I’m in the village market in Edwards. It’s a throwback to no tech comfort and everybody is very helpful and smiley. I’m in the market for perfect peaches. I try not to squeeze the flesh, but no one’s watching so I tenderly poke a finger into their fuzzy plumpness. I lean in and take a gulp of late sweet August smell.

I have no arms because I’m carrying my semi-mature dog, who is wet and smells like the lake that we just wandered into. I’m holding him close to my sandy chest, pushing down the aisle using my right elbow to guide the cart. The air feels frosty on my prickly sunburn.

There are many children running rampant in unknowable patterns, dodging and weaving and dancing around the legs and waists of the people who belong to them. They seem perfect and perfectly content, their mothers within easy reach. Distracted and complacent, they can’t imagine the unimaginable.

You are not here, and I can’t find you in the produce aisle either, but I believe I hear you in the baked goods section. My head is half cocked and leaning in, I want to look and find the voice through the ruckus that belongs to you and matches the small adult form of a perfectly proportioned teenager; never having grown past the 4-foot-10 frame that carried you.

I let myself have this: seeing you here inspecting which sourdough boule to buy to go with the salmon and broccolini for Saturday night dinner, and it’s not a surprise, not at all.

I watch as you consider and choose an Albariño as our companion wine. Buying a second bottle for us to start sipping on as I set the table with our sisters while we listen to classic rock forever on the single kitchen speaker.

In this version, it’s late summer, and the sun is still high. The moon will rise over the Shawangunks much later and we still have plenty of time. My favorite outside sounds begin; the rhythmic call and answer of dusk. Thank you frogs and cicadas for being right on time. It’s that hour of indulgent beauty again. We talk of nothing in particular and it’s enough.

None of it happened. All of it is true.

Linger longer, I whisper to no one. Stay put, stay in your small body, feet planted right where you are, sister. Do not go. And if you do go, please take me with you.

The chorus of voices of little people running in small stampedes chases away my reverie. Please bring back the frogs and cicadas. The symphony of early nighttime. My negotiations aren’t working.

I feel myself losing restraint, I’m breaking away from the inside like a dehydrated sand sculpture, and without warning a rush floods my head and now I see it for the rogue wave it is. It’s rage. It’s a reckoning. And nothing has prepared me for this overthrow of reason. It comes out of nowhere, right, all of us who have ever experienced loss. Which is all of us who are lucky enough to reach adulthood. Until it’s happened we can only paint a picture of what loss looks like from the outside.

I suddenly and truly want to run my cart into these happy, unruly, sun-kissed children. My gut clenches, and it’s not sadness welling up and threatening to spill over, it’s an unearthly keening. Not meant to be exposed to daylight or be seen in public. Keening is a private affair meant for classic literature.

Loving you is and always was a privilege, and life comes at the ultimate cost.

But here in this moment, the absence of you is more tangible, more felt, than any living presence.

I still have a peach in my pocket, unpaid for, a little squished and warm from my own palm.

Vail, Colorado has rare air. It’s high up, and altitude is always a challenge here. But when you invite a group of the greatest artist-athletes on earth to come and perform at 8,500 feet, it becomes even more rarefied.

This piece is an homage to an art form that is a living treasure. It’s also, admittedly, something of a gush. I know firsthand what it takes to train and train and work to keep your body supple, and to manage injuries. Careers are so brief — the time and life invested, set against how many seasons you actually get to perform, is gone in a blink.

The best and most soulful dance is like watching breathing. It reminds me of where I came from and where I’m going. Inevitably, when I watch artistry happen, it’s like a great unfolding. My husband, who sits dutifully to my left at every performance, knows when a piece has struck my heart. He doesn’t need to look at my face — he just feels me quietly sobbing. I know this sounds emotional. But breathtaking performances have a beating pulse, a shared experience between an audience and the dancers.

In a world where most things are less than beautiful, dance is superlative beauty. The discipline, the artistry, the musicality, the body awareness, the sheer athleticism — it’s an extravagant windfall that we get to experience.

