Ranny worked for the telephone company as a lineman and you never knew where he would show up in town. When I was fourteen, my best friend and I would walk downtown after school to catch the bus. We often stopped at Dominic’s Pizza for a midafternoon slice before hopping on.

One afternoon, halfway through our slices, feeling our adolescent independence, we decided to light up a couple of Winstons sitting beside the big glass window at our small table, unaware that Uncle Ranny was outside working on the phone lines.

The next time I saw Ranny, he caught me in the front yard before climbing the steps to see my mother.

“Hey, Cousin Mo-Reen.” He leaned toward me and sang that talking-blues country song, “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”

Then he grinned.

“Feeling pretty cool, you and your friend at Dominic’s, huh?”

He revealed he was outside working on some lines and just happened to see the two of us enjoying a smoke, like two kids trying to look so grownup.

“No! Are you going to tell on me?” I tugged his arm before he walked further.

He promised he wouldn’t so long as he could sing that same song every time he saw me. He sang the next line, “Puff, puff, puff, it if you smoke yourself to death” then let out his deep laugh and walked up the front steps, leaving even me smiling.

Yesterday I returned from Uncle Ranny’s funeral.

He was 94.

I saw my cousin Eileen there, one of his seven children.

“Your mother, she was the backbone of our family when we were young,” Eileen told me.

Eileen’s a few years younger than I am. When I got my driver’s license, I drove her to swim lessons and other things. My sister took her to register for college—the first girl in her family to attend. My aunt Barbara, her mother, didn’t drive. Uncle Ranny worked his job, often overtime, to raise seven kids, while the rest of us helped in whatever ways we could.

That was what our families did. We had about 35 first cousins just on my mother’s side. There was always some way to help. And so much to talk about.

Coming back to my hometown, revisiting my roots brought memories rushing back.

“Hey, Ran,” my mother would say when Uncle Ranny came over to borrow our lawn mower on Saturday mornings. “Would you like a shot, maybe?”

She’d ask as if the idea had just occurred to her.

“Well, OK, Toot, now that you mention it.”

Tootie was her family nickname.

She’d reach into the cabinet above our electric stove, pull down a bottle of whiskey, pour him a shot and put it on the table.

He’d down it.

“Ahhhhhhh.”

Then the two of them would sit and chat for a while.

Soon my mother would ask, as if this exact same thing didn’t happen every Saturday:

“Hey, Ran, do you think you might like one more?”

“Well, OK,” he’d answer, as though this little dance had never been done before.

Another shot.

“Ahhhhhhh.”

Then off he’d go to cut his grass, returning the mower sometime later in the day.

Ranny drank for most of his life but when he was in his seventies, he decided to quit cold turkey.

My cousin Ray, his nephew, worked as a mental health care professional. When Ranny couldn’t sleep and felt as though his mind and body were spinning in different directions, he called him.

“I need help,” he said.

Ray connected him with the help he needed.

Uncle Ranny never had another drink.

Years later, when his wife, my Aunt Barbara, developed Alzheimer’s in her eighties, Ranny was adamant that she would stay at home. He cared for her in their small three-bedroom house where they had raised their children until she died five years later.

There was a lot more to Uncle Ranny than the funny stories.

But I’m grateful for those stories. I see how we loved one another: showing up, pitching in, teasing each other, staying close and yes, fighting, too.

Rest in peace, Uncle Ranny. Thanks for that lovely rush of fresh water for my roots.

Jerry Hall and I were both twenty-two, sitting in the back of a taxi after a fashion show at Studio 54, when she asked me how I’d gotten into the show.

Of course, I knew who SHE was. She had no idea who I was. But I also knew quite a bit about her.

I had been working with Antonio, the fashion illustrator and artist, who had been engaged to Jerry when she was sixteen. While I posed for him, I heard all about their nights out at Club Sept—the clothes, the makeup, the drama.

It was juicy stuff, and I ate it up.

“So how did you get to be in this show?” Jerry asked me.

No question was too personal in the modeling world of the late seventies.

“Antonio Lopez suggested it,” I said, knowing perfectly well that I had just dropped a tempting little fishing hook into the water. Her lithe 6 foot frame coiled around it.

“Oh, you know, he used to be my beau,” she said in that wonderful Texas drawl.

“Really?” I said.

I knew. Before I had any opportunity to say anything else, she reached into her pink purse.

“Would you like to see a picture of my boyfriend?”

“Sure.”

Out came a photograph of Jerry and Mick Jagger. I lifted my eyebrows and looked appropriately impressed, pretending I didn’t already know exactly who her boyfriend was. Then I just listened.

What I remember most wasn’t Mick Jagger’s photograph. It was Jerry herself. She was so unabashedly interested in her own life and somehow, she pulled you in, too. There was nothing coy about her. She had a kind of lovely self-absorption, a siren song that worked very well for her. Hall shined her light with audacity. I admired her approachable, magnetic boldness.

Nearly fifty years later, I find myself admiring her again. About a month ago, I saw Jerry on the cover of AARP magazine, wrinkles and all. She talked about not wanting Botox or fillers and joked that she didn’t want to scare her grandchildren. I loved it.

Here we were again—the two twenty-two-year-olds from the back of that taxi—except now we were older and miles apart on the paths we chose.

I’ve made some of the same choices about my own face. No Botox. No fillers. At this age, I’m less interested in looking younger than I am in looking alive.

I want my face, my body and my health to be vibrant and to radiate whatever essence is mine. The laughter, the work I’ve loved, the people I’ve known, the mistakes, the adventures. I don’t want to erase the evidence. A life lived thus far with my own brand of boldness.

And Jerry? She’s still Jerry. Still commanding attention. Still appearing on magazine covers. Still giving interviewers something others can talk about. Still completely and unapologetically herself. Maybe that’s what I admired in that taxi all those years ago.

At twenty-two, Jerry Hall showed me what it looked like to take up space without apology.

She is still doing it.

In 1939, researchers from the Harvard Medical School asked, “What makes for a happy life?”

Between 1939 and 1944 they enrolled 268 Harvard sophomores including future President John F. Kennedy and 456 young men from some of Boston’s poorest, toughest neighborhoods in what would eventually become known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

The researchers tracked these two groups of men from radically different backgrounds and later their spouses and children throughout their entire lives, some for almost 80 years. Year after year they were asked questions about their families, marriages, income and jobs. They were asked about their hobbies and how often they exercised. They met with psychiatrists, social workers and marriage counselors. Brains were scanned and blood was drawn. Medical histories were reviewed, and more recently, DNA samples were taken and analyzed. All to figure out what makes for a happy life.

So, after collecting thousands of pages of data, what did the researchers come up with? They discovered that the things we think contribute most to our happiness--things like money, prestige, popularity, and success don’t matter as much as we thought.

