Dolly filmed her television show in New Orleans! It has been such a treat to watch her second line and perform with legendary New Orleans musicians.

The podcast series Dolly Parton’s America

Trio, the first of Dolly’s two albums with fellow amazing musicians Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris

A cover I did of one of my favorite songs of Dolly’s “Wildflowers”

We will always love you, Dolly <3

There is a pile of dirt across the street at my neighbor’s property. It arrived a few days ago. This small hill of coarse clumps reminded me of what I used to think was a recurring memory but now realize is a vivid one-time memory of dirt being delivered to our side yard when I about four. My whole entourage of tiny friends were invited to play on what was, to us, a giant hill, a rare and special thing in flat New Orleans. As if it is happening now, I remember the sheer joy of digging my hands into the earth, the thrill of sliding down before the arduous climb back up. What was a practical thing became a playground—and that is precisely the way my mom worked her magic in the world.

My mom was the best at conjuring magic and beauty out of the ordinary. She did it all the time. I remember the joy, shared by my classmates, of when she was the one bringing cupcakes to my classroom. She taught me how to cook gumbo, and we created feasts for friends. She plated regular dinners like they were special occasions in fancy restaurants because my mom understood, on a core level, that the daily moments made up a life. She imbued our days with sweetness and special occasion flair.

It’s been over a year now, barely, since she died, and I’ve lived through all the firsts. People often say the firsts are the hardest, but I don’t know if that’s true. This Mother’s Day felt harder than the last one. Last year, the grief was fresh and raw—always with me, a second skin. Yes, the day was painful, but the loss was so fresh that the ramifications of her absence hadn’t yet set in. This year, I have lived without my mother for a full year. I know what that feels like. And I know that, for as long as I am lucky to be alive, I will have to do the rest of my living without her.

I finally feel like I’m delving into the materials of grief. In the months after my mom died, I ordered a stack of books about grief—to add to the stack about aging parents, dementia, and grieving while someone was still alive—and then I couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few pages without having to put them down.

I am a very good student. But I couldn’t digest any of it. I couldn’t focus. Other people’s words overwhelmed me. It was enough to feel the loss of her. It was, in fact, too much to feel the loss of her without other voices sharing how they and others felt. I had to learn to listen to myself first, to feel it all unmoderated by others’ opinions.

Then, of course, came the friends and people who drifted into my life—as if guided by her hand—to help me be with the pain of that loss. There were the long walks with a newer friend who was also an only child whose beloved parent died. There were the people who transitioned from acquaintances to close friends because they asked how I was and genuinely wanted to know, because they weren’t scared of my grief. And then, there were the connections that fell away because I had very little to give and because, for whatever reason, they didn’t ever reach out to see how I was doing. Grief is deeply clarifying in that way: it is surprising to see who is and who isn’t able to hold the tender pain with you. I can look back in retrospect on all the times that I simply didn’t know how to be either: when I didn’t understand the way a death can permeate every single aspect of living. I didn’t understand the way time stretches out, a limitless horizon of never again, after the death of a loved one. I didn’t know then what I do now.

Two things are true at once: grief isn’t for the faint of heart, and we must all learn how to grieve because loss will come for us all.

I taught a grief writing course this year with a group of profoundly beautiful writers and humans. I had decided to offer the course I wished was available to me and, in doing so, to attempt to provide a container to hold grief. I assumed that most of the people that signed up would be coping with death of a loved one. But I was quickly corrected—there were all kinds of griefs in the room, as many different kinds as there are in the world and as we must face in a lifetime.

Since my mom died, I see grief everywhere. So many more people dying in my life and lives of those around me, loved ones or loved ones of loved ones getting sick, people divorcing and breaking up, people losing homes to fires and floods, people losing jobs, people losing versions of who they used to be. That’s on top of the death of life as we knew it before Covid-19, the excruciating pain of war and genocide, the grief and rage stemming from the erasure of entire communities and futures as well as the cruel and intentional theft of civil rights. I am more awake to the grief around me. I am more attuned, and I feel it more deeply because I understand in a more profound way what it is like to stay with the feeling of loss.

Holding our personal griefs alongside our collective ones often feels like too much to bear. Watching the Voting Rights Act be gutted and racist gerrymandering rigged to erase the impact of Black American voters is not only deeply upsetting for our present and future but is a slap in the face of all those who worked so hard and sacrificed their lives to ensure people of color had access to their right to vote. It is easy to feel overcome while watching unjust wars be waged with our dollars and in our name without being, while watching our neighbors be pulled off the street without cause and without process.

Learning to grieve everyone we will lose and everything that will change is part of the mandatory coursework of being human. I would argue that so, too, is finding a way to transmute these experiences—to let our grief change us and to let this malleable self be one that can hold these tender aches, our own and one another’s.

This happens in art. This happens in policy changes directly rooted in people’s lived experiences of loss and hardship and oppression. This happens when we show up and extend a hand to one another. This happens when we show up to a fight that doesn’t directly impact us—understanding that if it directly impacts someone in our community, it does, in fact, impact us.

There are many really pervasive narratives right now about our helplessness that are suspiciously tied to the schemes of billionaires in charge. They would like to hoard even more wealth, more wealth than they or even their progeny could possibly use in their lifetime. And to do so they are trying to convince of inevitability of things not in our best interests. We’re told AI is inevitable and we will be left behind we don’t adopt it—even as data centers steal our water and energy and wreak havoc on our environment, even as generative AI art is ugly and generative AI chatbots, wrong all the time, ruin brains. We are told that we just need to consume more—even as we know that no “thing” will ever make us happy, even as we feel the second we step into a room with other people that what we need, most of all, is to be together. We are bombarded with cruel and evil acts with information being released in a way to intentionally overwhelm our nervous systems; when we look around, we also see the countless ways that human beings are showing up with generosity, grace, humor, and kindness for one another. We need to remember better the story under the story. We need to remember better who we are at our core and what we are capable of together.

Sometimes life delivers a pile of dirt. Is it a nuisance you have to deal with or is it soil for the garden? Is it a place to get a wider view and play with your friends? Is this pile of dirt a hard reminder of the mother I lost? Or is it a mirror held up to reveal the way my mother was here for me—helping me see the extraordinary in the ordinary—and continues to be here in my cells and in my memories?

Here are a couple of poems I saw around Mother’s Day that touched me: “What I learned from my Mother” by Julia Kasdore & “Places to Look for a Mother” by Rosemary Griebel.

And here is one of my favorite Joy Harjo poems, “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in its Human Feet,” which reminds me and us of what it means to be human and to walk alongside one another on this path.

I never knew what to get my mom for her birthday. It’s not that she was hard to please or picky about presents. It’s that she always enjoyed giving gifts more than receiving them. Gift baskets of bubble bath and body lotion were left still in the saran wrap, topped by dust, years after she received them. One year, I gave my mother, a consummate cook and baker, some ceramic nesting bowls in various shades of teal, one of our favorite colors. She loved them but, instead of using them, she placed them on a bookshelf where they remained: a decoration. This year, my dad and I brought silk flowers to her gravesite.

Grief is a funny thing. The body and mind refuse to believe, to compute. It doesn’t make sense that someone who was here is simply not anymore.

In December, eight months after my mom died, I was driving down a big boulevard near a mall and a fleeting thought came to mind: I had to figure out what to give mom for Christmas. It was a split second really, this illusion. Then the realization set in that I didn’t need to get mom a Christmas present. That I would never need to get her a present ever again.

Today is my mom’s birthday. And today is the last in of a string of firsts: the first occasion of her birthday without her here to celebrate.

My mom loved to celebrate anything and everything. She embodied joie de vivre. I see her twisting ribbons into a fantastical bow for the top of the Christmas tree, stirring melting chocolate that will become Easter eggs over the stovetop, bustling around the house putting up decorations for every holiday. I see her out in the middle of the street I grew up on, planning a neighborhood party with a co-conspirator. I see her at the store picking out gifts for loved ones and buying a few extra things for unexpected guests, so that everyone would have something. My mom loved to show people they were special and cared for. And, as her daughter, I was a lifelong beneficiary of this kind of care and attention.

Last year, my mom was at home in hospice on her birthday. It was a big one: her 85^th. A month before, it wasn’t clear if she was going to make it to her birthday—and it seemed evident to us, even if we weren’t saying so aloud, that it would be her last—so we really wanted to go all out. Dad and I got balloons and flowers and I ordered her favorite dobege cake. Perhaps because of the milestone, whoever decorated the cake had taken extra care. Instead of the traditional roses on top, the cake bloomed with purple irises curving around the circular cake. But my mom slept the whole day and, when encouraged, only took a few meager bites of her cake.

Grief is everything everyone says and nothing you can know without living it. What I have learned about grief in the last eleven months is that grief is impossible to predict and can show up differently every single day. Sometimes, I’m full of gratitude for my mom and thankful I got as much time with her as I did. Other times, I mourn for her absence, all the conversations we will never have and the stories I will never know. And sometimes I’m angry, actually furious, that the very nature of life has us saying goodbye to people we love so deep in our sinews and bones.

Another strange thing has happened. Now that my mom is gone, I can see in a clearer way how much I am her daughter. Sometimes I’ll see myself doing a simple chore or decorating my house or having an impulse to reach out to a friend, and I see that my mom is still here, living through me. That makes me happy: to feel so clearly my connection to her and the way that my life continues her legacy.

In Buddhist tradition, where there is “no birth, no death,” you don’t say “Happy Birthday.” Instead, you say “Happy Continuation Day.” Buddhist monk, spiritual teacher, author, and poet Thich Nhat Hanh wrote: “We do not have a stem linking us to our mother anymore, but when we were in her womb we had a very long stem, an umbilical cord. The oxygen and the nourishment we needed came to us through that stem. Unfortunately, on the day we call our birthday, it was cut and we received the illusion that we are independent. That is a mistake. We continue to rely on our mother for a very long time, and we have several other mothers as well. The Earth is our mother. We have a great many stems linking us to our mother Earth. There is a stem linking us with the cloud. If there is no cloud, there is no water for us to drink. We are made of at least seventy percent water; the stem between the cloud and us is really there. This is also the case with the river, the forest, the logger, and the farmer. There are hundreds of thousands of stems linking us to everything in the cosmos, and therefore we can be.”

I was a singer from a very young age. My mom used to say that I sung before I could talk. I was also a theater kid from a young age. My dad talks about how I would be rapt watching musical performances or ballets, on tv or in person, when other kids my age were restless.

One of the first performances I remember vividly was a stage production of Carousel. For those unfamiliar, Carousel revolves around the romance between a carousel barker and millworker, and there are high stakes and big consequences.

One of the aspects of the production that affected me most was the use of a scrim, a fabric curtain that is opaque when lit from the front but transparent when lit from behind. In Carousel, the scrim is a device that is both literal and metaphorical, a veil separating the living from the dead. We, the audience, can see the dead but the living characters can only sense them. At a pivotal moment in the production, when a woman protagonist is facing impossible grief, her cousin attempts to imbue her with trust and hope. She sings, “You’ll never walk alone”:

When you walk through a storm
Keep your chin up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone!
You’ll never walk alone.

I was less than ten at the time, and I still remember the feeling of that song in my body. I still remember the shock of loss communicated on stage, and the way that song embodied grief and hope simultaneously. I still remember feeling the truth of those words. (I super recommend both the original and this Brittany Howard version of the song which, when I heard it several years ago, offered that same feeling).

In How To Live When a Loved One Dies (a book I recommend for anyone navigating grief, regardless of their spiritual beliefs), Thich Nhat Hanh writes; “When we walk, we’re not walking alone. Our parents and ancestors are always walking with us. They’re present in every cell of our body. So each step that brings us peace, healing, and happiness also brings peace, healing, and happiness to our parents and ancestors….We don’t walk for ourselves alone. When we walk, we walk for our family, for our loved ones, and for the whole world.”

I love the symbiosis in what he has written. It’s not just that we’re not walking alone—they are there with us—but also that our walking liberates us and them. We’ll never walk alone. We walk for the whole world.

So maybe the gift I can give my mom, on her birthday and for the rest of my life, is this living, this walking.

ALSO: I want to let you know about an online nonfiction writing workshop I will be offering starting next week on March 18! I designed the course I needed and need: Grief as Portal: Writing With and Into Loss. More information below. Please join us and/or share this with community members who might benefit from the container of this course.

Grief as Portal: Writing With & Into Loss

A five-week generative nonfiction writing workshop with Lisa M. O’Neill.