Every year in August, Christmas happens for me. The Vail Dance Festival showcases some of the most extraordinary dancers the world has to offer. For two weeks, dancers, choreographers, and musicians are given opportunities unimaginable for most artists. It’s like summer camp.

There’s a playfulness and camaraderie when dancers from different companies are paired together for the first time, learning techniques that aren’t their mother language. Choreographers get the rare chance to work each day in temporary tented studios, making debuts in an environment stripped of the formality of curtains and sets. No curtain up, no curtain down. The backdrop is a dappled rock garden bursting with color, shaded by aspens. Dancers from the American Ballet Theater are cast in ballets by New York City Ballet. Ballet dancers take on roles choreographed by Martha Graham, Melissa Toogood, and Alexei Ratmansky. Dancers who’ve spent an entire career onstage get to stand in the house and watch their own choreography unfold in front of them.

Musicians perform onstage. Open rehearsals happen, and the artistic director coaches dancers in front of a full audience, on a night called Up Close. We in the audience get to hear the notes and live vicariously, step by step, watching the dancers transform in their roles from open rehearsal to performance the next night. Transformation — poof! — right before your eyes: they work through a phrase with corrections from the choreographer, attempt a new lift, run it over and over until they’ve got it.

These dancers are today’s rock stars. They combine athleticism and technique in a way that’s frankly superhuman. There’s a long-standing myth about meanness in the dance world — glass in a competitor’s pointe shoes, that kind of vitriol. So untrue. These are some of the kindest, best humans, cheering each other on from the wings with real commitment and community.

I know what it takes to train and train to keep supple and manage injuries. They say once a dancer always a dancer, but tonight getting ready for the theatre I got a muscle spasm in my calf putting my Spanx on.

The offering of community is very much alive. The best supporting role belongs to the landscape itself: mountains and rivers, and the open-air Ford Amphitheatre planted with colorful annuals and perennials that move with the breeze when there is one. Tonight, during a pas de deux, a squirrel crossed the stage in a box step and exited stage right.

I get attached to watching the dancers embrace real risk — taking off blind and backwards to be caught by a partner. Tonight she takes flight a full two feet further than usual.

This year also produced a number of babies, born to ballerinas at the height of their careers. Watching those babies watch their mothers dance for the first time was one of the most moving things I saw all festival.

Watching the community grow together and care for each other is a devotional act. My heart beats for current and future generations of dance. I felt so supported by this community as a young dancer. I’m so grateful to be able to answer the call now.

Optimism conveys a light and sweet energy. Most of the time I believe people to lead with basic decency. Unless you’re a known criminal or named politician.

I trust.

“Trust but verify,” Ronald Reagan cautioned the Soviets when Putin was still wearing short pants.

Can we agree to stop confusing skepticism with intelligence?

The majority of people are essentially good, even though statistics demonstrate otherwise.

Last Friday, I received a phone call from a familiar area code. The official sounding voice identified himself as Lt. Jon Shelton. Write this down, he said “it’s J-O-N.”

He began his pitch and told me to check my text messages. He’d sent what looked like a registered letter with my name and address on it and someone else’s signature. That’s not my signature, I said. He then proceeded to tell me that a lot of times postal workers will sign for a resident because they don’t get paid overtime for delivering a package twice. Ok, that’s believable.

I have no priors. The only time I’ve been inside prison walls was teaching yoga to the inmates at a minimum security facility in Bedford, NY. The worst you can accuse me of is spitting in my ex-husband’s coffee (and that only happened once).

I’m what’s referred to as an easy mark; this particular felon had my name, telephone number, address, and coffee order. I keep trusting the conveniences that are, without my consent, informants. What the criminals don’t know, but will soon learn, is that I rarely carry cash. I keep most of my money in a savings account that I hide even from myself. Inventing new passwords anytime I try to log in.