What they did find is that the happiest people were… by far… those who were involved in close, loving relationships throughout their lives. These were the people who talked and listened to one another--who trusted and believed in one another, and who cared and counted on one another.

The researchers found that the single most powerful driver of happiness was love. People who love one another are the happiest. Period.

I thought about this study recently as I watched my family pile into a canoe. Three generations, a little crowded, everyone needing to make room for everyone else. It struck me that happiness often looks much less impressive than we imagine it will. The bank was muddy, everyone’s shoes got dirty, the youngest was crying…. but they came back with red cheeks and stories about birds and snapping turtles and almost tipping.

It is rarely the accomplishment we worked so hard for or the thing we finally managed to acquire. More often it looks something like people we love, crowded into a boat together on a summer afternoon.

Maybe the still center isn’t something we find alone. Purpose and meaning and love just might reside in the space between us.

If you have been waiting for me to tell you how to find your still center, I can’t. There is no perfect morning routine or prayer, no philosophy that works for every life. If writing this memoir has taught me anything, I know for sure that the still center cannot be borrowed from someone else’s journey. Peace must be discovered on your own unique walk through life.

What I hope these stories have offered are not answers, but clues:

Perhaps the still center is found each time we choose courage over comfort, or every time we begin again when life asks us to, or when we loosen our grip on who we were and become more willing to discover who we can be. I stood with mine and then walked through twists and detours, leaps of faith, grief and joy, motherhood and marriage, failure and faith, New York City and a Connecticut farm, acupuncture, art, and paying attention. Most of all, I found peace through action after realizing what path might be best.

Every transition carried the same invitation: gather the courage to be true to yourself in connection with the divine and then move. In those moments, the still center lives, grows, and bears fruit. Sometimes it is a whisper, other times a storm.

As I write these words, my husband is outside doing what he loves, that is, working the land, uprooting what chokes the good, and planting fresh seed. My son is in DC for three days, behind a camera telling stories that matter to him. My grandsons are sucking homemade watermelon popsicles under the shade of a maple, while their mother creates opportunities for young people she may never meet. And I am writing in the café of my favorite bookstore where I will meet a friend later for lunch.

The basic arc of this memoir is complete, nine months to the day after I began publishing nearly every Wednesday. Stay with me as I backtrack to put more flesh on these basic bones: short stories that add a richer broth and a few spices to make the flavor pop.

Thanks so much for reading, for encouraging me, and for walking beside me on this journey. If you’re inclined, please share with one person you think might enjoy my reflections.

During my second year of acupuncture school, my husband George and his 3 siblings began dividing the 800-acre parcel of land left to them by their grandmother. Fortunately, I was immersed in acupuncture school and had found a small, affordable apartment in Greenwich Village, the same neighborhood where George and I had begun our marriage.The years that followed the beginning of that family debacle would not portray anyone involved in flattering light.

I went for coffee with a friend of mine who was in a strikingly similar quandary: her husband and his three siblings were attempting to divide a similar expanse of land and farm.

“Mine is worse than yours,” she said. “I have a meddling mother-in-law!”

“Me, too!”

She went down a list of uncanny similarities: a sibling with undiagnosed mental illness.

“Me, too!”

We both laughed at our comically traumatic situations.

“I just don’t know,” I shook my head over my last sips of coffee.

“Me, either,” she said, staring out the window to the old copper beech tree.

By the time of that coffee date, I had graduated and chosen to build my practice in Manhattan while the family storm gathered strength back in Connecticut. When young George graduated from college, he moved to the same neighborhood and chose to pursue his master’s at the School of Visual Arts in digital photography. He poured right into city life as if he had never left. We went for walks with our Nikon cameras across Houston St. from West to East and back again, stopping to take portraits of willing subjects. I showed him how you could use the reflections from the sidewalks and buildings to light a subjects face. We discussed while sitting in Washington Square Park how composition could power an image. He was exceptionally good at connecting with people. He took a job at a hip bookstore in the neighborhood before deciding to get another master’s degree in journalism. George worked his way through school while I focused on my private practice first on Broadway in Soho, then on West 9th Street in the Village.

Life was expansive. I had lunch with old friends at Morandi’s on Waverly Place, morning coffee at Jack’s on West 10^th St. and Sunday lunches around the table in my 400 square foot apartment with the six windows on a quiet courtyard on West 4^th. Two mourning doves chose to nest in my window box every spring before planting those fuchsia geraniums and a large tree shimmered golden each autumn outside my window. George came down every chance he got when he could unentangle himself in the negotiations and care for the farm.

In the meantime, back in Connecticut, the four siblings were trying to communicate as though they spoke different languages. Four attorneys joined a situation already complicated by misunderstanding and complex personalities.

George and I could see where that car with no brakes was headed and wanted to stop the ride before it consumed us all. We agreed that the only way to get the division done would be to force a partition. This legal action would coerce everyone to meet before a judge and say what they wanted. Until then, we were the only ones willing to divulge what we clearly wanted. We were fully aware that we would probably not get the whole of what we had cultivated while raising George. We agreed that the peace of mind would be worth it.

As predicted, we did not keep all of the land and buildings we had brought back to life but we kept a slice of that heaven where we are spending this very summer watching our grandkids ride their bikes along the same gravel road and canoe the same river their father grew up on.

I can see that school and work kept our small family emotionally stable during the battle. My first year out of school I volunteered as an acupuncturist every Tuesday for a year at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in Chelsea. Many of my patients were HIV positive or had AIDS. They had no idea, as I massaged their feet and then placed acupuncture needles to ease their anxiety and the side effects of their medications, that I had had a front-row seat to the arrival of their disease before it even had a name. As the doctor I shared the room with said, HIV was a completely different disease than it was then.

Two walls of the reception area at Callen-Lorde carried the large words from AIDS activist Michael Callen, who died in 1993 at the age of thirty-eight:

“In the end, for each individual, it is as rational to believe he or she WILL be among the survivors as it is to assume that he or she won’t…
We must fix our hearts and minds on a clear image of the day when AIDS is no more.
Make no mistake about it,
That day will come.” Michael Callen

While lawyers argued over boundaries and acreage, my son was finding his place in the world. Patients were grateful for more years of life, and I was entering a new season. The land would eventually be divided.

Life, thankfully, kept expanding.

The next chapter of life often begins with a door closing. There are seasons when we feel untethered, but life has a way of offering quiet hints if we become still enough to notice them. I needed a new rhythm to my days. I was considering studying Chinese medicine. I wanted to know whether I could still learn with the same intensity I had in college. I enrolled in a year-long anatomy and physiology course, aced it, and then applied to a three-year acupuncture program in New York City.