Course Description: It is impossible to move throughout life without encountering grief. We lose the people we love, we lose the selves we used to be, we lose mobility and health and jobs and relationships. We are witness to the changing climate of our planet and to the harm being done to fellow human beings throughout the world. The very nature of being alive means things will change and we do not always get to choose the shape of that changing. Our grief cracks us open and molds us into new, sometimes unrecognizable versions of ourselves. Grief can also be a portal into new ways of seeing and being. This five-week nonfiction writing course will be a container for us to read about, share about, write, and transmute our experiences with grief. We will read texts by other writers reckoning with griefs of all kinds, and in supportive community, we will attempt to use language to carve out understandings of our own experiences of individual, familial, and collective grief.

Disclaimer: I am a writing teacher and not a therapist or psychological professional. Our class will be focused on generating and sharing writing, but as we are writing about grief, difficult emotions may arise. Please make sure you have supports in place for any emotions that may arise during our time together.

Details: Five Wednesdays over Zoom: March 18, March 25, April 1, April 8, April 22, from 5–7 p.m. PT/ 7–9 pm CT/ 8–10 pm ET

Cost: $240 (reach out to lisa.oneill at gmail dot com to inquire about a payment plan if the full cost is prohibitive). Course capped at 12 participants

REGISTER HERE!

Today, a friend of mine invited me to a remembrance ritual. She held space held to write about, to, and for our ancestors at this time when the veil is thin and we are very much thinking about those we love who are no longer with us in their physical embodiment. While it’s always been a time that has felt special and sacred to me, it feels different now that my mom is an ancestor.

My mom—

exquisite costumer

maestra of all holiday ceremonies

holiday wizard

holder of the harvest

maker of magic

Among the many things my mom was good at, celebrating holidays was right at the top. I didn’t realize how exquisitely good my mom was at holidays until I realized how exquisitely bad others are. Or, to be more generous, that it didn’t come naturally to others or wasn’t a priority. That others simply let occasions pass by as another date on the calendar, that others would prefer a more sterile life or home over the inevitable mess of preparations and cleanups.

My family has a 10 X 15 storage unit and a good third to half of it is full of holiday fixins: bins upon bins of door hangers, lights, ornaments, Easter baskets, chocolate making suppleis, gift bags, wrapping paper, and presents yet to be assigned to a particular receiver. Mom stored all of this and added over the years. Abundance overflowing.

In the argument of minimalism vs. maximalism, my mom was firmly in the more is more camp. Me too. I come from a long line of women who prioritized the sweetness of celebration and believed making a home beautiful made life better.

My mom was devoted to celebration because she was devoted to others feeling seen and cared about. She wanted everyone around her to feel special, most of all her daughter.

Every October, we would start planning my Halloween costume because I always had grand visions. This was when I was old enough to understand Halloween and voice opinions of my own—which didn’t take long. She never told me no about a costume idea I had. If she couldn’t make my costume, she would collaborate with my paternal grandmother, a talented seamstress, to make it happen. (Because I grew up in New Orleans, this was true for Halloween and Mardi Gras—the dress up chest was overflowing). There were a cascade of characters I wanted to be, many of which I wouldn’t remember without going back through family photo albums.

But one of my all-time favorite costumes happened when I was about three or four. The year before, my mom had sewed me a pumpkin costume. She fashioned the orange gourd with fabric and stuffing and then put me in forest green tights and little orange shoes and pinned leaves in my hair.

In the time between that Halloween and the next, I became obsessed with the musical Annie and I would sing “Tomorrow” to anyone who would listen and to a slew of family members, neighbors, and strangers who would prefer not to.

My mom had the idea for a mashup.

She paired a red Annie wig from my everyday cosplaying and last year’s Halloween costume and thus “Pumpkin Annie” was born.

Years later, we were looking through photo albums, and she was talking me through costumes. This is when you were a Pumpkin, and this is when you were Annie, and this is when you were “Pumpkin Annie.”

I laughed loud.

“Mom, that’s not a thing,” I said.

“It IS,” she argued.

And she was right. Because “Pumpkin Annie” became real the moment my mom conjured her. In the same way elaborate Christmas wreaths were fashioned for doors or chocolate Easter eggs appeared for our entire neighborhood wrapped in lime, pink, and purple foil.

Every year, I change my Facebook profile picture to “Pumpkin Annie” to honor the sweetness of my mom’s care. Because really what happened is that my mom was always paying attention. She merged her gigantic creative spirit and devotion to celebration with the things I was interested in and passionate about. She was always looking for ways for me to feel honored and seen. I’m sure she wouldn’t have called it that. She would have called it love.

I don’t think that in this season we are necessarily closer to our dead. But I do think we are paying closer attention. We are more apt to see things as connection or signs than we are other times of the year when we are busy tending. And there is also something about the fall. Leaves changing color before their, beginning their process of decay before becoming sustenance for spring flowers. The wind begins to blow stronger. We feel the bite of cold coming in. We are awakened to the way in which change, always with us, is an inevitable part of what it means to be alive.

I talk to my mom all the time: in writing, in my mind, and out loud. And I’ve told her I want to find more ways to feel connected to her, to feel her presence. It feels important to not only continue the connection but to explicitly invite it.

For the writing ritual I did today, my friend said to grab a candle and a picture if we wanted. I took a photo of my mom and I, a candid from my early-twenties where we are both smiling, leaning on one another, our eyes focused away from the camera, in the same direction. And I grabbed the candle that happened to be on my desk. When I looked for the scent later, I saw that it was called Vetiver Woods. My mom’s birth name is Vera Woods. V. Woods.

I don’t know what happens after we die, but I have heard the voices of my ancestors too many times in too many ways to believe that our connection ends when someone leaves their body behind. I’m grateful, especially in a time so hard and fraught with too much cruelty and indifference, for the whispers I get: in synchronicitous moments, in the natural world, in the way memory suddenly and sharply punctuates the mundane.

Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh talks about us as our ancestors’ continuation. Both the ancestors we are related to and those we consider ourselves in the lineage of. In blood kinship, our cells literally carry the material of ancestors. I think we take for granted sometimes how profound that is, that the blood in our veins and the cells of our sinews are made of all who came before us. Our minds, hearts, and spirits are made up of every time we were ever shown affection, every dream someone else ever offered for us, every prayer bearing our name, every book that ever touched us, every song that we knew in our bones to be true, every circle we’ve sat in that made us feel like we belong. We can grieve those who are no longer here to sit beside us while we know this other truth: we are never, not ever, alone.

Last Tuesday was the five-month anniversary of my mom’s death. I am changed. And my grief is ever-changing.

That morning, my dad and I went to visit my mother’s grave—a ritual we adopted during the first 49 days after her death and at anniversaries. We brought flowers. We spoke to her. We watched as dragonflies flew low over the green grass and as a bee wandered around the petals of one of the hot pink rose I’d placed in the glass vase that was on my parents’ kitchen countertop and is now in the ground. My dad had used a trowel to carve a round shape in the ground where it could nest. We have made this impromptu altar until we have a headstone.

We told her we missed her. We told her about my recent show on Frenchman Street, how she would’ve loved it. We told her it was hard here without her.

On the way home, I shared with my dad a new song called “What Bird Did You See?” off songwriter Dar William’s most recent album. A panoply of birds are ushered through the song in description and motion: a seagull, a gold finch, a red-tailed hawk, a cardinal. The refrain is “What Bird Did You See?” The last line of the song says, “It’s okay to know it’s me.”

I had the opportunity to hear Dar sing the song on a songwriting retreat, about eight months before my mom died. She talked about the liminal space after someone dies and the way it is a common experience for people to experience their loved ones through the natural world, through these visitations. And how even skeptics often have their minds changed. These moments help us see and feel seen, they reverberate with the mysteries of life and death. Songs like these help us feel seen, too.

My dad drove us home as we listened. It was a good morning. It was good mourning.

Later that night, I turned on Somebody Somewhere because I was ecstatic that Jeff Hiller won an Emmy for his excellent portrayal of Joel. The show—which phenomenal creator and star Bridget Everett has called “a coming of middle-age story”—is a comfort show for me, a companion through life’s ups and, particularly, life’s downs. And it just so happens that where I had left off, in my latest rewatch, was the scene when Sam, the protagonist played by Everett, and her younger sister Trisha are sitting in their dead sister’s living room talking about grief.

The scene happens when Tricia comes to where Sam lives in their sister’s former house, because she realizes they have both forgotten their sister Holly’s birthday. In the moment I reentered the episode, Tricia is telling Sam that she herself did grief wrong while Sam did it right. Sam says that she doesn’t think that’s true. “You did it one way, I did it another way—we both end up in the same place,” she offers. Trisha says, “I think you did it better.” Sam replies, “I don’t think there’s any better.”

As someone who has struggled with perfectionism my whole life, I notice the way these patterns show up even in my grief. Especially in moments of inner turmoil, I attempt to measure it. How much crying is enough or too much? What is the normal amount of time to feel bereft? How many people are enough to help me hold this pain? How much holding on is appropriate? How much letting go? Even if I feel these questions are false and know that, at their core, they are an attempt to find ground where there is no ground, they arise in my mind’s eye. As if grief is an algebra problem. As if there is a clear x or y that simply needs to be plugged in in order to solve the equation of absence.

My mom was a strong presence in life and she is a strong presence in death. In the first four months of her being gone, her absence felt like an avalanche. The missing was so intense it was sometimes hard to breathe, hard to get out of bed in the morning. Sometimes it still feels that way. And sometimes I am able to feel her so strongly it is as if she’s right here next to me. It’s not the same and that will always be a grief. But talking to her, writing to her, feeling her in objects she held and in the natural world is a great comfort.

A few days after the anniversary, I had friends over for supper. I cooked corn maquechoux, a Cajun dish my mom taught me how to make.

“Help me out with this, Mom,” I said aloud as I drove to the grocery store and again when I was cutting the corn off the cob in layers.

When I was at a retreat in August, a musician friend K told me, while thrumming a beat with her fingers on the car wheel, that the conversation with my mom isn’t over. “The relationship with my mother is ever-evolving,” she says. “The relationship didn’t end when she died.” She sung a little song that her mother used to sing. This framing not only made sense to me but opened up a door to something that felt real and true.

I feel close to my mom when I’m cooking because the kitchen was her favorite place. She loved making meals to share with loved ones. Her love language was a delicious meal lovingly prepared. So as I repeat the motions she executed so many times in her life, I feel her forearms inside my forearms, tensing as we cut and scrape the corn; her hands inside my hands stirring in onions in the pan. I feel us wiping the sweat from our brow.

Here is my mom, alongside me as I prepare one of her favorite dishes. Here is my mom’s voice in the recipe I hold I my hand. Here is my mom, still teaching me how to cook.

Nuggets of beauty, hope, and inspiration

• The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan & Sophie Cull : I just finished this fantastic book written by Calvin Duncan, who spent twenty-eight years at Angola State Penitentiary serving a life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit before being released and exonerated (Here’s an NPR interview with him). His release and exoneration came from his own work on his case as well as the diligent work of his legal team at Innocence Project New Orleans, now Innocence and Justice Louisiana. The book is excellent because, through personal narrative of Duncan’s unjust trial and sentence and his decades working as an inmate counsel, Duncan and Cull reveal the systemic flaws in our criminal justice system and the enormous barriers people face to getting justice. On top of it, they write the book in a way that makes legal decisions accessible to those of us without a law background. I think every American should read this book. Get it from your favorite independent bookseller or in physical, digital, or audiobook from your library (so important to support libraries always and definitely now!)

• I had the privilege of seeing the phenomenal Arundhati Roy, a longtime literary and social justice heroine of mine, read and speak from her new book Mother Mary Comes to Me (more on this soon) last week. I haven’t read her new book yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I also recommend her stunning essay “The End of Imagination,” originally published in The Guardian in 1998, that I read a long time ago and which she quoted from at her reading.

• Last month, I discovered the gorgeous textile art of Rachel Hayes. I love these bold and beautiful tapestries she creates and love more the attention that is given to how they interact with landscapes. Click here for some beauty.

• Hummingbird Highway, the album hosting the song I mentioned above, is delicious start to finish. Here’s one way to listen.

Last Thursday, almost exactly a week before the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the universe gave my family a special surprise.

I got a text in the morning from my dad that “the AC leaked” and “the ceiling had collapsed.”

With no further details provided, my brain immediately spun out a slew of terrible possibilities and terrifying questions: Did we lose anything precious of that belonged to mom who just died four months ago? Were the photo albums okay? What was lost? How quickly did we need to move to save what we can?

These questions are rooted in the experience of losing almost everything we had when my childhood home flooded in 2005 with four and a half feet of water.

For someone whose brain automatically defaults to the worst-case scenario, real life scenarios of real trauma and loss only confirm what my brain tells me all the time: Be afraid of everything. Nothing is safe. You have everything to lose.

As it turned out, the sheetrock collapsed in a hallway storage closet and, apart from losing some of my mom’s chocolate-making supplies, everything was salvageable. We were also able to dry off and sanitize the seasonal decorations: Mardi Gras masks, St. Patrick’s and Easter door hangers.