Many moons ago, when I was a young dancer, I was on the E train in NYC going to an audition. I was mugged at knifepoint on an otherwise beautiful Saturday afternoon. Holding a knife to my side and demanding my money, the mugger scanned the train uneasily. Nobody came to my aid. No heroes in that car. Rifling through my dance bag I came up with about $3 in bills and some loose change. I raised a finger and motioned for the robber to hang on a sec because I thought I might have more in the bottom of my bag.

No such luck.

Only damp smelly ballet slippers, a leotard, and tiger print leg warmers that my mom had knitted. He exited the train at the next stop and I was shaken and maybe in shock, but on time to the studio. Adrenaline fueled my dancing and I nailed the audition.

Common sense ought to dictate reason at this point. You can’t be arrested and incarcerated for failure to report for jury duty. Can you?

I would like to do my civic duty and sit on a jury, as I discussed at length with Lt. Jon Shelton of Washington DC. And when the officer told me it was a great case that I missed, I told him that I have to hang up now to go volunteer. You have no priors, he said, so if you get pulled over you would likely not be arrested; however, you will be called back within 2 hours, and if I didn’t answer I’ll be reported to the local sheriffs department in Colorado. They’ve been building a lot of new incarceration centers, he told me, and you would hate to be the one to help fill one up. For a few minutes I actually believed I might be arrested — that’s how good he was, and that’s how easily the script works. I told him I’m not allowed to have my phone in my volunteer job.

They didn’t get far enough to get any real information, mostly because they didn’t know who they were dealing with. As a people pleaser with no prior record, I began to spin off that my father was a well respected litigator in DC who, in addition to arguing cases and being a civil rights activist, authored the U.S. patterned jury instructions. He taught all of his daughters about judicial fairness and our responsibility to serve on a case.

For the most part I can’t comprehend how anybody who is as skillful as a con artist can’t get a well paying job in advertising or marketing. Admittedly one vocation takes more schooling, but if you are that good a liar, can’t you tailor your résumé?

Con artists use scare tactics to cause otherwise intelligent people to respond emotionally. Using fear and leveling a dose of shame that stirs up unreliable memories.

I still believe most people are essentially good, and that life experience and opportunity have shaped their choices. I wonder if a talented teacher or mentor early on might have awakened something dormant, and an entirely different life would have unfolded.

As for me, I will not consider abandoning myself to overt or covert cynicism; but for good measure I’ll continue to hide my passwords and certain assets from myself.

My day begins uneventfully. Little is different, and there is nothing to foretell what will unfold over the next twenty-four hours.

I’m restless. I woke up swaddled and sweating under an extra twenty-five pounds of weighted blanket. I like it because it grounds my nervous system, lets me let go completely while I sleep. You are either a fan of weighted blankets or you abhor them. I’m always trying to sell them to my dental technicians as standard practice for cleanings. I’ve pitched three different dentists so far. No takers.

I can usually only make my half of the bed because there’s a man sleeping next to me with a dog. He happens to be my husband, but buried as he is under the covers, he could be just about anybody. The dog glares at me — I’ve disturbed him. My husband, however, does not rouse, preferring to fake sleep even when I bring him a bedside latte.

I love waking up early, especially in the country, but also in the city, where if I really tune in, I can hear birdsong. Or I think I can. There’s a fifty-fifty chance it’s actually the little laminated, pitched-roof speaker I bought to trick myself that I’m living in nature. Tripping out a consistent rhythm of chimed songbirds, every six seconds, give or take. I’ve invited the birds inside. They live with me now.

The first thing I don’t do is turn on the news. This is an accomplishment. Each morning I withhold myself from it like an offering, and each morning I feel the small, pious flush of someone who has sacrificed something and is enjoying it more than they should.

Now, if you will, please come with me into the kitchen. There are things to do and coffee to make happen. Good coffee doesn’t just happen. You have to will it into being. I think it helps to have someone on standby as advisor.