At 46 I went back to school to study acupuncture. George was in his second year of college. The house and farm we had restored had shaped so much of his childhood. We sold the animals and a young man took over the organic garden we made. I had no guarantee I could master an entirely new discipline in midlife. I only knew that not trying would haunt me more than failing.

Movement had always been my blue flame. It was the one path that still made sense.

Years of studying dance in the city with extraordinary teachers had awakened an essence deep within me. Every class left me feeling more alive, as though every movement reached into my bones and reminded me who I was.

Then I discovered qigong.

Translated simply as “the skill of cultivating vital life energy,” qigong introduced me to a way of understanding the body that felt both completely foreign and strangely familiar. It wasn’t simply exercise. It was medicine through movement, breath, and awareness.

Something inside me recognized it immediately.

Looking back, I can see the thread that was there all along. My mother’s illness awakened my desire to heal. Science taught me to trust the remarkable intelligence of the human body. Modeling opened my world. Dance taught me that movement could transform us from the inside out. Then qigong gathered those threads together to point me toward Chinese medicine.

The path had never been straight. Riding it was a circuitous and sacred loop.

Acupuncture school was demanding. I became a beginner again, memorizing hundreds of acupuncture points and learning a language of healing that challenged my Western way of thinking. Slowly, I began to see the world through entirely new eyes.

The three years of study, along with two years in a busy urban clinic, immersed me in a community of curious learners and compassionate healers. Living in New York City once again made the transition even more dramatic, yet I was exactly where I needed to be.

It wasn’t an escape from the country, which is still in my heart. This change was the next blended expression of it.

I had no idea where this new path would eventually lead. I only knew I was eager to step through another doorway and trust that something beautiful could be built from everything that had come before.

Every meaningful beginning in my life has arrived disguised as an ending. My family had no idea that New York was about to write the next chapter for all of us during a turbulent and unexpected storm.

I’m running late with today’s post as I pack for a summer away. Before I go, though, I wanted to leave you with one simple practice that is one of my favorites.

I won’t claim it will change your life, but a regular practice will help build strength, improve balance, and support the kind of independence we all hope to carry with us for years to come.

We filmed this video in one take at the end of a full and sweaty workday. It's far from polished, but you'll be able to see exactly what to do, and that's what matters.

Until I write again, you might consider adding this to your workouts or practicing on its own as you take a break from your computer or whatever you are busy with. Would love to hear how it goes if you give it a try.

Balance isn’t just about standing on one foot.

Stability begins in the core. Retaining poise comes from muscles we often neglect, especially if we spend much of the day sitting. The encouraging news is that these muscles respond amazingly well to a small and consistent effort. A practice that slips naturally into your day is helpful—one you might enjoy enough to return to tomorrow or feel inspired to continue once you feel its effects.

note: If you cannot bend your knee on the standing leg, just balance without the bend.

Beginner’s Balance

I just got back from a week back home, where the tides determined my schedule.

At first there was a little anxiety about stepping outside my routine. It took a couple of days to decompress. But high tide was later in the day, and after catching up with family and friends, I slipped into the cool salt water of Long Island Sound. By the third day, I was no longer checking my phone. I slept more deeply than I had in months. A friend came up from the city, and together we hiked paths beneath towering trees, swam at sunset, and ate fresh corn on the cob with cherries for dessert.

By the end of the week, I wasn’t trying to make every moment productive.

I was simply living it.

This morning I’m back sitting outside at one of my favorite cafés in the DC metro area. There is no sunrise over the water here, only the steady flow of traffic. But birds are singing in the trees, and for a moment I’m back beside open windows and the changing tides anchored my day.

One question on my acupuncture intake form often caught people by surprise:

How many vacations do you take each year?

It is not a casual question. Time away gives our nervous systems a chance to settle. Even a long weekend can restore perspective and can remind us what matters most.

Whether it’s a week by the sea, a weekend in the mountains, or an afternoon with your phone out of reach, I hope you’ll make time this summer to step outside your routine.

Soon I’ll be returning to those open skies and changing tides for the summer. I’ll be spending much of that time with my grandchildren, and writing in between the joyful chaos of summer camps, picnics, swimming in the Sound, and catching up with old friends.

Along the way, I’ll share the stories that find their way onto these posts along with simple practices that help me stay grounded.

And as Finding the Still Center unfolds, I’ll begin telling the story of how a journey back to New York to study acupuncture became an unexpected education in healing, resilience, and what it truly means to accompany suffering.

Until then, I hope you’ll find moments to breathe deeply, walk slowly, and rediscover your own still center. I’ll meet you there.

Last Thursday I went for an acupuncture treatment.

My left shoulder had been bothering me. Nothing dramatic. Just the accumulation of daily life: too much time at a computer, more responsibility than usual, and getting ready to travel for the summer.

My acupuncturist, who trained in China, began with cupping and gua sha on my back, neck, and shoulders. The tissues softened almost immediately.

Then he placed needles around my shoulder, neck, and upper back.

“Would you mind putting a few needles in the backs of my lower legs?” I asked.

He smiled and understood immediately. In acupuncture, points on the lower leg are often used to treat neck and shoulder problems. To many people this seems surprising. Why would a point near the ankle affect the neck? How can points on the hands and feet relieve a headache? Why can needling points on the lower inner arm relieve nausea?

About a month ago, several friends and colleagues forwarded me an article that appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine section on May 11. It described newly recognized pathways in the body, identified by researchers led by a pathologist at NYU Langone Health, that may help explain some of acupuncture’s effects.

For many readers, the article described a fascinating new discovery. For those trained in Chinese medicine, it sounded surprisingly familiar.

For thousands of years, acupuncture has described a network of pathways called meridians that connect one part of the body to another. It is one reason a point near the ankle may be used to treat pain in the neck or shoulder.

As I lay on the treatment table, I could feel how the points on my lower legs helped release a knot of tension in my neck that had stubbornly resisted stretching, massage, and wishful thinking.

As the treatment continued, I asked for a few of my favorite “tune-up” points as well—points I have used on patients for years to help regulate the body, calm the nervous system, and support overall well-being.

Soon I drifted into what acupuncturists call an “acunap.”

Twenty minutes later, I woke up feeling my shoulder relaxed, my breathing deeper, and a profound sense of well-being. This is what I aim for in every person I treat.

Walking back to my car, shoulder looser, mind quieter, and smiling, I found myself thinking about the article again. The New York Times article offers a new language for something I have observed myriad times in practice.

Does the discovery of a whole-body communication network that connects organs, tissues, nerves, and fascia prove the existence of acupuncture meridians?

Not necessarily.