But the sight of soaked possessions and the sharp smell of mold were familiar.

I didn’t know if I was going to write anything about this anniversary. Part of me resents the world’s interest in commemorating a certain landmark period of time. Go away, I want to say. Nothing you could say right now is anything New Orleanians haven’t already talked about and thought about and muddled through and attempted to reckon with thousands of times over.

It feels voyeuristic and reminds me of the carelessness I experienced from so many people in the months and years after the storm. People who, however well-intentioned, would casually bring up Katrina the second they heard I was from New Orleans and ask if I was affected. As if it was appropriate for a stranger I just met at a cocktail party to demand to know about the precise shape of my trauma and to ask, while chewing crackers, to inspect this deep wound.

My streaming platforms keep recommending Katrina documentaries and series, and I have multiple times on multiple occasions told inanimate appliances to eff off.

The hard thing about anniversaries like this is they are far from the only time those of us impacted by the storm think about it. The missing is forever. The reminders are constant. Everything changed and we are living inside the aftermath of that complete undoing.

I don’t always know how to name the exact grief but one way is that I yearn for the people we lost and the community that was forever altered. I ache for the New Orleans we will ever know because of what the waters took and the destruction left in their wake. I am angered at the way the city was abandoned for so long before being exploited by outside developers when it felt safe and profitable to invest.

I didn’t need the ceiling caving in to get in touch with these feelings. They already live close to the surface.

When I went to his house, I reminded my eighty-one-year-old father to please wear a mask around the leak. Mold is dangerous. We know that.

I will never forget the circles of mold on the living room walls or the way that my high school photo albums, keepsakes that couldn’t be replaced, were reduced to rainbowed blurs. I will never forget how my mom rescued the sopping wet quilts generations of matriarchs from both sides of my family made and washed them over and over again so that we could hold onto these pieces of history that meant something to us.

I know my loss isn’t singular. I know there are so many people who lost so much more than me—lives, beloveds. I was, in the grand scheme of things, lucky.

I wasn’t living in New Orleans at the time of the storm. I had moved to San Francisco the year before and, in the days after the levees broke, myself and a colleague, who had family in New Orleans, spent time at our jobs at a nonprofit serving unhoused San Franciscans calling home to check in as we helplessly watched the news from afar.

When—finally, after a month—we got the okay to go back into our neighborhood, after the floodwaters had receded, I had to fly into Houston to drive home. I still remember how eerily quiet it was when I entered the city. How empty. How still.

Turning onto my street and getting out of the rental car, I first saw my mom, who had red Gatorade stains at the edges of her mouth from hydrating in the crazy September heat. I collapsed into her arms as we wept. Mattresses and appliances were stacked in a pile taller than me in front of our house. My cousin and dad and uncle had already begun to pull big items out.

I remember walking into the side door and I can still see it in slow-motion, the parts that my brain will still allow me to remember. The dirty floor, the watermark four and a half feet up, the mold in concentric circles on the wallpaper, the furniture scattered wherever the water set it down, my childhood bedroom in chaos, the bookshelf with all my journals, photo albums, and scrapbooks collapsed, the guitar I learned to play on ruined.

As I write this, tears come as they do always when I think about this time in New Orleans, my city, when we lost so much.

We lost so much because money meant to be used to repair the aged and failing levee systems was diverted to fund the inhumane and unjust war in Iraq. We lost so much because FEMA was led by someone appointed by Bush who had no skills in emergency management, whose qualifications were that he used to head an Arabian horse society. We lost so much as our imprisoned community members were abandoned, left in their cells as the water creeped up to their necks. We lost so much because racist policies and policing resulted in the deaths of Black citizens and racist headlines talked about white New Orleanians “finding food” while Black New Orleanians were “looting.” We lost as people yelled from their roofs and fought their way out of attics by using axes and hatchets. We lost as American citizens were routinely labeled as not hurricane victims or evacuees but refugees. We lost in the time after the storm when outsiders wondered aloud and openly and with complete and utter gall whether it was even worth it to rebuild New Orleans if it could happen again.

I don’t need to watch the documentaries to remember all the images of that time or the stories told by everyone I knew who was impacted.

The other day, I went to a prayer service held by a spiritual community I have been a part of off and on since my twenties, since a few years before the storm.

When I walked in, the leader gave me a handout and when I saw 20 years at the top, I wished I hadn’t come. But she had put together a beautiful set of readings and rituals, and, when we it was open time to share, we all held in the space for one another as we recalled our different experiences of this shared moment in time.

Hurricane Katrina and the levees breaking split the timeline in two for all of us who called New Orleans home. The time before the storm and the time after the storm. What is, what could have been. What we had, what we lost. Who used to be here, who is gone.

And, of course, we have also watched and witnessed these twenty years since as other communities too lost all they had and the people they loved to massive floods. Witnessing and watching the near misses of my parents and fellow Louisianians as well as the efforts of those were impacted by tornados, hurricanes. And 1,000 year floods and had to rebuild all over again. Witnessing and watching as climate change alters our planet and corporations continue to exploit rather than protect it. Witnessing and watching money being diverted from protecting our communities to fund militarization, fight endless wars, and expand agencies that pull innocent people out of their cars and homes and away from their families for no just cause.

Any reflection I’ve written about Katrina over the years refuses a neat ending. Part of me wants to write into resolution. People came and they volunteered because they wanted to—and many of those people stayed and made a home here. New Orleanians got through because of the kindness of their neighbors and community members. The time after the storm brought out the best in so many people. All of these things are true.

And it is true that the losses are impossible to measure. That resilience doesn’t undo what was broken. And that we will never get back all the thousands of people we lost to the water.

There are griefs that reside in our bones. There are griefs that are lines in the sand. There are griefs we must simply learn to live inside. This is one.

p.s. Here is an essay I wrote for the 10^th anniversary of Katrina that was published in Scalawag.

p.p.s. Here is a piece I wrote for my online literary blog The Dictionary Project in 2012.

Today is my birthday. I love birthdays. I love my own, love other people’s. I love celebrating the unique qualities we each have and the way we alter one another and the world through our lives and presence. But this entire week, I have been absolutely dreading my birthday. Because it is the first one without my mom.

My mom was amazing at birthdays. As a kid, my birthdays were grand affairs, with specific themes, custom cakes she made in her kitchen, activities, favors. My mom knew how to throw a party. And, once I was grown, she told me on more than one occasion that, growing up in her family, birthdays were no big deal. They were “just another day.” So she wanted every milestone in my life, and particularly my birthday, to be celebrated. She wanted me to feel celebrated all the time but particularly on the day I was ushered into this world.

And once I lived away from home, she called me every birthday at 6:26 a.m., the time of my birth. I think she might’ve gotten the idea from the movie City Slickers where Billy Crystal’s mom did this but I don’t know for sure. She and my dad would sing “Happy Birthday” to me, or to my voicemail if my ringer was off. And she insisted on calling at the exact time of my birth, Central Standard Time in New Orleans even when that might mean a very early 4:26 a.m for the many years I lived in Arizona. “Couldn’t we just do 6:26 a.m. her time?” my dad told me he asked once. That was the last time he asked that. She was adamant. And there was something about the precision of this ritual, its consistency in my life that made me feel deeply and completely loved. I was precious to her and she wanted me to know it.

For her last several years, my mom was living with dementia and last year, my mom, I’m certain, had to be reminded of my birthday. Just as I had reminded her of every important holiday pertaining to my dad: his birthday, their anniversary, Father’s Day. I had gone to the drugstore to carefully select cards for her to give to him, doing my best to pick the ones I thought she would choose and knowing how important it was to her to express care in this way.

But even as the disease erased her ability to remember basic things like what she just ate or family member’s birthdays, she continued to remember us. She knew my dad was her beloved husband. And that I was her beloved daughter. I know this is a gift not everyone gets and I didn’t and don’t take that for granted. I was grateful to be known by her until she took her last breath.

I know, too, that I am lucky to have been loved by her, in person, for so long. So many people either don’t get that much time with their mothers or have mothers who aren’t able to meet them with the kind of care and love and generosity mine showed me. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye in the way we are never ready to say goodbye to loved ones who have been so present to us.

There is a specific and wrenching heartache in celebrating being ushered into the world without the person who did the ushering in. No one will ever love me like my mom. No one will ever celebrate my life like she did.

And, of course, the personal grief I feel is compounded by grief I feel as part of a collective. My mom would have hated the bill that just passed in Congress. Not only did she spend her life seeing that our family was fed and fed well–cooking was one of her great loves and astounding skills–but she spent decades of her life waking up in the wee hours of the morning to drive across Louisiana to oversee distribution for a food commodity program (funded largely by the FDA) so that seniors living below the poverty line could eat. She took great pride in her work and its impact. She talked all the time when I was young about how vital the program was so that elders didn’t have to choose between food and medicine, between food and housing. She never wanted anyone to go hungry and she spent her life doing what she could to help that be true.

I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled this week and it happened to be scheduled for a half hour after this cruel bill that will harm and kill so many Americans passed in the House. I drove to the appointment, gripping the wheel in seething anger rotated with tears about the harm that will come to pass.

When the PA walked me into that clinic room, she asked how I was doing. “It’s a shitty day,” I said. I was so upset about the bill. She didn’t know it had passed and worried about her own healthcare and that of her family.

Then my doctor, who is the best doctor I’ve ever had, came in and I immediately burst into tears. She sat with me and listened in the way doctors who take their time do–resisting everything in the system that urges them to rush through appointments. “I’m so sorry about your mom,” she said. She asked me how I was doing. And after I shared, she told me, with tears held in, that she had lost her mom, too, and remembered what this fresh grief felt like. She sat on that stool and I sat in that plastic office chair and, beyond the purpose of being there, we were two women who had lost our moms.

When I told her it was almost my birthday and I was not handling that well, she reached out and gave me a big hug. And there was more medicine in this conversation and space-holding than the other things we would talk about. It is a gift to be seen in our humanity always and especially in contexts where our whole selves aren’t always seen.

Each mother/daughter relationship is singular. There are intimacies of that connection only ever known by the two in it. This connection, when cultivated, is sacred. And I know it continues beyond the grave. I have felt my mom with me. I know she is accessible to me not only through the ways I experience her in the world but in my very cells. She made me. She continues through me.

Today, I’m drinking out of a mug she gave me when I was a kid. It has my name on it and the meaning of it, one of those mugs you get at gas stations or Hallmark stores. And it says all the things that my mom always said to me. What a gift to come from someone who wanted you to see and feel their love and care all the time.

One day during her last months, when my mom had entered hospice at home, I came in as I did every day to be with her. She was laying in the hospital bed we had placed in a corner of my parents’ bedroom, and I told her she could rest as I settled into an armchair across the room. She had been sleeping most of the day now, and most of the time, when she talked, she kept her eyes closed. But it turns out, mom didn’t want to rest. She had something to say. “I guess I want to tell you,” she said from across the room, “that I’m so proud of you.”

Even in her last times here, she wanted me to know it, to feel it. She wanted me to know her love and that she was proud of her daughter.

Whenever the kids of my friends who are mothers have a birthday, I celebrate them, too. They brought these beautiful beings into the world, they carried them and continue to carry them through this life. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. It’s a beautiful thing to have experienced. I’m thinking of my mom and wishing her a happy birthing day in whatever space or form she is now. I hope she knows I continue to celebrate her and always will.

Tuesday was Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It is my favorite day of the year. I feel so grateful to have grown up here with Carnival and Mardi Gras traditions. As a kid, I thought everyone in the world gathered in the streets for a month-long celebration of life, music, art and culture.

Mardi Gras morning, I was writing a text message to wish a friend a Happy Mardi Gras and my phone autocorrected “happy” to “holy.” Holy Mardi Gras. Which was just right because this day, this celebration is sacred.

As someone who grew up Catholic, I am familiar with holiness as it comes to religion. This means dogma and commandments. Holiness is guarded fiercely and often relegated to the category of the trinity and saints. Organized religion has taken ownership and applied restrictive rules to the holiness that belongs to all of us. As an adult who practices a different kind of spirituality, I have reclaimed what holy means.

Holy is gathering in the streets with neighbors and strangers to cheer on the majestic sounds made by young people blowing into brass instruments. Holy is the sway of dancers hips to live drums and songs blasted from speakers. Holy is spontaneous line dancing breaking out in the middle of an intersection while folks wait for the parade to roll. Holy is instant communion through shared costumes. Holy is hours and hours spent beading on Mardi Gras Indian Suits. Holy is hot-gluing sequins and rhinestones to add as much sparkle to costumes as possible. Holy is running to people you only see once a year at Mardi Gras. Holy is an entire parade area rallying to get a stuffed animal for a child they just met. Holy is the remnants of tulle on your floor and the smattering of glitter you will find in your house for a month no matter how much you vacuum. Holy is the time when imagination is honored and creativity is manifest everywhere and kindness and hospitality open like doors before you with every step. Holy is Mardi Gras. Holy is its celebrants.