I have an ongoing disagreement with my current espresso machine. It hasn’t settled in with the other appliances and made itself at home. Every day is a little bit of a hostage crisis. It doesn’t give up its secrets, and I haven’t learned how to outwit it, to crack the code. And in my life, it’s my way or the highway. But today will have a different outcome, believe you me. I’m prepared.

There are people who are paid to look good and people who are paid to sound good, and they often show up in the same body. I think you may have an idea who’s coming to breakfast.

I summon George Clooney, energetically. I’m unprepared — still in my pajamas, no half-hug offered, just a friendly handshake that leaves me slightly disappointed. Up close, though, I understand what Amal sees in him. He rolls up the sleeves of his rumpled white linen shirt, forearms and all, and we get down to business: water-to-capsule ratio, frother temperature, foam consistency. I lose interest somewhere around the statistics, when he starts diagnosing what’s wrong with my Nespresso. I confide that the real flaw may be that I like my cream with a little coffee in it, not the other way around.

With all the yakking in the kitchen, we wake the dog, and he comes down to check where his breakfast is, not particularly interested in Clooney. But a tilt of the head, a small wag, and I feel the presence of another person in the room. Wouldn’t you know it — well, I wouldn’t have thought it, but my dog wasn’t the least bit surprised. Rob Lowe is leaning against my quartzite counter. He and Clooney exchange pleasantries, say something to each other in a low tone I can’t decipher.

Another passionate expert in the category of health and wellness, Rob Lowe knows about dogs — what they like, what’s good for them — and if I know what’s good for me, I’m going to lean in and learn. For only three dollars a day, or is it three dollars a month, my dog can eat his way into longevity and continue to sleep on my pillow. You can tell Lowe cares deeply about the welfare of all dogs, even though he’s getting paid for it, and maybe he even donates some of his paycheck to the Humane Society.

Now everybody is situated for the time being, except my partner, still in his REM sleep. Time to get down to business. I can’t find a single working pen to write with, so it’s back to the junk drawer, where I find only three dull pencils, a roll of twine, kitchen scissors, CBD, and two brushes, both for my dog. I’m not one hundred percent positive, but I think Rob Lowe may have recommended this brand of dog CBD.

Back at the table, focused now on the pause before finding flow. I’ve been told, by multiple people, multiple times, that it’s important to write freehand — that there’s a direct connection to your temporal lobe, to cognitive functioning, that it not only reduces cortisol but increases cognitive ability.

A special shout-out to the neuroscientist who recently debunked the long-revered theory of Bessel van der Kolk, his groundbreaking science from The Body Keeps the Score. Who do I listen to — the debunker or the debunked? Even without scientific evidence, I know my body re-experiences stored memories of old, buried trauma.

Scrolling new emails I open a solicitation from Anne Lamott. This one is different. Anne Lamott isn’t a summons, she’s an icon to me, part of my lineage. I raised my daughter on Bird by Bird. To this day, when Mireille calls me overwhelmed, I repeat the sacred words back to her: honey, just take it bird by bird. So when I turn on my computer and find an invitation waiting — Anne, live streaming a writers workshop the next day in LA — I’m already there. I’m certain she’s reaching out to me directly and foretelling our budding friendship. I write back and ask her to save me a seat next to her.

At the end of the message, she offers up her husband — also a writer and teacher — who happens to be offering a workshop in Montana on taming the inner critic. I sign up immediately and tell him I’m coming partly because it’s the closest I may ever get to his wife.

The coffee’s gone cold. The dog wants his actual breakfast, not the longevity kind. My husband is still pretending to be asleep, and somewhere in all of this I never once ask myself if I could just figure out the Nespresso machine on my own.

What is living in this room is by invitation only.
You are cordially invited if you possess the good character and spoken language of nature, song, art, and storytelling (preferably in an Irish accent.)
If you are a human, you need to audition to be accepted but if you're an animal, you have permanent squatters rights.