But it may help us understand, in modern anatomical language, something practitioners have observed clinically for centuries: the body is interconnected in ways modern science is only beginning to understand.

The New York Times article described the implications as potentially enormous.

I agree. I see the article as a dialogue between modern science and traditional wisdom. If that dialogue continues, it may change not only how we treat disease, but how we understand health itself.

My mixed media piece, Silk-Scarved, is currently showing in a local exhibition.

The image began as a black-and-white photograph I made in New York City in the 1980s. At the time, I did not know where life would lead—through marriage, motherhood, healing work, grandchildren, and writing.

Last winter, I pulled the photograph from my archive and sat at our kitchen table with three grandsons gathered around me. I painted while they painted. Brushes, paper, bowls of water, paints, and conversation.

“How do I use this brush? This stick? Can I smudge it? Will it blend?”

Two liked the tempera sticks, another the brush dipped in acrylic.

Of course we made a mess.

My son, a photographer, and producer of videos, helped scan the image for printing and exhibition.

When I first made the photograph in New York City, he was three years old—probably in preschool, or downstairs sneaking up for a peek into the studio.

Now he has a three-year-old son sitting beside me as I work.

Creativity is rarely a solitary act. We may sign our names to a piece of art, but every work carries traces of the people who helped bring it into being: the artists I worked with when I first moved to New York, the models and their agents who trusted me to get good images, Jason at the printing salon, who spent time helping me find the right exposure and contrast, and the galleries that have shared my work with others.

It takes a village to raise a child.

Sometimes it takes a village to bring a piece of art into the world.

Looking at my grandson’s painting hanging in the kitchen, I found myself thinking about the many ways creativity inspires others.

Influence rarely travels in a straight line. We offer what we love, and sometimes it takes root in unexpected places. Most of the time, we are never even aware of our effect on others.

Creativity can move without awareness from one generation to the next.

That is one form of legacy.

More than once, I’ve had patients tell me that focusing on their breath during a period of intense anxiety only made them feel worse. Their breathing was already shallow and tight. Paying attention to that barely-there inhale and exhale seemed to amplify the problem.

Yet, we now know through scientific research what many healing traditions have taught for centuries: conscious breathing can help regulate the nervous system.

A slow, full breath can signal safety to the body and begin to shift us from “fight or flight” toward “rest and digest.”

Try this:

1. First, simply notice where your breath is. Is it shallow? Is it staying in the chest and neck? Does it feel difficult to take a full breath? Try not to judge.

2. Take a breath in until your lungs feel comfortably full.

3. Hold it gently for one to four seconds.

4. Exhale as slowly as you can, preferably longer than the inhale.

5. At the end of the exhale, become aware of that time before the inhale.

6. Allow the lungs to fill comfortably again.

Repeat. There is no need to force the breath. Let the inhale and exhale happen naturally.

After a few rounds, you’ll notice that the breath begins to get fuller. The belly may start to expand naturally on the inhale. This is a sign that the diaphragm is lowering and the nervous system is beginning to receive the message that it is safe.

Sometimes reading about the breath is one thing. Experiencing it is another. If you’d like, take two minutes and join me for this simple meditation.

Sometimes coming back to the breath is not about taking the perfect breath but being present and grateful for the one you have—and letting the next one arrive without judgment.

In Chinese Medicine, each season carries a unique rhythm we can tune into to support our health. Summer is associated with the Heart. How do we live in harmony with its cadence to be nourished and restored?

The most important quality of the Heart from an Eastern perspective is that it houses the spirit, sometimes translated as mind or consciousness. A healthy Heart promotes stability in thinking and action.

Speech: Before grand rounds in acupuncture school, one of my teachers, Kiiko Matsumoto, often spoke about the power of words in relation to the health of the Heart. Words can soothe the Heart or “wound it like a dagger,” she would say in her heavy accent and gesture like she was stabbing as we chuckled. There was truth in the message she insisted upon. The way we speak to others, and to ourselves, matters.

Diet: Summer invites us to nourish the Heart through the abundance of the season: fresh fruits and vegetables, plenty of water and lighter meals. Foods like watermelon, cucumber, citrus, and celery are considered cooling. Cooling foods help calm what we call “Heart fire” during the heat of summer which, in excess, can cause irritability, anxiety, and agitation.

Relationships: Summer naturally draws us toward one another. A table set for lunch in an open field, a long conversation on a porch at dusk. Relationships that nourish and uplift us are a powerful tonic for the Heart.

Movement: The openness of summer often makes movement feel easier and more inviting. Movement that gently circulates energy without exhausting the body helps support both the Heart and the spirit. Weeding and watering the garden. A sail. A kayak at sunrise. A walk early in the morning. A yoga class.

Reflection: As summer stretches the days with more light, there is often a chance to reflect on the months between winter and now. What has truly nourished you? What no longer feels sustainable? What may be ready to gently shift?

For me, this summer means returning to our place in Connecticut. Swimming out to the yellow raft at high tide. Reconnecting with friends. Cookouts and camps for the grandkids.

Most importantly, I’m allowing the last eight months of excavating the past in my writings to settle and integrate before continuing the journey.

Everyone is different, and I’m curious: how do you think you might be able to “reset” this summer?

It was young George who initiated the revival of the neglected farm.

The abandoned chicken coop started to breathe again under the care of a middle school boy gathering hens the way other children collected baseball cards. Rhode Island Reds, Araucanas, Anconas and Polish hens with their wild feathered crowns.

There was Honey, the tiny Black-Tailed Buff Japanese Bantam who became the gentlest and most devoted mother of them all.

One spring, Honey gathered abandoned turkey eggs beneath her small body and patiently sat on them until they hatched. Soon, awkward gangly poults followed faithfully behind her everywhere she went, even after they had grown twice her size.

Each day, young George rode his bike down to the coop carrying baskets back filled with fresh eggs for our family and his growing coterie of customers. Before long, he even wrote his own small handbook: The Kid’s Guide to Raising Laying Hens.

From the kitchen window, I watched young George tending rows of tomatoes, peas, carrots, and beets rising from the composted soil of his garden. First, he and his father got three goats. Soon they were attending farm auctions together. One week they returned with pigs, then sheep, and eventually white-faced Hereford cows that grew into a herd grazing between the river and our gravel road while a persistent white egret stood comically atop her chosen cow.

Meanwhile, Big George reclaimed the land alongside John, a local farmer. They worked together haying the fields in June and then again in August throwing bales with their strong hands and broad backs. George and John brush-hogged the invasive growth that had swallowed the river view with vintage equipment they fixed themselves.