I hadn’t been watching the news much since the peak of Mardi Gras–what folks now call Deep Gras–started last week, but I’ve seen enough to know that the horrors persist. The horrors are persisting. People will continue to be hurt and die from Project 2025 and the dismantling of democracy by this administration, both elected officials and a certain unelected billionaire.

But I have been reminded in a major way in the last week that we are so powerful. Our creativity is boundless. And we have the power to direct our creative energy towards resisting a dystopic future that harms us all in favor of revisioning a better world we build together.

Resistance and beauty can coexist and they must.

Last year, I wrote about the Krewe of Chickpea, which paraded for Palestinian liberation on Lundi Gras. This year, the Krewe of Zeitoun took to the streets led by Nola Musicians 4 Palestine. The arabic word zeitoun means olive. The Krewe organizers asked attendees to wear shades of green and gold, in honor of the olive tree and the olive oil that provides sustenance to Palestians. Musicians played traditional Palestinian songs and participants carried signs shaped like keys, emblazoned with the Palestinian flag, with the words: Return, Rebuild, Remain–a reminder that the land belongs to Palestinians who have the right to make their home there.

On Sunday, I watched incredible young people from high school and colleges, here and throughout the South, as they battled each other, song for song, in a grocery store parking lot, as they do every year. All of the months of practice leading up to this moment, horns blasting and dancers moving in perfect synchronization. Standing there, listeners can hear the thump of the bass drum in their chest, can move with the thrum of the snares.

On Saturday and Sunday, I walked in parades as a member of the Krewe of Dolly, a krewe that celebrates the Queen of Country. And as we moved through each block, we were met with such love and affection from the crowd. A love and affection that has been cultivated not only through Dolly Parton’s radiant music and presence as a performer but through her practice throughout her career of using her platform and resources to help her community and our world. Dolly famously donated a million dollars to help fund the Moderna Covid Vaccine. And through her Imagination Library (which the Krewe of Dolly supports in Orleans Parish), she has helped donate more than 229 million books to children from birth to age five throughout the country since its founding in 1995. That kind of generosity and desire to give back is rightly celebrated.

At five a.m. on Mardi Gras morning in the Tremé, the skeletons of the Northside Skull and Bone Gang enact a longtime ritual rooted in traditions from Haiti; they walk and sing and remind those gathered to not squander our lives. “You next,” they shout, reminding us that death comes for us all. And underneath the Claiborne underpass, Black Masking Indians show off the ornate feathered and beaded suits they’ve worked on all year, dancing to the sound of tambourines and singing anthems, while participating in their tradition to honor indigenous communities who provided refuge to enslaved people seeking their freedom.

Beyond the larger cultural traditions, I am always inspired by the small acts of kindness, devotion, and care that are provided throughout the Carnival season. New Orleanians who live on the route opening their house with drinks and snacks and bathrooms to their friends and friends of friends of friends. Friends setting up chairs and tarps and bringing food and beverages for picnics at parades. Musicians traipsing around the streets sharing their gifts for both planned and impromptu parades. And those community members who are always out for the Society of St. Ann procession with costume repair items–ready to help with extra bobby pins, safety pins, duct tape, and eyelash glue.

After processing, wayfarers gather by the river to scatter the ashes of loved ones passed on. Revelers gather together to hold each other through this mourning and this celebration of lives well lived.

Everywhere, on the streets, you witness bursting of sound, explosions of good will, outpourings of care and sweetness.

Author Arundhati Roy wrote, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

That world breathes deep on Mardi Gras. You can hear her song in the waves of the Mississippi River. You can listen to her heartbeat in the sound of the bass drum. She is already here. She just needs us to remember her. She needs us to call upon her not only in times of sacred celebration. She needs us to resist and be brave so she can be made visible and hearty and present to all.

I want to tell you that I care about you. I want to tell you that even in the hardest, darkest moment, I see your lights radiating out into the communities you are a part of. I want to tell you that even when things are bleak, you and your efforts matter. The biggest lie of any ruling class motivated by greed and control is that we, as individuals, don’t matter. And this is simply untrue. We do matter, each of us. And together, we can move mountains.

Some questions for you:

How are you connecting with your agency in this moment?

How are you remembering what it is you have to offer (both inside and outside the lens of capitalism)?

How are you tuning into the goodness in yourself and in the world to remember what it is we are fighting for?

How are you connecting with others who share your values of building a just, equitable world where all can thrive?

A few years ago, I tried out the practice of making a “good things” jar. This is a practice I’ve seen multiple places, but my initial introduction to it was from author Elizabeth Gilbert. This year, I decided to do this ritual again. At the beginning of the year, you find an empty jar and then, throughout the year, you take a moment to write down when something good happens. I like to do this daily when I go to bed (and when I forget, fill in the days I missed).

The good thing could take many different shapes:

When were you moved by something someone said? When did you have a beautiful encounter with a friend? When did you see a cool flower or bird? When did you go to an event that made you feel alive and connected to something bigger? When did you see something that gave you a feeling of hope or joy? When did you eat something delicious? When did you hear a song that moved you to tears?

You write the good thing down, you throw it in the jar. At the end of the year, you look back and read all the good things that happened over the course of this year.

Here was my jar on January 1.

Here is my jar now.

Do you see all these good things?

These are here IN SPITE of January being one of the longest and hardest months of my life, both personally and collectively. Every single day has brought more communal traumas, more looming threats, more hard uncertainties to navigate inside my own family and our community and world. AND every single day, I have had a good thing to take note of and write down.

Do you know how bullies win? By stealing our attention.

They don’t only come for our rights and our laws and our dreams. They come for our precious attention. They want our nervous systems to be a wreck so that we move into freeze. They saturate us with bad news. They overwhelm us with the sheer audacity of their greed, cruelty, and hate. They demand our attention. They demand our despair.

We will not give it to them.

Because we know that our beloved community members hold within them bountiful beauty.

We know that we are each other’s greatest joy and responsibility.

We know that we are strong together.

And most importantly, we know that the ties that bind us are way more powerful than the empty things they say or do to tear us apart.

That is not to say that the threats and the harm aren’t real.

People’s lives and wellbeing are at risk. The stakes couldn’t be more high.

This is particularly true for those among us who are being most targeted right now: undocumented immigrants, queer and trans youth and adults, BIPOC community members, our incarcerated community members, and all people with uteruses. For our children and adults who participate in our education system and our elders and all those who need our social safety nets.

But in the face of this attempt to strip away rights and protections, we must remember what we are capable of and what we are fighting for in order to be able to fight for it.

Below I’m going to share some resources that have been useful for me in the last several weeks. These are words and practices by smart, heart-centered people who are offering us ways to be connected to our power and agency in these times.

One of the clear actions all of us can take is to make calls to our elected officials to let them know that we object to the decisions being made that put our democracy and rights at risk.

I encourage you to make your own good things jar–to force yourself, even on the hardest days, to find something good to write down. And then to watch as those good things pile and expand.

Remember: Accumulation works both ways. Fear can accumulate. But so can hope. So can kindness. So can acts of generosity. So can mutual aid. So can community.

Remember: It matters that we pay attention to joy, beauty, sweetness, tenderness, connection. Paying to attention to what is good in us and around us–even and especially in moments like this– reminds us of our strength.

James Baldwin wrote: “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.”

May all beings be happy and healthy. May we all thrive. May we find our place in community and may we remember all we bring to the table. May we mirror and magnify each other’s light.

Wisdom, Practices, and Tools for Participation:

• I love this prompt from YK Hong! Write a list of all the things you are skilled at! This doesn’t have to just be the things you would write on a resume. Can you stay up late to work on things? Can you make people laugh at tense moments? Do you make the best biscuits in the universe? Write down all the things you are good at and then ask your friends and community members what you are good at. Or better yet, do it together so you can remind each other of your gifts, talents, and skills.

• I appreciate the experts that are reminding us that we cannot all track everything at once. Read this post by sociologist Jennifer Walter. (I’m also posting below in full). And think: where do you already have expertise, passion or roots? What are two or three things you CAN track and actively participate with? Focus your attention. That’s not to say you can’t stay informed about other things, but you won’t be able to respond to everything. What areas will you be of most service? Where do you feel called to plug in?

• Don’t believe him. This piece from Ezra Klein offers really important context for this moment. Shock and awe are the point. Don’t give into the foregone conclusions they are saying are inevitable. Read at NYTimes here or on Facebook here.

• 5 Calls is an app that easily allows for you to call your elected officials AND for them to track how many calls are being made. They streamline the process of you letting your voice be heard.

• Working Families has great resources for engagement. And I deeply appreciated these notes from author and community meme-keeper and oracle adrienne maree brown from a Working Families mass call.

• A visual reminder from Alyssa Cole of how strong we are together.

• A song (“One Voice” by The Wailin’ Jennys) I like to listen to that makes me feel connected to our communal power. And another one (“Why Shouldn’t We” by Mary Chapin Carpenter).

Thank you for being part of my community.

Hello out there. 

I don’t know how the last seventy-two hours have been for you. For me, they’ve been chock full of emotion: deep waves of grief, fear, anger, disappointment. A friend of mine said: heartsick. That seems to encompass most of it. This result landed differently than 2016. Then, I was shocked. I had been so confident in a different outcome that I spent the days, weeks, months after roaming in a haze; it was hard to reckon with a reality I hadn’t seen coming. 

Wednesday was different. I was stunned in a way that felt familiar. Stunned but not shocked. Stunned but not surprised. I knew this was a possibility and didn’t know how it was going to go. That it was announced so quickly, that we didn’t need days for everything to be tabulated, that was the real shock. The result was clear and decisive. 

I have watched people pour out their grief and confusion and blame and analysis online. I have been trying to give myself a moment to digest this change that will impact us so much. 

Author, columnist, and sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom said that the Democratic Party overestimated how terrified people were of another Trump presidency and they ran their campaign counting on that terror. Some of us felt it, but clearly some did not. Many progressives couldn’t bring themselves to vote Democrat–altered as they were, altered as our world is–by the genocide of Palestinians, funded by our government. Then there is the fact that so many white women, 52 percent, voted for Trump, again. While 92 percent of Black women voted for Harris. 

We have arrived to a new moment in our history. While my dominant feeling these last several days has been grief, another dominant feeling has been resolve. We are not helpless. We are skilled. Each of us carries within us gifts, talents, particular tools that will be of use in this next moment. And our job is to figure out how to plug in. 

I read one writer say on Wednesday that the world is the same today as it was yesterday. I emphatically do not agree. The world is much scarier than it was three days ago. More people will die, more people will be harmed, more suffering will happen because of a leadership that is more interested in controlling people than supporting them. Our people and our planet will suffer because of relentless, unchecked greed. The legislation that has already been passed in the last eight years based on the first Trump presidency and appointees during that time has put more people at risk. In the week before the election, we heard stories of multiple women who died because they were unable to access abortion when their pregnancies were not viable–they were unable to access medical care to save their lives. The harm is visible and palpable. This is only one example. And the legislation that has already been envisioned in Project 2025 is much worse. 

I saw another writer friend write about how “Resist!” was a mantra back in those first Trump years. It is easier to resist when you are resourced. I don’t know a single person who is not exhausted right now. The weight of our collective grief from the pandemic, genocide, fascism, and injustice pulls at our shoulders. That is on top of our individual losses of loved ones and jobs and homes and relationships and and and. We are very tired. We are not in the same place psychically as we were in 2016. And it benefits us to remember, as Rebecca Solnit and so many others have written, that exhaustion is the point. Exhaustion is the plan. On Tuesday, Solnit wrote, in a piece that went viral, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love.”

Wednesday morning, when I wrote in my journal, I was thinking of my ancestors. I was asking them how to endure this moment, how to fuel ourselves with hope when bereft. I ended up writing a long letter to my paternal grandfather. He died when I was nine. I didn’t have the honor of getting to know him as an adult. But I have heard stories about him. He hated lying and leaders who lied. He believed in everyone’s right to live a whole and fulfilling life. He wanted leaders who worked for justice. He lived out these values in his life. My most vivid memory of him is seeing him resting on the couch, behind a coffee table that held stacks and stacks of library books. He was well-read because he was insatiably curious. And because one of his favorite things was to talk to others about ideas and their passions. He passed these traits onto my father who passed them onto me. 

I wrote to my grandpa and asked him to help me find my way in this moment. I asked him to help me understand how I am meant to plug in, what skills and traits might be of benefit to the whole. And thinking about him, thinking about all my ancestors and all of our ancestors, makes me remember that we don’t have to rely on what is in us alone. We have histories of resistance to refer to, we have countless stories of organizing inside terrifying times. We have records and documents and photographs and art made by people who, in the face of tremendous obstacles and hardship and fascism, stood up and made their voices known. 