The news is not welcome in this room; only sunbeams, open windows a generous breeze stirring the curtains, stacks of books on the floor.

Idly frittering the day away is called for over random bursts of business.

Maybe old news can visit as it pertains to family lore. No existential angst.

I'm not making masterpieces of flowers that refuses to give up Joy. A cup of tea. The clouds scrolling down the sky. I read a list of things that still comfort me a clean surface fresh smelling sheets, my sleeping dog a quiet breeze the filtering of sun in an early early summer day.

New flowers planted in my pots on the terrace crushing mint in my hands getting my fingernails, completely dirty and then sitting in a chair for 45 minutes to get them clean again. Loving the people offering me services that I pay for but still gratefully, and happily, accepted with a smile

Yawning, napping and soft snoring are the cherished soundscapes. Especially dog snores. Did you know that when dogs dream 90% of the time they're dreaming about us?

Read to me until I can only hear your lips move. Random syllables that languish on your tongue.

Inside these breathing walls lives defiant joy that refuses to surrender even though evidence threatens to upend the whole thing.

You are in my house, in my dream. I can dress you in silk and cashmere and ask you to place your shoes by the door.

Please acknowledge receipt of this invitation in writing.

I think that's where it ends.

Going into my own event, I should feel like an expert — on myself, at least. It’s the only thing I’m really an expert on. But still I feel unaccountably nervous. I’m breathing a little shallow, my jaw is tight. I’m not just here to show my jewelry. I’m also planning to speak without a script and without a cookie in my hand. I’m not sure I can do it without the cookie.

I have plenty of time to prepare, which means I don’t get to rely on that adrenal rush to push out the cortisol and whip me into the comfort zone of full ADHD frenzy. I’m on my own.

Krishna Das and Sting harmonize while I warm up like I would for a performance. Pliés and tendus, a walking meditation, a little chi gong for grounding, and some loud and pitiful vocalizing that I hope no one can hear through the walls.

Something’s still irking me, so I text my husband.

Picture everybody in their underwear, he says.

That’s not helpful, I tell him.

Mauri. He says my name like it’s a full sentence. You’ve done other things that made you nervous. You climbed a telephone pole. You surfed. It’s just people — no better than you.

For the record, the telephone pole was part of a yoga retreat activity designed to observe how the mind behaves under stress. So the first part is true. The second — surfing — I’d like to revisit.

Baby, he says. You are a fairy. Gather your fairy dust and sprinkle it all over the room.

I mean. He’s not wrong.

What would your meditation teacher tell you right now?

I know exactly what he’d say. “Remember everything you’ve ever worked through, learned, embraced. Believe in your own possibility. Sit with your breath. Be present with all of it, all of the feelings — and everything will be fine. And if it’s not fine, you’ll get another chance.”

And he was right. It was fine.

I got to show up as myself but better, with a great hair and makeup artist to fancify me and so much love and kindness from the people who came to hear from me.

I think I’m beginning to experience myself as shy — which is new, or maybe not. Maybe what I thought was outgoing was always a little performative. Maybe this is just more honest. All I know is it felt true.

There are things we do, and then there are things we inhabit. When we move into flow state, the critical mind takes a back seat and something older and quieter takes the wheel.

What I discovered in telling my story was the weaving — how what looked like unrelated chapters were actually the same root system branching in multiple directions.

Modern dancer. Then choreographer. Then, inexplicably and completely naturally, director of all things Nutcracker.

Yoga teacher training, then into the schools, then into Bedford Correctional Facility — a women’s prison where I taught meditation and pranayama and watched women connect to their bodies in a place specifically designed to make them forget they had one. That mattered, and when I turned around and saw the guards and the inmates, all moving with me, I was profoundly changed.

The transition from teaching into making jewelry was so organic I almost missed that it was a pretty significant pivot. I’d teach a class, take the $75, go into the city and buy stones, make a necklace. Teach another class, buy more stones, sell two necklaces. And my next life began.