George and I uncovered the gardens hidden beneath years of weeds and bramble. Lavender and sage reappeared around the herb garden George’s grandmother designed with a stone walking path. Siberian iris clusters were freed from the tangle of wild white rose. Daisies bloomed near the Fourth of July when the strawberries were ripe. The old York and Lancaster roses that had once filled his grandmother’s bowls began spreading close to the ground after waiting patiently to be uncovered.

The farm was no longer abandoned, and neither was I.

We painted the barns, chicken coop, corn crib, and sheds a vivid red, replacing the muddy brown tones that had faded quietly into the landscape for years. Beneath the blue sky and above the green fields, that cluster of color carried a joyful confidence. The hue was inspired by the striking shade of the Greene Art Gallery beside my church. That gallery would reconnect me with a part of myself I thought I had left behind.

After morning Mass, we often lingered at the neighboring bistro over homemade muffins slathered in butter and strong French coffee. There we came to know the gallery owner, Richard Greene. Richard had lived in Paris and carried a rare sensibility for style and culture, unusual in our small shoreline town. We spoke of Rue Mouffetard with its hidden doorways and open-air markets overflowing with vegetables, meat, and my favorite lemon chocolate layered pastry.

In the quiet afternoons, I returned alone to read The Web That Has No Weaver and Between Heaven and Earth, books that opened an entirely different understanding of healing and the body’s relationship to nature and the world around it.

One morning he asked if I would consider exhibiting my photography in a summer solo show when the shoreline towns once again filled with visitors returning from New York and beyond.

“Sure.”

My answer sent me digging through boxes stacked high on shelves and in closets.

My friend Emmett helped curate the exhibition. We spread photographs across a long dark dining table while morning light splashed across robin’s egg blue walls. We laughed remembering the people, the intensity, and our impossibly ambitious attempts at creating beauty.

We called the exhibition In the City, By the Sea, and chose forty-five images, mostly studio shots, but many by the sea.

Unexpectedly, the exhibition drew attention. The New Haven Register wrote about the polished fashion portraits displayed beside photographs of the unhoused, each subject carrying the same humanity and quiet dignity. What moved me most, however, was the community gathered in that room on opening night: family, friends, my qigong teachers from New York. Wine was poured beside platters of appetizers and hummus-stuffed cherry tomatoes picked from the garden. Flowers overflowed from bowls and vases, their rose fragrance drifting through the gallery.

Standing there in a cream Armani jacket and heels from my modeling days, I felt the threads of my past stitched gracefully into the present.

Soon afterward, I was invited to present another solo exhibition in town at the Women and Family Life Center: Moments in Time: Family Life, a collection drawn from my years photographing our family and the farm itself as it rose to life and our son grew alongside it.

During those years, the separation I had once felt between art, motherhood, spirituality, and healing began dissolving.

The years moved quickly. Young George entered high school. I began teaching movement classes that blended qigong with the disciplines I had studied and loved over the years. Increasingly, I found myself drawn toward Chinese medicine, not only as a system of healing, but as a philosophy rooted in breath, balance, and the unseen energies moving between earth and sky. I discovered that the direction I thought I had abandoned after four years of premedical studies in college had not disappeared at all. The path had not been straight, but somehow it had led me exactly where I needed to go.

When young George left for college, I would return to New York City myself. Back to the very same neighborhood where we had once lived when he was a little boy.

But this time I would not be returning as a young model or photographer searching outwardly for beauty and meaning.

I would return searching for the deeper roots of healing itself.

A new chapter was beginning.

The two of us spilled laughing into the May afternoon as I sprang into cartwheels over our scrappy lawn. The perfect shot was placing hands on my hips and falling into a perfect split, veil askew.

Mrs. Dietz, who lived a few doors down, reminded me as I grew of looking out her window that day and seeing me rip down Morton Rd, white patent leather shoes pumping the petals of my rusty green bike with my veil trailing as the neighborhood dogs barked.

Even those of us who drift far from religion often remember that day. First Holy Communion marks what the Catholic Church calls the age of reason — the moment a sacred seed of awareness is believed to awaken in a child.

It was George who brought it up when young George reached the age for his First Communion.

“I don’t feel comfortable not giving him some kind of spiritual foundation,” he said. “Something he might need someday. It feels like neglect.”

A lot happened between the click of that shutter on my communion day and when George announced his desire to bring our son into the fold. By then, church had all but disappeared from our lives, reduced to funerals, weddings, and memories we rarely touched.

As newlyweds in Japan, among mountaintop and lakeside shrines, not even the pine incense curling around curved wood was strong enough to touch my roots.

In China to study more about qigong, I walked through the halls of the once sacred Shaolin Temple and felt no connection as monks asked for money.

Thích Nhất Hạnh’s words were the first ones to gently tap my spirit. George, young George, and I attended a five-day retreat with him where we walked beside him in meditation. During one of his dharma talks, he said something unexpected: that the path toward inner peace is often not an escape from our roots, but a return to them.

I knew from therapy how scorching it could feel to warm the cold roots that ultimately held the nourishment needed to become whole.

“I will teach him,” I said, surprising even myself with no idea where this might lead.

Mrs. Latanzi, the director of Religious Education at the Catholic Church in our small town, assigned me eight children to teach in my home along with a study guide.

The truth was, I had issues with the Church.

The words “God the Father” alone were enough to tighten something inside me.

The image of God had fused with that of my own father: a World War II veteran with a hair-trigger temper who could erupt over something as small as a bubble popped unexpectedly from a piece of chewing gum. There had never been much room for discussion after the outrage or a quick slap across the back of the head.

When I heard “God the Father,” I imagined a God watching closely for mistakes, ready to punish them instantly. A God who could punish even the innocent joy of a young girl popping bubble gum.

Preparing for the first lesson, I realized how little I knew myself. Catholics, after all, had a reputation for not reading the Bible, and I was no exception.

The first lesson described the details of the first Passover. It startled me with its drama. Blood on doorways. Fear. Protection. Families hurriedly preparing a meal with meticulous instruction before fleeing oppression into the unknown. I decided to cook and share that meal they described with the children for our first lesson.

We ate lamb and tasted the bitter herbs together as we talked about that dramatic night.

I was hungry to learn more.

I started attending morning Mass in the small church on the town Green surrounded by white steeples and old trees. An older woman asked if I would become a lector.

I said yes.

At night I studied the readings carefully before standing at the pulpit the next morning to read them aloud. When someone failed to arrive, I quietly stepped in. Slowly, scripture became a reflection on how to live my life. A fresh way to look honestly at suffering, forgiveness, humility, and love.

Meanwhile, the lessons with the children continued. As I taught them, I learned as if for the first time. Teaching my son was a welcome journey. Not an instant transformation, but a slow and steady rewiring of antiquated patterns as, week by week, I began touching parts of the tradition I had never truly known.