One of the greatest lies of this country is that one person can pull himself up by his bootstraps. That one person can do it all alone. It is a mythology that makes us feel isolated, inadequate, and alone. It is also deeply untrue. 

We need only look to the course of a single day to see the ways that our lives are held up by the care, devotion, and labor of others. Our lives are not possible without one another. And when we remember this, when we live from this remembering, we win. We win no matter what people in power want us to believe. We win because we are stronger together. We win because we are for us. 

When we look to countless movement leaders of our past and they tell us that what we need is love, that what we need is to love one another and organize our lives around that love, those are not empty words. Those come from people who have faced down death threats. People who have walked forward even at great risk to their lives and wellbeing and the lives and wellbeing of those they hold dear. The cost to move with love at the center sometimes meant unfathomable sacrifice. But the cost to move from hate was much greater–to surrender to a soulless life, disconnected from our fellow humans and nature, a death before dying. 

I’m thinking about this as I orient toward this new reality. I’m asking: How can I move from love? How can my daily life be in service to community? How can I use my gifts and skills to work for common good? How can I stay soft in the face of terrible hardness? How can I tap into the tenacity of my ancestors and lineages, those I was born into and those I am akin to, to make my way and lend my hands? 

One role I feel strongly about is my role as a space-holder for creative expression through writing. I’m thinking about how to hold this space moving forward. 

In the meantime, I am sending you love and wishes for care and comfort. And some recommendations of things that have been balm for me. 

Here are some things that have helped me over the last 72 hours: 

Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owen’s message on Instagram. 

This piece “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” by Daniel Hunter, sent to me by a dear friend yesterday. 

This sweet video of a dog resting his head on a guitar. 

This video of James Baldwin.

These reminders of “How We Stay Involved” from the life, words, and legacy of Howard Zinn.

This song led by Wendy Moore O’Neal at a meeting of VOTE, Voice of the Experienced, last night.

A turnout of over 6,000 people to a meeting with SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice, on a zoom Wednesday night. 

The artwork of Lovesome Dove.

Music. So many songs I’ve listened to. And past me lined up concerts this week with musical gems. Is there live music you can access near you? 

A walk I took with the oak elders I always turn to when I need to ground. Is there a beautiful place near you that helps you be present in your body and in communion with the non-human beings around you?

The other thing that has helped me enormously are check-ins with friends. It felt so helpful to be checked in on. And then I wanted to check in with others. We’re going to need to do so much checking in, even more than we already needed which was a lot. This is an invitation to check in on three loved ones: with words, with memes, with questions, with an invitation to share space. 

Tonight, on the eve of the election, I had the honor of seeing our poet laureate Ada Limón read. I adore her poetry and have seen her share her work several times before. Her words on the page are stunning. In presence, she is incandescent. Tonight was extra special because I witnessed her share her words alongside my dad. And because, in the midst of the anxiety of the moment, I remembered, once again, the power of wonder. 

When I was growing up, my dad read to me every single night before bed. We have always shared a common love of language. 

My dad is a poet. He has a large binder where he keeps copies of poems he has written over the last decades and from time to time–for occasions, for sermons at his church–he will share them. He instilled in me an appreciation for the written word, the power it holds and the hope it can bring. 

So it was special to sit alongside him tonight and witness him be moved by the same lines I was, to hear his gentle and audible “mms” of resonance and recognition. We have sat next to one another so many times over the course of my life. But sitting side-by-side listening to poetry in this liminal moment, I was acutely aware of the gift of the moment while inside of it. 

Ada Limón is someone whose poetry carries a sense of reverence for life and living, for the natural world and humans as a part of that world. Her work illuminates the tenderness of being alive in a world where we must face mountains of grief but also a firmament full of wonder. To be able to hold awe and heartbreak at the same time, that is the task of being a human. To illuminate how to hold it, that is the work of a poet. 

My dad is someone who sees hope where there are no visible signs of it, who sows seeds of possibility in empty fields of despair. As a therapist, he has walked alongside countless people as they journeyed their personal dark nights of the soul. In conversation and presence, he has helped me navigate my own. He isn’t afraid of the dark. He knows that shadow is as necessary as light. I have learned from him that resilience is possible even when it's hard to locate, see, or believe. 

Tonight, Limón shared many poems that felt buoying, that spoke of strength and courage through the people she loves and the animals–mountain lions, horses–that leap over fences and run and run and run without tiring. Poems that contemplate the vastness of the galaxies and our place inside them, our connection and obligation to them. The reading felt like a kind of spellcasting (a word she used at one point) for possibility in a moment when I—and I know, others—needed and need deeply to feel connection to our own power and our collective power. 

Before speaking of one poem she was commissioned to write to accompany an important congressional report on climate change, she said that after she met with a room full of hundreds of scientists, one scientist approached her crying, and she said, “I know you have to write this poem…please don’t make it nostalgic.” The poem, entitled “Startlement,” was imbued with current threads of connection to the earth. It speaks of the necessity of moving forward together: "The world says, 'Once, we were separate, and now, we must move in unison.'"

What I am trying to say is that inside that room was the best of us. Sharing and witnessing beauty, hearing the power of creations that resonate across a myriad of selves and experiences, feeling the awe that arrives when we get to feel alongside one another. What it means to not merely be one another’s company but to accompany one another. 

I know that tomorrow’s news will come. I know the incessant feed of fate will roll. I know what hangs in the balance is humongous. I know that there are no simple solutions to any of the problems we face as a collective. 

And I also know that there will always be beauty and wonder to be found in community. There will always be times to call one another home. We have to choose it. We have to hold space for the possibility of a world where we all thrive. We have to vision and believe that world can be. We have to choose us over and over again. 

*Title in relationship to ”Poetry is not a luxury” by Audre Lorde

I don’t know about you but my mental health has not been exactly blossoming these days. This week alone has come with so many things to hold. This past Monday, October 7 marked a year since the Hamas attack which caused the death of 1,200 Israelis and then the subsequent genocide by Israel of an estimated 110,000 Palestinians. As Americans throughout the Gulf South and Appalachia attempt to rebuild and take stock of storm damage from Hurricane Helene, which wiped out entire towns in North Carolina, Florida has dealt with the build up to and now the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, a storm so out of the scope of what we’ve seen before that a longtime meteorologist cried on air when speaking of it. These are the big headlines. There are, of course, the avalanche of stories that are part of this and then the ones that exist beyond. 

It is not only that we are constantly tapped into the news through our devices. It is that the world is, indeed, on fire and we are watching it burn. How are we supposed to feel good? How are we supposed to remain composed in the face of manmade atrocities? Isn’t feeling disturbed and not okay the natural response to this kind of violence and harm? 

Today is World Mental Health Day.

I am someone who has struggled with anxiety and depression my whole life. Like many, I happen to be very sensitive. That means that I have the capacity to feel joy deeply and witness beauty in profound ways. It means that I love to create and find deep satisfaction in making meaning through art. It also means that suffering can, sometimes, surround me. 

I can’t stop thinking about the way in which we, as with everything else, have reduced mental health to a matter of personal responsibility. Your brain, your problem. 

I want to scream: It’s the world!

When we talk about mental health, we talk about it in a very specific way that puts on all the onus on individuals. You go to therapy. You do mindfulness practices. You learn to regulate your nervous system. You eat nutritious meals. You exercise more. You go on medication. You get enough sleep. You do things you enjoy. 

But we are not singular beings living inside a vacuum. We are complicated, compassionate beings who cannot ignore the suffering around us. It is part of our makeup to feel for others. It is what makes us want to be in relationship with and help one another. It is, in fact, our desire for community and connection that is the most beautiful part of being human. So why, then, is there this “fend for yourself” mentality when it comes to mental health? 

We all face times in our life that are too hard to bear alone. We lose loved ones. We lose relationships. Our health shifts in ways that alters everything, or the health of our loved ones causes the alteration. We experience traumas of all kinds that fracture our sense of who we are or what the world is. 

Not to mention that it is very hard to simply be alive these days. The cost of rent has skyrocketed. And, if you are fortunate enough to own your home, you have to deal with the rising costs of home insurance, rising because climate change is putting your home more at risk of a flood and fire. Just getting groceries is a feat in this time of inflation. Inflation that benefits the few at exorbitant cost to the many. 

People are overworked, underpaid, overstretched, undersupported, and it is on top of this that they, that we, are witnessing all the other suffering of fellow human beings. 

We do not get sick alone and we cannot get better alone, either. Healing is only possible in community. And healing is only possible insomuch as the community is willing to address the harm happening and do better. 

That is what I think is some of the standstill. People in power want to pretend that bandaids are enough. That it is enough to protect certain parts of our lands while letting corporations endlessly ravage and pollute other ones. That it is enough to offer healthcare options that are still unaffordable to too many. That it is enough to claim to be trying to stop the bombing while, at the same time, sending our resources and weapons to other countries who use them to kill innocent civilians. That it is enough to make empty promises about gun control while awaiting news of the next mass shooting.

For far too long, I have been feeling like I’m living inside a dystopian novel. Watching on Instagram as influencers do silly dances and advertise skin care products alongside reels of parents holding babies without skulls, bombs eviscerating schools, Palestinians living in tents atop rubble. My brain cannot compute. 

I have tinnitus. That means I have a constant ringing in my ears. About ten years ago, my tinnitus was brought on, ironically, when I started taking an antidepressant to try to cope with a particularly hard time in my life. I stopped the meds but the sound continued. You can imagine that, instead of making things better, it made things feel much worse. Over the last decade, I have had to attenuate. I have had to make peace with the sound. Sometimes that is easier than others. It is hard to have this pulsing and piercing. And sometimes, the sound changes and I have to learn to live with it in a different way. 

The suffering of the world is so loud and constant. And while we can pretend or use all our coping mechanisms, we will not become attenuated to witnessing others pain and not caring. Our bodies won’t allow us this. We understand on a cellular level what it means to lose, what it means to be sick, what it means to be hungry, what it means to be heartbroken. Thank goodness we can feel this. Our compassion for others is what makes us human. Our capacity to care is what keeps us not only living but truly alive. 

I saw a meme about how the world has bioluminescence and Northern lights but we chose the 40-hour workweek. And paper we call money. And debt. And war. And under the superficial humor is the great tragedy. That our world is so beautiful, that human beings and animals and plants are so incredible as to inspire awe. And what we have made of it is this terror. 

We have boundless creativity and, right now, this is being used either to dominate or to resist domination. When that creativity could be used inside to create and manage a world with systems that allow for everyone to thrive. 

The good news is that it takes very little to remind us of who we are and what is possible. Even inside the most terrible of experiences, we are offered a hand by a friend or a stranger, we notice some small beauty in our environment, we feel an ounce of gratitude for whatever is in front of us to be grateful for: these feed us. We almost can’t help ourselves. Because while despair is very strong, I truly believe the human desire to hope is stronger. 

It is why people rebuild after devastation. It is why people heal after tremendous injury. It is why people are able to forgive even after terrible harm. It is in us to be for us. 

Because that’s the thing about healing. When individuals heal, they don’t only heal themselves, they heal the collective. There is a benefit to all of us when we help each one of us get well. 

p.s. 1: Two practices that help me enormously when I am feeling helpless about the state of the world and suffering are these two Buddhist practices: metta, or loving kindness, and tonglen. Metta is about sending out loving kindness (I think of it visually as radiating light) to yourself and others. Tonglen involves breathing in your own suffering and the suffering of others and breathing out relief to both yourself and them. Here’s a metta meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh. And one with Tara Brach. Here’s a tonglen meditation with Pema Chodron. And here is one on “Surrendering to the Earth” with Lama Rod Owens.

p.s. 2: I love the illustrations of Lovesome Dove who shared some of the powerful pieces she’s created over the years to engage with mental health topics.

p.s. 3: If you are ever feeling like you need someone to talk to, call the 988 lifeline <3.

Authors’ note: I wrote this during the hurricane last week. This was in the liminal space while we were waiting. We were fortunate to not lose power and, although the water rose high, it didn’t enter our homes. I didn’t have any of that information when I was writing this. I’m choosing to publish this documentation of that in-between moment, where there was both a sense of calm and a sense of fear that comes with the threat of the storm and the unknown on the other side. With wishes that those who did have storm damage may be able to get support from the community as they rebuild. 

I write to you in the middle of a hurricane. I am hunkered down. I cooked dinner for my parents, hoping the onions would saute and the kale soften before the power went out, if it went out. Then I plated the food, with some flourish and style, and we ate together as we did in all the evenings of my childhood. And inside this storm, which I was panicking about only a short time before, the arrival of stillness and intention and beauty. 