As a dancer you don’t depend on getting paid a lot. You lead with passion and accumulate what I call cultural collateral. But redefining myself as an artist who could make things of lasting value — that opened something else entirely. I wanted my business to mean something. And magical thinking allowed me to believe that I would be wildly successful and a great philanthropist. I aligned with organizations supporting women whose voices deserved far more visibility than they were getting, creating symbolic pieces that could represent their work and bring them greater presence in the world. These were my passion projects. I called it the karma collection. Alongside all of this I started making gardens, out before dawn with my hands in the dirt, which felt like the same thing in a different language.

In telling my story that evening, I got to hear it for the first time.

The connective tissue between all of it lives in the process of creating. If I have one note of wisdom to offer, it’s this: when you find something you love, keep tending it. Keep rebirthing it. It will be your nourishment. And anything that truly emanates from you doesn’t feel like work — it feels innate. Necessary.

I’ll tell you what I remember with great clarity. When my designs started getting copied, I went to an attorney and simultaneously sought counsel from my meditation teacher.

The attorney wanted a large fee with no identifiable satisfying outcome.

My meditation teacher asked me a single question.

Who do you watch, he said, when your kids are on the playground? Do you watch your own children — or do you spend your energy watching other people?

Follow what you’ve birthed. Don’t spend yourself trying to stop other people in their efforts. Put your energy where your heart is.

The best advice I’ve ever been given. And I gave it without a script, without a cookie, and without once picturing anyone in their underwear.

Tend what you’ve made. Follow your own children. Sprinkle your fairy dust and mean it.

Once upon a time, and forever after, the Earth began to offer its secrets through shape and pattern, a fascinating mathematical equation, hidden in plain sight and yet obvious everywhere we look.

Sacred geometry is the measure that weaves through everything living. Nothing that exists in nature is truly random; it is all built on order. We see it echoed in the unfolding of a petal, a fern, a flower, in the way a sunflower arranges itself, in the proportion of a nautilus shell showing off its exquisite measure of the golden mean. This is beauty in its purest state.

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What continues to fascinate me is that it hides in plain sight, even living within our own DNA. Sometimes we are simply the observer, feeling a sense of grounding without knowing why. Artists have always known this. They studied the principles of sacred geometry and centered them in some of our greatest works of art.

One principle I frequently borrow in my work is the Vesica Piscis, translated from Latin as the vessel of the fish. What I love, and can talk about until your eyes glaze over (if they haven’t already), is its living evidence of a new birth.

Start with a single circle and draw another beside it, the same size, essentially a Venn diagram, and overlap the two. The space in between becomes the birth of a third. Another way to understand it: look at your two hands separately, then begin to clap them together. Apart, your hands have no interaction. But the friction between them is alive, and within that overlap is the creation of something entirely new. Opportunity is born through friction. Every single thing that arrives newly persists through this same equation.

North is your connection to whatever God you believe in, and to spirit. South is earth and grounding. East and west are the extension of your heart into your community. And we are the center, the point from which everything emanates.

When you hold an object in your hand that has a perfect proportion, something inside begins to ground itself and feel like home. There is a recognition in the measure of the order. We don’t need to understand higher math or physics to feel when something is true.

This is why we have always worn or carried things that become sacred talismans, essentially good luck charms. They are not magical in and of themselves, but when we connect with them there is a weight, a kind of alchemy, in their truth.

So this enthusiasm I feel for something so intrinsic to our nature is what so often guides me in creating jewelry. I am essentially a conduit, borrowing what nature offers freely. We live inside the pattern, not outside of it. We are made from it. When we sit in meditation we are the vessel, and our breath is the elixir that moves through us and creates a true alchemy. Here is the real magic, how these ingredients show us how to transform and transcend. There is no mistake in this universal law. This is the real hand that moves mine.

Thank you for reading, and for supporting my work. My current collection is here, if you'd like to see where all of this takes shape.