One lesson told the story of Rebekah offering water to the servant of Abraham as he searched for a wife for Isaac. Her hospitality and willingness to serve changed the course of her life.

Something about that story stayed with me. I began inviting neighbors for dinner, opening our home on holidays, creating the kind of table I had once been searching for myself.

My favorite Mass became Holy Thursday, three nights before Easter. The first reading returns to the telling of that first Passover meal, and the last reading is of the Last Supper. Jesus gathers with his disciples before his death to teach them how to live. Every year on that night, churches around the world perform the ritual of the washing of the feet. We watch the priests kneel before twelve people and wash their feet one by one.

The message is simple and radical: if you want to follow this path, you serve others.

For me, that became the center of what faith was about. The roots I had neglected were still alive beneath the surface, unfurling tendrils into rich soil.

God was not the father I grew up fearing.

This mystery was far bigger than anything I had previously understood. What I found there was not punishment or perfection, but rather an encouraging and forgiving presence.

In the place of fear were service, humility, and love as they were meant to be.

Somewhere along the way, the young girl inside me began doing cartwheels again.

The bleeding started slowly. Then it didn’t stop.

I knew what I should do. Call a doctor. Get it checked.
But I couldn’t. Not easily.

I had spent my young years watching my mother move through a system that could not find answers. Test after test. No clear diagnosis. Surgeries that changed nothing—except the final one that took her life. She was 54, and my son was not yet two.

Something in me had locked doctors on the other side of a wall.
I told myself I was being careful. Thoughtful. Different.

That wall was built brick by brick with fear.

My bleeding did not resolve on its own, or with qigong, or vitamins, or with the acupuncturist I had come to trust. It got worse. Slowly at first, then all at once, until the wall I had built grew so thick that it left me with no room to move.

It was Linda, my sister, who said the words that blew that wall apart.

We were in Vermont when she said it.

We retreated there on a school vacation, both families together. George’s father had built the house, with a family room of floor-to-ceiling windows. To the left, the morning sun rose over Magic Mountain. To the right, it settled into Stratton at sunset. Snow-covered birch and pine trees framed the view beyond the firelit room.

The kids skied all day at Stratton. George went out to shop for groceries. In the evenings, he cooked—spatchcocked chickens, usually two, or a steaming roast with mashed potatoes, peas, and gravy. The family room filled with warmth and laughter, the easy rhythm of family.

Linda and I had just walked down to Riverside Farm and back, under the evergreens, the snow packed beneath our boots, our breath crystallizing in the dry winter air.

When we returned, I sank into the sun-faded couch in front of the fire.

We were alone.

I told her that I was bleeding. That I was tired. That I did not know what to do. That my energy was slipping away each day.

“Call your doctor,” she said.

What followed moved swiftly. Appointments. Decisions. And then surgery: a hysterectomy I had never imagined for myself. The bleeding stopped.

But something else took hold of my spirit. I was empty.

When I picked up young George from soccer practice, I sat in the car longer than I should have, gathering myself before walking across the field.

Again, it was Linda whose words demolished what stubbornly remained of that wall.

This time we were at my home. Her daughter was riding a Quarter Horse for her first lesson at the riding school down the road from me.

“Call your doctor,” she said again. “Do it now.”

The help I needed was not the help I was willing to accept. I knew it.

With more hesitation than I like to admit, I made another call to the doctor who had performed the hysterectomy. I told him it was urgent. That I could not sleep. That I could not eat.

He gave me a number. He had already called her.

A psychiatrist. I remember thinking: this is not who I am.

Dr. H. saw me that day. After a few simple questions, she said:

“Tell me about your mother.”

I stood. “I have to leave.”

She didn’t stop me.

“Would you like some water?” she asked. “You can step outside. Come back when you’re ready. I’m here.”

I stepped out. After pacing her porch and parking lot, I returned.

She was there, as she said she would be, and she helped me—not all at once.

She gave me something to sleep. Suggested an antidepressant for the anxiety that had tightened itself around everything.

I resisted.

“How long will I have to take it?”

“Maybe a year,” she said.

Then she paused.

“But only if you go to therapy. The medication will change your mood, but not the patterns that need to be changed. You need to talk with someone about your life, about your mother, about everything. Regularly. A professional. You won’t get better unless you do.”

I resisted that, too, but the pressure building beneath the surface pushed me through that door as well. Dr. H. helped, with a certain finesse, pull that stubborn piece from the dam that had been holding everything in.

The flood came—but not in the way I expected.

I slept. I ate. I talked with my therapist until the fear that had felt so large began to loosen.

The crumbling of that wall did not destroy me. It released me.

My mother was physically ill, yes. But something else had gone untreated. Not just in her. In her lineage. I was refusing to carry it forward.

My life would not narrow into a prison I could not climb out of. I wanted to be present: with my son, my family, friends, but mostly with myself.

Along the way, I stopped carrying that heavy and cumbersome load—not by turning away but by accepting the help I needed.

Traveling that road was not what I expected. It was uneven, arduous, and even humorous: a deliberate climb into places I had long kept in the dark. But I was not wandering alone, fighting blind with shadows.

And from there, something else emerged.

Our move to CT catapulted us out of our 18-foot-wide townhouse and onto acres of fresh earth.

For George and young George, the transition was immediate. They were like two explorers on an adventure.

Young George met his best friend on the bus to kindergarten the very first day. Chris lived downriver, and George would paddle his canoe to pick him up. They fished, pulled blue crabs from mud holes, swam the river at high tide, roamed the woods unsupervised, and rolled down meadows green with spring.

Big George found his place just as quickly. While working land in Litchfield, he began to work ours as well.

We were in the heart of what is now the East River Preserve. Natural trails cut through hundreds of acres that you could wander from our back door.

But just beyond it—out of sight, though not beyond the reach of its smell—were open pit septage lagoons.

The town, under pressure to fix a failing sewage system for a growing population, chose the easiest solution: dumping raw sewage into open pits to be absorbed into the land, feeding into the ground water of the East River, which runs for about seven miles before reaching Long Island Sound.

George called them what they were—abominable, unacceptable—and pushed to have them shut down. He found himself up against not only the town, but the DEP as well.

They pushed back.

What I thought might be a passing concern became something else entirely. With each setback, his resolve deepened. He walked the land with scientists to establish testing sites, wrote letters to the local paper, and sought legal counsel.

He stayed with it. Meetings. Resistance. Years of it.

And then, slowly, he succeeded.

The groundwater was proven contaminated. Negligence was established. What followed made conservation possible. The land surrounding our home was sold to the town, protected for anyone who would walk its trails, paddle its river, or stand in its quiet.

That stretch of earth would remain. In perpetuity.

I had never seen this side of George before—steadfast and unwavering once his purpose was clear.