The threat is still here, of course. From where I am writing, I see sheets of rain outside and hear the strong cadence of the wind. And even though Francine is gentler than other storms we’ve faced–landfall as a Category 2, moving fast–we don’t know what she will do or leave in her wake. All of this is true.

And

This moment is offering something else. 

Stillness. Slowness. Opportunities to notice and nest. 

Standing at the stovetop, I remembered the days of the early pandemic, lockdown, when our principal job (unless we were medical professionals or essential workers, who carried us through that time) was to stay home. We were asked to do nothing–or do only what was necessary–in order to protect our community members. And there was a feeling in that that I can’t quite describe. Or describe in a way that goes beyond platitude or cliche. Because, it really did feel as if my heart was warm inside my chest. I remember the visceral fear of that time–of the disease and also all the uncertainty–but I also felt more connected to fellow human beings than I ever had before.

Remember that? Remember that feeling? Of being truly with one another in this moment? In the midst of near total isolation, I felt the power of being part of a community. 

Today, a local writer and baker I follow wrote in her Instagram stories about, in spite of it all, she likes the energy of pre-storm prep–neighbors checking in on each other, bringing supplies and wine. 

This is the kind of community that we can experience inside a crisis–here for one another, all in this together kind of energy. 

What I have been feeling today is the feeling of permission to rest, permission to hunker down. Without the expectation of plans or productivity. 

This is a permission that is harder to take for ourselves when the world is rushing around us. That cult of hustle, another kind of hurricane. 

This world of urgency is of our own making. This world where we have to spend so much of our lives at jobs in order to pay our bills. This world of ongoing genocide of entire bloodlines. This world where the majority suffer and fight for the basic tools of survival at the hands of those who can afford to live without even minor inconvenience. 

One of the things that happened for me post-pandemic is the shock of reentry. The world of before—coming back—felt too big, too much, too loud. 

I had spent time watching the waxy young green leaves unfurl from my houseplants (which I had recently discovered I could keep alive) and I had learned to distinguish the songs of birds who lived in my neighborhood? 

On top of the anxiety of less protocols and protections from Covid, how was I supposed to be at events with dozens–much less hundreds–of people? Or adjust to the pace of a day chock full of meetings? How was I to not get overstimulated by meeting so many new people again?

I’m still not adjusted to the pace of life. I knew it was fast before but, having lived inside an alternative, I feel it in my body now. 

There are real spaces of urgency. Officials and emergency personnel have been preparing for days so that those most vulnerable to this storm had safe places to go and staffed those places with other community members. 

We must attend to the acute crises we face in our work, our homelife, and our community. 

But, if we are fortunate enough to not be living in acute crisis at each moment, there is actually room for both: for stillness and motion, for supporting our community and supporting ourselves, for joy to balance out the sorrow. 

Creator of The Nap Ministry Tricia Hersey says, “You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.”

And it shouldn’t take a global pandemic, it shouldn’t take a hurricane, it shouldn’t take a major illness or a leveling case of burnout for us to realize that we have to, for our own survival, let ourselves be still sometimes.

Tomorrow will bring what it will bring. I carry the fear of what could happen and what I do not know. But alongside those real emotions, I also feel the power of my community. I feel the invitation of the pause. 

*Title of this essay comes from a lyric by Tim Hanseroth and Brandi Carlile from their song “Hurricane”  

It’s raining today. The rain hasn’t come lately and we needed it. The timing is fitting because today is an anniversary of so much rain, so much water. Many of us have line in the sand moments in our life that neatly separate our lives into before and after. For New Orleanians, it is nineteen years ago: before the storm, after the storm. You don’t have to name the storm. We all know which one. 

I grew up with hurricanes. The watches and warnings were familiar to me. As I recall, we only evacuated once, when I was about ten. We drove north to Arkansas when it looked like a storm was heading here. I remember returning home and my dad saying something like, “a few leaves fell.” It wasn't a big storm. Living here bore the same risks as other places. In Kansas, there were tornados. In San Francisco, earthquakes. Here, hurricanes. 

On August 28, 2005, I was living in San Francisco, having moved there from New Orleans a year before. I talked to my parents in the leadup to the hurricane. They were planning to go to a festival in Southwest Louisiana, where my mom is from, and threw a couple extra things in the car. At the last minute, at my urging, my dad moved all the family photo albums to the top shelf of their closet. This was purely a gesture of a loving father to put his daughter’s mind at ease. No one anticipated a real threat. 

But then, of course, the storm came. The levees broke. 

We didn’t know for weeks whether our house was flooded because it took weeks for the water to drain out of the city. In the meantime, my parents’ visit with family became an extended one, their lives up in the air. We watched as help didn’t come. We watched images of families stranded on the tops of roofs, people floating in the water, elders outside the convention center in wheelchairs without access to medicine. Stories came in about people in jail cells who hadn’t been evacuated with water rising to their necks. So much time has passed and all of the stories are still so vivid. As is the sense of helplessness alongside the utter rage that so many people in my hometown had been abandoned. As is the remembrance of Bush’s flyover the city, the FEMA director whose credentials involved something with Arabian horses. As is the blunt and terrible exposure of racism in the lack of response to American citizens whose city had been destroyed. 

In the days, weeks, and years to come, I would grow to hate the word resilient. Resilient, all too often, is the word is summoned not only as a way to assuage the pain of life but as a form of distancing. They are resilient so what happened is in the past. They are resilient so they can bounce back. They are resilient so there is a limit to the need, a limit to how long and how much I need to care. 

So many people came to help. It was a beautiful thing. But there was also so much abuse (Halliburton contracts) and so much neglect. I remember driving around the city a year later and seeing the same piles of detritus outside homes, the lights out on main streets around the city. The storm might as well have happened yesterday. 

The other thing I remember was how–for a long, long time and for the first time in my life–I dreaded telling people where I was from. Because the questions would inevitably happen. Some version of: “Oh, were you affected by Katrina?”

What a dumb question. How could anyone from New Orleans not be? 

And I was lucky, of course. I didn’t lose loved ones. I lost almost every artifact of my childhood and adolescence. I lost my childhood home. I lost the sense of safety I had carried til that time. But I didn’t lose people. Too many New Orleanians did. 

I began to carry a rote response for whenever someone asked me that question. But I often could not carry my anger. Cause seriously, how dare you, Person I Just Met At A Friend’s Birthday Party? We should be more careful with one another. We shouldn’t ask someone to recount their traumas to satisfy our curiosity. 

Over the years, my reaction has diminished, and I can talk about that time without the pain teeming under the surface. But it’s still there. When someone I just met asked me earlier this month, I gave a once sentence response, and changed the subject as quickly as possible. 

Other things people would say: Oh well, it was bound to happen being below sea level, People shouldn’t live there anyway, Why didn’t people just leave?, I wish I would’ve gone–you know–before, It will never be the same again, New Orleanians are SO RESILIENT.

Three years ago, in the leadup to Hurricane Ida, I sat in standstill traffic on the way to Houston with my mom and dad, our two dogs with me in the backseat, my body humming. Sixteen years later, in the midst of a pandemic, and the fear fresh. Would we return to our homes intact or would we have to begin the slow goodbye to what was lost, the slow rebuild of our home and sense of assurance? 

We were lucky. My parents had a broken window. I had a small leak in my bedroom ceiling. We had tons of debris in our yards but our walls held. Our fridges had been emptied by neighbors who stayed so we didn’t return to that stench. We were lucky.

When I woke up this morning, I thought of a tattoo a friend had on her arm of a line from a poem that reads: how little lasts and how long. 

Thunder rolls as I write this and I’m thinking about all those years ago. I’m thinking of everyone we lost, all those stories unwritten. I’m thinking of the ways hundreds of thousands of people’s lives were forever shaped by those levee walls, weak from years of disrepair and neglect, cracking. I’m thinking of the way the water came in. I’m thinking of climate change and the fierceness of fires and storms. I don’t know what to say except a prayer that we may do better to protect one another, may healing may be found. May we do better. May we heal. May we be found. 

p.s. Soul Queen of New Orleans Irma Thomas sings “It’s Raining” with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint on keys.

p.p.s. I’ve written about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath many times over the years. Here are two other pieces: The Water Will Never Not Be Here & Plot. 

I have had a really hard summer. Every time I have felt a little space, something else has come in like an avalanche, another trial that requires enormous effort to come out of, simply to breathe. It is easy to feel, in these moments, that I am alone. Especially when friends don’t reach out, and I don’t have the capacity to ask for support. Hard times bring into sharp focus how much we need one another. We simply can’t walk this life alone. 

Even if we don’t believe in the bootstraps narrative, we are permeated by it in American culture. The mythology that we can and should carry ourselves through life is so pervasive. That narrative not only controls how we feel about work but how we feel about home, family, community, and grief. We are told we should be able to suck it up and keep going and that our suffering–an inevitable part of being human–is somehow our fault or, if not our fault, our burden to bear alone. Alongside the bootstraps narrative is an encouragement of collective and individual amnesia–that we should get over and forget the harms done and done to us (even those being inflicted in this precise moment) so that we can live inside a world unimpacted by harm. These are fantasies. And they are fantasies that harm us all. 

A few weeks ago, I went to a songwriting retreat I’ve been lucky enough to attend numerous times in the last seven years. Every year, the organizers come up with a theme that organizes the daily prompts and loosely holds us in a common vocabulary. Last year, the theme was “Witness.” And as part of the retreat, the leaders asked us to bear witness to one another throughout the week by writing our observations down on papers to put in envelopes with each of our names. A scrap of a lyric, a smile at an opportune time, the ricochet of someone’s laugh, the feedback that helped us work on our song. We were asked to document the way we showed up in the space together. 

When I got home that year, a few days after the retreat, I read people’s noticings about me. And I found tremendous gratitude in being seen, being seen for the things about myself I value and the things I would never think to. I placed the small pink envelope on my altar where it stayed. Then in June, when I was reeling from family health issues and overwhelm, I picked up the envelope again and began to pull out the notes. Across time and distance, I felt the buoying and bolstering of this community I had been and still was a part of; they helped carry me through. 

This wasn’t the first time I had participated in a retreat that had a practice like this as a component. During college, I went on several religious retreats through my Catholic university. Instead of envelopes, leaders wrote our names on brown paper bags, and we were invited to write notes to one another throughout the retreat time. They called these notes “palankas.” 

I imagine they told us something about what that meant at the time. But decades later, all I remembered was the name. And what it made me feel like to read them: buoyed, bolstered, seen, held.

Last night, I was curious. I looked up what the word meant on Google. Immediately, I was shown an illustration of a fort. Specifically, I was told a “palanka” was a wooden fort used in the Ottoman empire. But when my eyes scanned right on the page to “see results about,” it simply said: Palanka, Fortification. 

Fortification. 

These messages were meant to fortify us: to strengthen us and protect us during the storms of life, the crises of faith, and the times when we did not remember our own nature. 

There are occasions when we celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of the people we are fortunate enough to know and love. Among them, birthdays, graduations, and funerals. If we’re lucky, we tell each other in texts and conversation, too. But how often do we record the exact shape of our seeing? The precise curve of our gratitude? How often do we remind people of the difference between their presence and their absence? We think, sometimes, that others must know their gifts because we see them so clearly. How could they not? Until we remember how hard it is for us to remember when we are in the throes of anxiety, depression, grief, or shame. 

There were no envelopes at the retreat this year. The retreat had a different theme: “Inheritance.” And the previous-year ritual had to do with witnessing. But on the second day at breakfast, some of us were talking about how meaningful it was to have those noticings. Every single one of us had pulled that envelope out during a dark day to remember what other people had seen about us when we didn’t even know they were paying attention. We asked one of the retreat leaders if we could do the notes again and offered to help. I wrote everyone’s name on the envelopes and placed them on a wooden table. On the last night of the retreat, a half dozen of us sat at a table writing these notes together, a practice of devotion. Because the thing is, it isn’t only a joy to receive them but a joy to notice the qualities of others, the moments when they shine. This is what it means to be part of a community: we witness one another and see how each person’s gifts make us greater as a whole. 

Every night on this songwriting retreat, we hold a song circle where retreatants share their original songs, ones written at the retreat or before. On the last night, people share collaborative songs that have been composed in the last seventy-two hours. Every time, I am astounded, not only at the power of the songs, but at how many ways there are to write a powerful song. With the songs all laid out together, it is so apparent that it isn’t a competition. That all of these songs are necessary. That everyone’s gifts belong. That these songs–each in a different way–-fortify us. 

At the end of the retreat, I saw the once-flat envelopes expand with others’ words. And I imagined those envelopes, slipped into rolly-bags and purses and tote bags before being ushered onto kitchen counters or bedside tables or into desktop drawers. Tucked away for the time when the person needed to be reminded of the brightness of their own light. 