This is familiar and alarming. Damning, even.

Apparently there’s a name for my fear of heights. It’s called L’Appel du Vide, or the call of the void in English. I get an overwhelming sense that my body is not connected to the ground and that, without my consent, I may get lifted away from the physics of gravity and float up and out and over the railing.

I’m currently positioned on the balcony, spying on the townhouse across the avenue from where I live in Dupont Circle.

(I’m a terrible spy. I will loudly announce that I’m surprising you just beforehand.)

Lately, the curtains on the townhouse have been open, but I see no action inside. No vacuuming. No sexy time. It’s a narrow three-story house with ancient-looking turrets.

I’m running through the most logical options of how to gain entry. If you’re reading this, I hope it’s not your house because I would never, ever do what I’m about to tell you I’m going to do. And if I did do it, I would definitely bring you a house gift. Probably flowers. But they wouldn’t be flowers that would please you; they would be flowers that would please me. So peonies, hydrangeas, ranunculus, and maybe some filler like alchemilla. You can keep the vase.

Wearing jeans and a pale lavender sweater because, as we all know, lavender is a universally unthreatening color, and not wearing a coat (part of the plan), I stand with my arms crossed, pretending to shiver as I knock on your front door. I don’t look the least bit crazy, but I didn’t ask anybody. I have a plan worked out. I’ve practiced arranging my face in the mirror to appear quietly self-assured, or at least not unhoused, and will let whoever opens the door know that I left my coat there the night before.

The house is likely from the mid-1920s, with a slate roof and Moorish-style windows. The limestone has collected verdigris, and soot gathers on the columns of the balcony. There’s a turret. I never see anyone at the windows. At my windows. It’s an invitation for my imagination.

I’m redecorating the rooms like a set from an old vacant mansion in Rhode Island, with heavy velvet eggplant-colored drapes and old wood that smells like Pledge and an ancient forest. I live there and move through the rooms with ease. There are Deborah Turbeville pictures on the walls. There is classical music playing, and it wafts from the plaster and composes itself through the walls. There’s no Wi-Fi, but there’s a room with a drafting table (there’s nothing cooler than a drafting table), watercolor paper, and sharp pencils. My cat lies in the south-facing window on a table laden with books. I live alone with the cat. She is black and white and complements the sofa, so she can stay.

Here I am, yearning for something that I don’t inhabit, and the longing is fierce. I want in. I see the perfect impression of a complete and poised woman mirrored in this space. That’s me times two, but subtract one. (OK, there I am.)

It always went like this.

I’m living in a loft in NYC or Paris. Each time I picture the scene unfolding, I’m wearing cream silk trousers, an immaculate man’s white tailored shirt, and a slender wristwatch. My hair is in a loose ponytail. It’s clean, and I have buffed nails manicured to a practical length. In this warped, inverted fantasy, this is how I appear. I likely went to an all-girls boarding school, played the piano well, and my parents were divorced. Nobody spoke during meals except to politely ask, “Please pass the salt and pepper.”

I walk across the wooden floor and my shoes strike a rhythmic click-click. I am carrying a porcelain cup of English breakfast tea and walk to a small marble café table, where I sit very still. I’m carrying nothing else. In the appearance and reappearance of this projected memory, I notice a small unease, a bristling in my body. Or maybe it’s the cat rubbing up against me.

Where on God’s green earth did I invent this character? There is no resemblance to the woman who lives in this body, my petite little body with large feet and strong dancer calves. I’m the barefoot girl wearing sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, and I’m mostly walking in circles, tapping my forehead to remember where I left my coffee, my lip balm, and my phone. I sit most comfortably on the floor or on a pillow, not upright in a chair. I always have a wrinkled paper bag carrying crumbs from a half-eaten muffin.

I’m complicit in my own ruinous cliché, disapproving of myself and desperately wanting to shed old skin and useless pieces of an ancient and comical story. Maybe that’s why the fantasy keeps returning. Not because I want her life, but because I keep mistaking her for evidence. Evidence that somewhere there exists a version of me who has finally gotten it right.