And while both Georges found their place in the country with ease, I did not.

When we first arrived from Connecticut, I wanted another child. It felt possible there—days unencumbered by apartment walls, schedules, or playdates.

But my body had something else to say.

While the earth around us struggled beneath the surface for years, so had something in me.

There would be no walking away from it.

We were about to begin the standing meditation: to stand in stillness, eyes closed, knees slightly bent, hands relaxed at the sides, breathing into the lower abdomen. In this quiet, the circulation that had been set in motion by the previous exercises could continue in a new way. What had been stirred by the twisting, squatting, and pushing of palms could move into the joints, muscles and fascia where disease might be hiding. The body could begin to clear what it had been holding.

Sometimes spontaneous movements would arise, but that day I stood completely still.

After a few moments, my body temperature began to drop. The cold grew in my torso and spread outward, into my limbs, then my head. It was not a chill that could be warmed away. It felt feverishly cold, the kind that makes your joints ache and your head throb.

I opened my eyes before the full twenty minutes had passed.

The sunlight was too bright. I could only make out the silhouettes of the others standing in the field. My vision blurred. My mind began to spin, thoughts looping, searching for something to hold onto.

Images surfaced without warning. Scenes and symbols from the religion of my childhood, long forgotten, rising as if they had been waiting. A crimson heart wrapped in thorns, Mary’s pale blue dress soaked with tears.

I stayed with it. Breathing calmly. Letting it pass, as we were told.

The twenty long minutes of meditation ended. Jack, a young attorney from the Upper East Side I got to know, came over to chat. The cold that began in my chest moved up and out opening my throat to sobbing then tears. “Emotional releases” made surprise appearances for a number of students the past few days. We learned to let them be. By the time we drove back to our place I was grateful my temperature had returned to normal after the tears. My sharp vision returned.

By the time I spread my chunky peanut butter on bread at lunch with a few others, we laughed at the bizarre occurrences; the range of emotions we had witnessed, the heightened sense of smell, the strangeness of it all.

I arrived home after dark. I wanted to know the diagnosis for the lump in Linda’s breast.

I could see my father through the screen door as I walked up the sidewalk.

“How is Linda?” I asked, the screen door not yet closed behind me.

He lifted his arm and gave a thumbs down.

It was cancer.

I called Judy, the middle-aged philanthropist who was hosting our teacher on his first teaching visit from China.

“My sister has cancer,” I told her, and asked if it would be possible to meet Master Zhao for a short visit. He was staying on for another ten days to teach a beginner class.

We piled our families into two cars and drove to Rhinebeck. The kids got bologna and ham-and-cheese sandwiches at the general store and brought them back to Judy’s to sit by the pool while Linda and I were brought into a room in the main house.

We had both read Encounters with Qi, the account of a Harvard-trained Western medical doctor’s experience with Chinese medicine. In it, he describes meeting our teacher, Zhao Jin Xiang, one of the most well-known qigong masters in China.

Linda and I sat waiting until the translator and Zhao entered. He drank a full glass of orange juice, then sat down, as calm as he had been the whole time, his oversized, tanned hands resting on his knees. He had a large girth and a round, shiny face, his black hair parted on the side and held in place with something thick. He smiled and listened as the translator spoke.

“What is your sister feeling, Maureen?” he asked, pronouncing my name Mao oo en, the middle syllable low and rounded. I had gotten used to the sing-song way he said my name with his gentle voice. Despite his size, a good six feet, his tone was soothing, making anything unexpected feel natural.

“She’s afraid,” I said.

He directed Linda to close her eyes. Then he lifted his arm, hooking his thumb to his ring and little finger, extending his index and middle fingers like a blade. We called this “sword fingers” and used it in our exercises to focus energy, directing it through the two fingers. He pointed them toward her chest for about ten seconds, dropped his arm, and told her to open her eyes.

“What did you feel?”

Linda was cluthing her chest. “Burning.”

“Mao oo en,” Zhao looked in my direction. “Teach her what you learned.”

The next week, our families left for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. I taught Linda the five routines on the lawn of our cottage as the kids laughed and imitated us. We laughed too, eating dinners together after days swimming in cold coves and getting double-scoop ice cream cones in town.

Linda went on to have the prescribed mastectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy. She learned qigong quickly and we practiced it together for the year.

As August neared its end, I was the one who suggested to George that we consider enrolling young George in kindergarten in the country.

For more than a year, the wheezing in my lungs woke me at 3:00 a.m.

Each night it came the same way. A tightening that would not release. I would fall back asleep. By morning, it was gone, as if my body had taken hold of something in the dark and let it go again with the light.

And then one July evening, without warning, my chest loosened and the contractions stopped. Completely.

The change began months earlier, though I did not know it then.

In mid-December, George, young George, who was four, and I returned from the West Coast. We climbed to Inspiration Point in Yosemite. I remember the height of it, the way the valley opened without warning, as if the world could shift in a single moment if only you were placed high enough to see the whole sweep of it.

When we came home, a catalogue sat in the small pile of mail that had gathered in our absence. The New York Open Center. I flipped through it without much intention until one listing held me. Qigong. I did not know how to pronounce it. Only that it promised health through slow, deliberate movement.

I signed up.

The class met twice a week in the evening. We sat on a wooden floor, a circle of strangers, each of us, it seemed, looking for some ease in our hectic young lives. The teacher spoke in Chinese. Her words came to us through a younger translator. On the board behind her was a drawing of the spine marked with three pathways we were told were meridians.

We were given names. Baihui. Laogong. Yongquan. The sounds were unfamiliar and made a few of us smirk. What was this anyway? They called it Soaring Crane, a type of ancient exercise that helped balance what was called qi, or vital life energy.

I wanted to learn the movements. They came easily to me, but the mental focus did not. Soaring Crane Qigong demanded a kind of attention that was challenging to give.

We were taught to move the mind through the body, to rest attention in one place, then another, as deliberately as the body moved. I had been trained in speed, in rhythm, in the discipline of dance. I was a fashion photographer. I liked results I could see by the next day. I was a young mother in Manhattan with playdates to coordinate and bedtime to do together.

This practice began to push me out of my comfort zone into a more attentive, less hurried pace.

After the fourth week of class, three of us went out for a beer.

“I heard qigong is good for sex,” Cathy said, and we laughed, as people do when they are not yet sure what they have stepped into.

A couple of weeks later, she told us she had begun coughing up black mucus from her lungs. She thought it might be from the exercises. She was trying to quit smoking.

My limited view on health and healing had already begun to open, though I did not trust myself to say it out loud.

About a month into the class, we were invited to a ten-day retreat in upstate New York. The originator of the form would be there. We all agreed to go.