We all need to be reminded of why we matter. We all need to be rooted for. 

My first moment of need came soon. When I came back home and was immediately under the weather with a non-Covid virus, the notes helped me feel in touch with a self that felt far away in the dark cave of not feeling well. 

And of course, when I read the noticings by others, I don’t only think of what they shared about me. I also think about what I saw in them. I think about what I noticed and how they moved through the space. I think of all of them, and all of our songs, as part of an expansive and illuminative community. Our lights are bright on our own. And even more radiant together. 

Webster's definition of fortify is “to make something stronger, especially in order to protect it.” There is, of course, another meaning: “to add spirits to (wine) to make port, sherry, or a similar drink.” When we speak the truth of someone else, we do this. We add spirit. We don’t need a special occasion to do so. We can fortify at any time*. 

*This essay comes with an invitation to reach out to one or five people today to share a noticing about them. How is it they make you feel seen? How is it they shine? How is it they make your life or the world better by being in it? 

One day a couple weeks ago, as I was sitting on my couch with my cup of coffee, I looked out of my window to a strange sight. A flurry of dragonflies were flying erratically around my front lawn–landing on the grass and lifting off again, their flights elliptical and unpredictable. They spun out in layers from one another. There seemed to be no pattern. It was chaos. 

After doing a search, I found that dragonfly swarms are quite common.

Static swarms happen when dragonflies feed together in a group. Hundreds may dive over a lawn, field, or pasture in figure-eight patterns to catch insects. 

Migratory swarms occur when they fly in large masses. They can be so dense as to be detected by weather radar. These swarms take place when they are moving south or gathering to feed on pest insects. 

Hunting swarms involve dragonflies gathering to eat other insects who are also swarming. 

Years ago, a close friend told me years ago that she loved dragonflies because they are a symbol of transformation and rebirth. They appear, she said, as harbingers of change. Her interpretation has stuck with me. 

Every year for my birthday, I pull tarot cards. And it wasn’t until later on the swarm day, when I looked at my altar on the way to another room, that I remembered that the animal card I had pulled for this year was the dragonfly. 

Here’s what the book said: “Dragonfly is the essence of the winds of change, the messages of wisdom and enlightenment, and the communications from the elemental world…Dragonfly medicine always beckons you to seek out the parts of your habits which you need to change.”

I struggle deeply with change. 

I feel terrified and clumsy in the face of change, always worried that I will make the “wrong decision.” My anxiety tells me that it is better to stay cramped and boxed in rather than risk the freedom of the open unknown. I can understand logically that change is necessary for survival. But my body and my mind have other opinions. They want to protect me from any possible danger and, in the face of the unknown, everything carries a risk. 

I began writing this the day after the news of Biden leaving the presidential race and the endorsement of Kamala Harris by him and others. Change is certainly here.

The day before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had done a long video on Instagram Live talking about the dangers of Biden stepping down without a clear plan in place, to change this late in the process.

But what we’ve witnessed in the immediate aftermath is a strong movement by many to support Harris and a resurgence of hope by some who have been disillusioned. This isn’t across the board, of course, for many reasons. But it did feel that a moment that felt leaden was suddenly a little bit lighter. 

The day before Biden resigned was Saturday, July 20, 2024: the date of the first entry of the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s novel The Parable of the Sower. The Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, is a work of speculative fiction that takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth reeling from climate change and inequity. The protagonist is an African-American empathic teenager Lauren who must navigate this world. 

The book opens with these words: 

All that you touch, you change. 

All that you change, changes you. 

The only lasting truth is change. 

God is change.

The only lasting truth is change. 

On the day of the dragonfly swarm, I watched an Instagram Live between adrienne maree brown and Malkia Devich-Cyril (which you can watch in full and I strongly recommend). In it, these thinkers and visionaries talked about so many potent things.

adrienne maree brown spoke to this moment saying: “I am moved by the energy I feel in the pivot…something just opened…the part of me that feels into the collective was like, whoa, something that just opened…I think we can find some way to make use of the opening.” 

Devich-Cyril spoke about embodied grief. “We are in an era of mass loss,” they said. “The world has not experienced this level of simultaneous emergency. At a time when the world is more connected than ever, it’s more separate than ever…having simultaneous emergencies at a time when you feel you can’t do nothing when you feel powerless, the stress on the body, the individual, the collective body, its profound.” 

This resonated in my bones. An era of simultaneous emergency. Where to turn? What to do? When the sirens are blaring, when the devastation is everywhere.

“When we root in grief and our understanding of grief as a process,” they said, “it helps us to be more embodied, when embodied can be in greater understanding of what’s true. I wish we would remember that we are defending each other not a political system of neoliberal democracy. The presidency is not a vehicle for transformative change. I care about whether the presidency can give my people more room to defend each other…Presidential election is not where we fight for liberation, its where we fight for space.” 

I encourage you to listen to the whole interview. I’ve listened to it twice. 

I’ve been thinking about grief so much these last years and, particularly, in the last few months. When we talk about grief, we so often speak of it as a personal experience related to individual, familial, or communal loss. But what about the massive grief that comes from living in a world on fire? What about the collective grief that we are all holding in our bodies? Grief that stills us into inaction or quakes us with rage. What about grief that keeps us separated from one another–unsure of how to move forward and afraid to admit we are struggling? What about the grief of watching genocides unfurl in real time? What about the grief of witnessing our earth become more and more affected by climate change or having our bodily autonomy and rights stripped away from us or watching as marginalized communities’ humanity is put up for debate by politicians proposing legislation that would cause tremendous harm? This all on top of our individual losses and griefs. 

I told a loved one recently that life right now feels like walking into an ocean full of white-capped waves. I see one, try to lift up enough to escape before being bowled over and pulled under, my nose filling with saltwater, my mouth stinging. I pull myself up and have only a few seconds before another wave comes to knock me over again. And as a conscientious observer, I can see I am not the only one in the water. I am not the only one facing these waves. 

Referencing Prentis Hemphill’s video on Instagram, Devich-Cyril said, “Chaos doesn’t have to be bad. Chaos is simply the condition. Sometimes disruption is needed. We’re in a period of disruption and we need that.” They described grief as not an emotion, but a process. 

Devich-Cyril said “the moment is trying to push us towards pessimism. We are mandated to resist that” and “the right action is to take action, the wrong action is to do nothing” and “don’t give up before we try.” 

As I viewed the conversation between adrienne maree brown and Malkia Devich-Cyril, I watched the dragonflies swarm outside my window. What looked like chaos to me was actually careful orchestration. This coming together for sustenance or to move homelands. What was happening was a swarm of action, a swarm of creation, a swarm made of tiny creatures taking flight. 

Last week, I pored over a box of photographs from high school. Much of my childhood and teenage ephemera was lost in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina so what I do have is both precious and a reminder of all that is gone. I found dozens of packets of photographs. There was a time–I remember it so clearly–when you brought your film canister to the drugstore and had to wait days to get them developed. And when you did, it was often a genuine surprise what you would find. The memories were older because you didn’t take a picture of every single moment of life–just the ones you deemed worth remembering.

As I flipped through the photos, I was so touched to witness myself all these years ago, still so young and in formation. Dressed up to go to winter formal, posing backstage in costume and stage makeup with fellow cast members at plays, meandering London where I traveled to perform with my high school chorus. There were also snapshots of makeovers from sleepovers with friends, a selfie where I only captured the top half of my face. I felt such tenderness for this girl, who was doing her best to shape her life and make friends and be herself. Who was trying so hard to figure out who herself was. 

I remembered, too, how hard I was on that girl, how demanding. I remember how clumsy she felt walking through the halls, how ginormous she felt compared to the models on the cover of every magazine, how she had all these questions about how to do life right. I could see how askew she was in her mindset. She was vibrant, beautiful, talented, and kind. 

The day before my forty-fifth birthday, I went for a swim at a local pool. As I swam laps, I felt the differences in my body from years ago and the familiar critical thoughts arose in my head. 

And then, I thought of that girl I was. I thought of how mean my mind was to her sometimes in the name of protection. I thought of how hard I pushed her at times when she only needed tenderness. I thought of how, years from now, as an elder, I would feel the same way about myself in this moment. Why was I so hard on her? 

So I decided to try, at least in that moment, to be kinder. To give myself the grace of my own careful attention. 

I was talking to a friend about the experience of finding those old photos and said it was like I was an auntie to myself, looking back with such care and love for this younger version of myself. To have reached the age to be able to have perspective like this is a privilege, I know. And alongside all the fears that come with aging inside a culture that hates aging and particularly hates women who age, I feel a gratitude to be here. 

When I was young, middle-age felt so ancient to me. But now that I have arrived, I feel confused and disoriented because I still very much feel like a beginner. Having more years of experience does not mean I have it all figured out, as I suspected in my youth. What I find is that I have even more questions. And knowing more sometimes makes life harder and decisions more complicated. I miss the brazenness of my twenties sometimes. But then I remember how hard they were–I was often consumed by self-doubt, I didn’t know how to manage my anxiety or intense emotions, I was plagued by a desire to fit in at all costs. Each phase of life comes with its gifts and its challenges. 

Today, I was listening to the podcast Wiser Than Me where Julia Louis Dreyfous interviews women she deems “wiser than me.” In this episode, she was talking to celebrated author Isabel Allende who is now eighty. Allende told her she loved being eighty because she didn’t care about what others thought. There was no time for that. I also discovered while listening that she published her first book at 40, a year later than when Toni Morrison published her first book. She had written all her life as a journalist, but she said, this was completely different. These legends lived four decades before stepping into the beautiful legacy they would be most known for. 

In a culture that is terrified of mortality and death, aging is made to be something that is to be feared and dreaded. The beauty industry exists to inform us what our imperfections are and sell us things to fix them. This intensifies as we age. We are supposed to hold onto youth as long as possible. The conversations are about doing things while we are young. The fear pulsing behind is all the things we will age out of. 

But what about the things we age into? 

When I look at myself and the difference from even five years ago, I can see the ways things have shifted. I have a bigger container to hold uncertainty. I have managed to see and shift my perfectionism’s rigid grip on everything. I pursue the dreams and projects that matter to me because I am more willing to try even if it means failing. I hear the inner critic’s voice and recognize it from a mile away. I know who I am. I am less concerned about what is true for other people and more concerned about what is true for me. I can care for others better because I can better care for myself. 

What has come from age is an unfurling of possibility. Instead of the narrowing of choices I was told was inevitable, I feel expansive. 

Often, we hear the cliche of people aging like fine wine. And like all cliches, this one is repeated because there is a nugget of truth in it. In a culture of perpetual urgency and instant gratification, we don’t like to wait. We are impatient and want it now. We assess and judge so quickly. But with time comes flavor, comes distillation; with time comes the distinguishing notes, comes the textures and details we wouldn’t have known were missing before but now savor. 

With my age, I also feel a sense of responsibility, one that feels more like a blessing or a charge than a burden or obligation. I have some years under my belt and I feel committed to continuing to use whatever skills and talents I have to help make things better for all of us. I don’t carry this with the bravado of my youth–where I went out chest forward, wide-eyed with a mission to change the world. I know I cannot change the entire world. I am aware of the enormity of pain and suffering and injustice. I am aware of how many people are needed and how much time and energy must be expended. I know that ripples move outward but move slowly. 

But I also know that I can change something. I know I can work with others on common goals. I know I can change myself and how I show up in the world. I know that small things are often big things. 

We are in a moment in our world where things are scary and so much is uncertain. It is easy to fall into despair. It is so easy to lose our place and to feel like what we the can do is not enough. But I also know that countless people have felt that way and have managed to be part of movements and make art and hold others through suffering and vision a better future even despite that. My heroes are the ones who walk broken hearted through the world looking for ways to mend it. 

Writer Suleika Jaouad wrote, “Living means learning to hold the astonishingly beautiful and unbearably hard in the same palm.” 

Here, in the middle, I’m thinking about all the past versions that reside inside. I’m honoring them and asking them to help me through this next part. To see the good. To hold the hard. To build with the people who want something better for all of us.

When I was a kid, I used to love the days where we did parachute in gym class. Apparently this was something that happened all across the United States during the time when I was in elementary school. The teacher unfurled the rainbow parachute on the ground and we all gathered around, grabbing hold of a part of the circle. We used the strength of our arms to lift the parachute up, we watched it ripple, we raised it high, we took turns running through the middle, then we sat down and held the wind inside with the weight of our bodies: looking across at one another, looking at the light shining down under the colored dome. 

p.s. The afternoon after I wrote this, I went to see Inside Out 2, which I loved. I thought it was even more poignant and funny and resonant than the first one. And I can’t believe how many threads echo what I wrote here today. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend it. For the young ones in your life. But also for the young one inside you. 

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I have always had impossible feelings. I have always been filled to the brim. As a child, I remember not understanding how people walked about their daily lives not being bowled over by worry, fear, or sadness. How was it they were able to live inside the same world as me with their barriers intact? My sensitivity felt like something that made me defective, not made for this life. Tears were always close to the surface, ready to stream at any moment. And my body didn’t feel big enough to hold all the feeling inside. 

This continued as I grew into adolescence. Though I had more containers for my emotions: I sang, I did theater, I found friendships with some of the other feeling girls. And, at the center of it all, I found music that mirrored and echoed what I felt inside. 

Among that music was Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. 

Let’s begin with the cover. 

A woman with fiery red hair looks directly into the camera, her face is turned slightly upward, revealing the ridges and length of her neck. Her skin is over-saturated, almost ghost-like, translucent. Her hand covers her heart. Her name and the album title are written in cursive in what seems to be her own hand. The woman is striking but this is not necessarily what would be called a “pretty” or “flattering” photo. It is, instead, a powerful one: an image of a woman choosing to be seen on her own terms. 

Even though Fumbling Towards Ecstasy  hasn’t been in my regular rotation for decades, I still know every word of every song by heart. And the songs are full of all of the feelings that filled me at the time, the ones I still feel: yearning, rage, desire, loneliness, fear, heartbreak, and even, at times, elation. They carry the shattering of endings, the power of love, the beauty of being seen. 

When I listened to these songs as a teenager, I connected with the words and McLachlan’s voice. Her voice held such a power and also an undeniable ache. Without having language for her technique, I marveled at her range: how she could make her voice both wispy and rope-strong. 

I came of age in the eighties and nineties, when “feminism,” in many circles, was a bad word. I wore pantyhose to church and recitals and dances, and I got strong messages that my thighs and calves weren’t the only things that needed confining. 

There were so many rules for girls, both spoken and unspoken. We were supposed to be powerful without being intimidating. We were supposed to desire but not inconvenience others with our want. We were supposed to be smart but not smarter than boys. I didn’t know how to make sense of these contradictions. Was I allowed to strive or did I need to shrink? Was I supposed to be myself or contort into the shape of whoever stood before me? It seemed that it was impossible to get it right. 

When I read Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher in my twenties, I felt seen as I understood the great dilemma I and other girls faced. When we were girls, we were told when we could do anything. But as we aged, we were told incessantly except that. 

Years later, when I began to take my writing more seriously, I would hear the phrase “confessional poet” spoken with dripping disdain by men and women alike. Women songwriter heroes of mine were described as saccharine. It seemed that when men mused about their inner worlds and tried to understand the workings of their psyche, that was philosophy, psychology, literature. But when women did it, it was myopic navel-gazing nonsense. 

I have always loved to write and found power in using writing as a way to metabolize the feelings that were uncontainable. I had my first blog in my early twenties that I used as a place to parse through experiences and make sense of the world. I was writing essays, though I didn’t know to call them that then. 

At that time, one of my roommates, who I never felt understood by, told me that she had found my blog and that it made her uncomfortable. She said, “it was like I was reading your diary.” In that moment, I felt a flush of embarrassment bolstered by the dissonance of knowing she didn’t get it. Did she not understand that I had crafted those paragraphs out of experience but not merely expelled them onto the page? Did she not understand that in languaging my vulnerability, I was making a choice? 

When I was a senior in high school, I went to Lilith Fair. At the time, I was deeply grateful for women artists. I was also fascinated by feminists while simultaneously scared of being labeled as one. I understood that to be called one, in many cases, was to not only be reviled but also dismissed out of hand. I went to Lilith Fair with one of my best friends from high school and my cousin. 

Sarah McLachlan was a hero of mine, not only because of her musical genius, but because she had created this space for women musicians. She did it, as she has said many times, because venues didn’t want to book two women acts in a row. They said tickets wouldn’t sell. So she made a whole festival made of women musicians. And she named it after the most maligned woman in the bible. Lilith: the first wife of Adam banished from the Garden of Eden for not being subservient to her husband. 

I can still remember where I stood watching that giant stage and the power of witnessing all these women musicians wail with their voices and instruments. I remember watching them radiate as they collaborated one another. It made a different kind of life feel possible. About a year later, in college, I taught myself to play guitar using their songs: Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Dar Williams, Paula Cole, the Indigo Girls. 

As years passed by, I saw the way some people tried to diminish or discount Sarah McLachlan’s talent. I saw the way incredible musicians were categorized as good “for a woman.” I saw the lingering misogyny in myself too: when I catered to the egos of men I played music with, when I underestimated my own talent. 

Last week, I went to see Sarah McLachlan on the 30th Anniversary Tour for Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I went with my cousin, the same one I’d gone to Lilith Fair with. But this time we were joined by her two daughters, nieces to me, who are nine and almost twelve. When I reached out about the possibility of going together, my cousin told me she had already gotten tickets. 

Sarah McLachlan is fifty-six now and though older than me, I feel closer alongside her as I move further into middle age. From the moment she walked onto the stage, she was fully present. I watched her: so self-possessed, settled in herself and in the truth of her talents. She was gracious and humble without being self-deprecating. She knew her worth. And in addition to sharing her own music, for decades, she has been running a school in Canada so that kids who might not otherwise have access to instrument or classes get to grow as musicians.  

As women in the crowd sang around me, I felt the voices of our younger selves here with us. The emo girls we once were, trying to navigate a world of contradictions and be true to ourselves. I felt the thrum of our lives lived in between then to now. All our choices and mistakes and yearnings and witnessing. All our broken and repaired hearts. All the loves and friends we’d had as company. All the dreams lived out and those still waiting to be returned to. I saw all of us in our bedrooms spinning CDs in our boomboxes, walking through lockered hallways playing the cassette in our Walkmans until they wore out. All of us, singing out at the top of our lungs: this is what it is to be someone who wants. 

Sarah McLachalan said that music is the thing that got her through. Music is her purpose, why she is here. 

Towards the end of the show, she did her song “Fear,” which starts lower and then, over the course of the song, shoots upwards. She started at the piano singing and then she stood. She slowly walked over to the mic and begin to sing the chorus an octave higher, the piercing high notes. Her Dr. Martens rooted on the stage, she stood straight, her arms a little at her sides, palms open, her chest and whole center both steady and expanding as she propelled the piercing notes forward. A kind of melodic levitating. 

We were, all of us, held inside the power of those notes. When she finished the song, I turned to meet the eyes of my twelve-year-old niece. Her eyes held the same amazement as mine.

Thank the universe for the emo girls who share their beauty and artistry with the world.

Sarah McLachlan helped me understand who I was and who I could be before I had the language and how to get there. She made me know, even before I could get there myself, that I could be myself. She made me feel possible. 

And she was part of the unfurling of those truths I hold sacred: feeling deeply is a superpower, sensitivity is a gift, music is transformative, art is alchemy.

When she performed “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” Sarah sang the words: 

And if I shed a tear I won't cage it

I won't fear love

And if I feel a rage I won't deny it

I won't fear love

She asked into the crowd, “How many of us live by that motto?” 

Me. I do.

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In the time since I’ve written to you, I have composed dozens of essays in my mind. I’ve thought of the ways I wanted to meditate on the courage of student protesters for Palestine, the beauty of witnessing musical matriarchs at Jazz Fest, the malaise of grading, and a handful of other things I’ve been negotiating in this particular body and mind. 

But the moments passed unwritten. 

In the time between thinking of writing about the student encampment/liberation zone here at Tulane/Loyola, the tents and art and books and flags and signs and community donations were dismantled and destroyed by New Orleans and Louisiana State police. The last day of Jazz Fest came and went. I finished the marathon of grading and watched as cap-and-gowned students walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. 

Everything moves so fast. There is urgency everywhere we turn. We hardly get to catch our breath before a wave of news comes through, new horrors come through to take the place of the old ones, new stressors disrupt the momentary bursts of joy that come our way. 

Our containers simply aren’t large enough to contain everything that is thrown at us in an hour, much less a day. And if we want to stay present to the world in front of us–the calls for justice, the need–we have to reckon with this. 

We cannot deep breathe ourselves out of the magnitude of this suffering. We cannot stop replenishing our joy because, if we do, the pool will run dry. There will always be need–our own and others–and to live, and to live now, is to constantly negotiate when and how we can be present, when and how we have capacity, and how to tap others out and tap in. 

Time used to feel stretched out far in front of me. The days felt long. Now, in this perpetually-online reality, in the midst of multiple genocides, living in a country in collapse, I find it hard to know how to measure time. No doubt some of this time shift has to do with entrance into middle-age. But this feeling of time slipping through fingers is also about the speed at which we are going as tuned-in techies immersed in late-stage capitalism. Where powerful mythologies perpetuate: every moment must be recorded, every moment must be productive, every interaction must be “worth it.” 

I feel as if I’m always behind in one way or another. And that is not a comfortable place to live. I know I am not alone. 

I’m thinking of the teachings of one of my beloved Buddhist teachers Thich Nhat Hanh, also known as Thay. Thay said, “Drink your tea. Drink your cloud.” Thay said, “Peace is in every step.” 

It’s so easy to dismiss these messages as naive or unachievable, as detached from “the real world.” Okay, you were a monk and of course you could devote your life to that sort of moment-to-moment presence, but how am I supposed to do it with work, with family and community obligations, with trying to keep my mental health and finances afloat?

It’s true that Thich Nhat Hanh never owned a computer. He didn’t have to deal with floods of messages in his inbox. His reality as a lifelong monk and teacher devoting his life to mindfulness was different than those of us that live outside monastery walls. 

It’s also true that Thich Nhat Hanh lived through the Vietnam War and the pain of being exiled from his homeland. It’s true that during the Vietnam war, he witnessed tremendous suffering and tried his best to alleviate it. His words about mindfulness are not apart from this reality—they are are not absent from the fire of suffering but rather forged by it.

Again and again the last few years, I have returned in my mind to an interview I read awhile ago where Thich Nhat Hanh talked about living through the Vietnam War and the suffering he saw. 

The 2013 interview was published in the Southern German Newspaper, the Suddeutsche Zeitung. 

The interviewer asks how he manages to not lose hope after witnessing so much suffering. 

Thich Nhat Hanh responds, Yes, I have witnessed a lot of suffering, especially during the Vietnam war. At that time, I was helping to build a village for refugees in the demilitarized zone when it was bombed by the Americans because Vietcong were hiding there. So we rebuilt it. Then it was bombed again. So we rebuilt it again. Once again it was demolished. The third time we discussed if we should rebuild it again. It was my belief that if we gave up, people would lose all hope. So we rebuilt the houses again a third time, then a fourth time and finally a fifth time.

The interviewer asked where he got the strength to do that. 

We try to transform suffering into something good, Thich Nhat Hanh said. Even a lotus flower needs mud in order to grow. It can’t grow on marble. You have to recognize that there is a close connection between suffering and happiness. If you run away from suffering, you cannot find happiness. On the contrary, we should try to identify the roots of our suffering. Only then can we gain understanding and cultivate compassion.

The monks and the villagers kept rebuilding the new village in the shelled-out remains of the old one. In order to not lose hope, they stacked stones and formed walls in the face of possible destruction. Over and over again. 

I’m thinking of the ingenius work of adrienne maree brown who, in Emergent Strategy and other works, talks about the necessary work of visioning. She talks about how the world we live in was not made by accident. It was made by people with interests who wanted to shape the world to serve them. So we, too, have to be intentional about the world we want to birth. This creativity and visionary building in community is not ancillary or escapist. It is necessary to envision in order to create a world that we want to live in, the kind of world where we are all whole and thriving. 

I’ve had a meditation practice now for almost fifteen years, and every time I sit down on a cushion, every time I get caught up in my emotions, every time my body trembles with overwhelm, I feel like a beginner. The teachings feel brand new. Or maybe it is that they are new to the me of this moment. I am different than I was fifteen years ago. I know I won’t ever have presence figured out because each moment brings new circumstances and barriers and opportunities. Each moment offers a new invitation.

Western views of time as linear are so limiting and so removed from how time really feels. 

We know how memories loop back over, we know we revisit the same material and experiences at different points and feel them differently. If we can view time not as a line but, as many cultures do, as elliptical swoops, circling back over themselves, then maybe we can free ourselves from the urgency that threatens to paralyze us in the here and now. 

It’s true that the issues facing us are urgent. It’s also true that getting swept up in our ego in relation to the urgency doesn’t give us much grounding in our power. We must be present to the suffering, present to the joy, and present inside the knowledge that our journey— as individuals, as a community, as a planet—is ongoing. 

Drinking our cloud, connecting with peace in every step, witnessing the suffering and knowing that something different is possible. Visioning the possible and building toward it. That is what I’m holding in my heart right now. That is what I am wishing for you.