By July, I wanted to spend the time with my family. The days were longer and we spent more time in Connecticut than New York. George was working with Bob in Litchfield, helping to clear the land to build homes. Life had softened into something easier. Young George painted space shuttles and flowers on an easel that stood beneath the sugar maple tree outside our back door. My sister visited often with her children. We swam, cooked outdoors, and let the days unfold without demand.

I missed the first night of the retreat.

Michael, a young man from our class back in the winter, called.

“Are you coming? You really should see this guy. He’s wearing lavender silk tai chi pants and a matching shirt.”

His amusement and uncertainty stirred my curiosity.

George helped me pack the Jeep the next morning, and I left with a mixture of reluctance and attraction. I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Rhinebeck, arriving just as the others were breaking for lunch.

The days took on a rhythm that soothed me. Mornings, we practiced in the open air with the scent of honeysuckle drifting through the heat. Afternoons were for lectures, mostly about how qigong was based on Chinese Medicine. We ate simply, hungry after long hours of movement and instruction.

Five days into the retreat, the wheezing that had pulled me awake night after night for more than a year vanished. The tightness in my chest did not get better gradually. It just stopped.

Instead of a sense of relief, something closer to unease arrived. How could that have happened? Could these meditative movements really work?

The teacher was not surprised. “But how does that work?” I asked.

“You do not need to know how qigong works in order to feel the effects,” he said. “If you really want to know the theories behind it, you need to study Chinese medicine, and that takes a long time.”

The frame of reference I had relied on to understand my body crumbled. And then, a day later, came the phone call from Linda. She had discovered a lump in her breast. Vulnerability filled me.

“Ooh, look at that,” young George would say each morning as we stepped out our front door on the way to preschool. Glittering, empty amyl nitrate vials lay scattered along the steps like tiny glass toys, beckoning his four-year-old hands. Broken car windows sparkled across the sidewalks.

We learned quickly to remove the radio from the car each night or return to shattered glass in the morning.

Drugs were sold openly. Turf wars played out in plain sight as police pushed dealers off our street, only to see them reappear two blocks away in Washington Square Park. By the time I returned from drop-off, George, my husband, would already be outside sweeping up the remnants of the night.

Violence was random and close. A friend’s babysitter was stabbed one afternoon by a stranger on an East Village street. She survived. Another woman, not far away in Tribeca, was shot in the head while packing her car for the weekend. She did not.

The subway was something to avoid, an easy place to feel trapped. Mugging was common. The rule was simple: give them the money and keep moving.

Beneath the electrifying creativity of the time ran something darker. The two were inseparable. Crime was rising toward its peak. Our neighborhood sat in the middle of the crack cocaine epidemic; its streets navigated with constant awareness.

New York in the 1980s could feel like a bright spring morning that carried the same edge as a moonless winter night.

And all the while, beneath it all, another rhythm was unfolding.

During these tender, transitional years, my mother died unexpectedly. A cardiac arrest following what was meant to be a routine but elective surgery, one she believed would relieve years of chronic back pain.

“Are you sure you want to undergo a surgery that isn’t needed?” I asked the last time I saw her. She was certain it would help.

Soon after, Antonio called. He had been diagnosed with AIDS. We drove together in my new white Jeep to his doctor on the Upper West Side. We talked about what mattered. About regret. About time.

In one of our last conversations, he said,
“You have a powerful presence, Maureen. I hope you use it.”

I didn’t know then what he meant, or what that might ask of me.

Then the headline appeared in the New York Times: “Antonio Lopez is Dead; Was a Major Fashion Illustrator.” Almost every week someone I knew disappeared, their life stolen by a tiny virus no one yet understood, in a world too afraid to respond with compassion.

At the same time, my own body began to signal something unresolved, something I would understand later.

Every night at three in the morning, I woke up with my lungs wheezing. Like clockwork.

My allergist’s diagnosis was simply that I was “too sensitive” and prescribed medication to be taken daily.

“How long will I need to take it?” I asked.

“Probably the rest of your life,” he said casually without hesitation.

I refused. There had to be a better way to stay healthy, something that worked instead of pills that only suppressed symptoms but did not address the root cause.

Around this time, I heard about something that resonated with me.

Qigong.

An ancient practice of healing through gentle, focused movement was being taught just two blocks from the dance studio where I spent my mornings.

Turning to movement to support my health felt like an opening, a return to myself, a beginning.

That was all I needed.

The two large studios lived in a loft on the 6th floor at 622 Broadway, built by hand by five young dancers. One of them, Danny Pepitone, had recently died of AIDS. Dancespace was a refuge. We slipped off our shoes and let our bare feet meet wooden floors polished by hand, morning light streaming through tall windows as we moved together.

This was a time when dancers could pool their modest earnings and afford a studio in SoHo. We called it the Simonson Technique, led by Lynn Simonson, a freer form of what we thought of as downtown jazz. It stood in contrast to the controlled precision of uptown movement.

Lynn often told us she created the technique so she could be dancing with us when she was an old lady. Her work honored the body. We were taught to listen, to never push beyond what the body could sustain. She believed she had healed her own scoliosis through this way of moving.

Class began with a long, deliberate warm up, moving through each muscle group, awakening the body slowly. We would pause, take water, then return to learn choreography, new each day, shaped by whatever music inspired the teacher. We danced to many masters: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, as well as Michael Jackson, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Culture Club and Madonna.

The discipline of dance, and what it awakened in me, became the ground beneath my days. I focused, learned the steps, repeated them, and then let go—trusting muscle memory to carry me through a routine without thinking.

In those moments, I felt as if I could change the world with the energy moving through my body in that sunlit studio.

I walked everywhere then, my Nikon camera over my shoulder, ready to catch whatever revealed the life of the streets. Bike messengers, graffiti, those living on the margins. I moved between dance class, printing cibachrome at Jamie Canvas on LaGuardia Place, George’s nursery school, and friends’ homes.

I hosted playdates where we made Silver Palate chocolate chip cookies together and once taped my seamless white paper to the studio floor so the kids could paint wildly with their four-year-old energy.

My studio filled with a steady stream of models, artists, and children. A photograph I took of Walter was sold at Phillips Auction House as part of a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography.

Other images found their way into shows. I continued photographing what moved me: a dancer turning in the last orange light of sunset, lemon tulips falling languidly from an emerald vase, couture on a model spinning in my studio.

I felt grateful to focus on beauty amid the grief of that time.

Dance informed my photography. Photography informed my life. All of it shaped the way I moved through motherhood, marriage, and home.

Dance kept my spirit strong, my mind clear, and my body moving forward with a kind of grace I could return to when life came at me fast.

Dance helped me move.

But there would come a time when I needed to be still.

That would come later.