Creating anything new, and what I mean is the action, not just an image, but truly embracing it, I need to be a little bit terrified. I need to sit with both my tigers and friends. Self-doubt and self-belief are the two bookends that we spring from. When I find out that I’m not going to become the person I thought I was meant to be, I start to go through the five stages of grief.

When I stop wailing long enough to listen, there is a voice that I begin to recognize. It’s the voice of spirit. Tenderly, patiently, the language of my not-English and not-human guides beckons me to pause and halt the endless tug. More questions than answers. More right than righteous. The reminder that we are always able to calm the uninvited critic and extend an invitation to our better angels.

I’d like to wrap this in a tidy bow and offer some sort of gospel prophecy, but here we are, messy and imperfectly perfect, with our tigers and friends having tea for three.

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Kindness is one of the few renewable natural resources. It is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it describes friendliness and generosity toward others — but it earns its stripes as a verb.

Some kindnesses are easy and ask very little of us. Others require greater effort. Holding a door open, smiling at the cashier, tipping the barista. All obvious social norms. Sometimes being kind is a matter of simply choosing not to be unkind: not flipping off an aggressive driver, being patient when someone takes forever to pay for their groceries. A certain restraint. I feel comfortable calling this kindness too.

Then there are the actionable big kindnesses. My good friend donated one of her kidneys to a man who needed one. A gift that keeps on giving. And while nearly all of us have two kidneys, it’s a rare person who willingly offers a major organ while still living in their body.

Early in our marriage, my husband and I worked with a couples therapist. When Keith told the therapist that I wanted him to change, be different, and transform into a kinder and better person, the therapist interrupted him, letting him know that I wanted the same for her as well. A reasonable ask, I think.

Teaching yoga in New York’s private middle and upper schools, I would ritually give students an assignment: choose one act of kindness to perform anonymously. The anonymous part was as essential as the kindness itself. Determining action for the simple sake of being kind — with no direct, measurable personal benefit, is a higher form of grace. In these moments, both big and quiet, we create an opportunity to grow a better part of ourselves. It’s a spirited yes to expanding into a more spacious heart. And there is literally no expiration on this one. The opportunity exists until our last breath.

Some of the students’ choices seemed excessive to me. Sending your mother three dozen roses with no note, while very generous, created more confusion than necessary. Maybe my instructions were unclear: I meant something more like: change the toilet paper roll, empty the dishwasher, take out the trash. They really enjoyed the assignment. Encouraged by the results, I asked the kids to go one step further: find someone in the hallway they would typically ignore, and smile at them. My brave attempt to dismantle the social hierarchy of middle school — a period in life that most of us would rather put knitting needles in our eyes than choose to repeat.

Kindness can be a catalyst for healing ourselves and others. It’s never a bad idea.

I had a Buddhist meditation teacher at the Kadampa Meditation Center in New York, the venerable Kadam Morten. His kind and humorous approach to Buddhism created a warm environment of unconditional acceptance and love. In dharma talks, he would discuss accruing karma through acts of kindness, drawing on the long-standing Buddhist tradition of selfless service.

I raised my hand and asked whether it was cheating to help other people for the benefit of helping yourself. He answered that performing acts of generosity is looked upon as merit-making regardless of intent — and gave me full permission to pursue karmic credit with my best efforts.

Once or twice a week, I would go to Grand Central Station and study the patterns of movement in the great foyer amidst the crush of people. Most of the pedestrian traffic moved rhythmically, purposefully. My goal was to spot people who were struggling and offer to help them up or down the stairs with their suitcases or packages.

I feel I need to explain myself here. I was experiencing a soul-crushing pain that lasted months, and I decided to go help other people — rationalizing that the karmic effect would heal me as well. It turns out I had shingles. Must have been karma from an earlier lifetime.

Kindness is my offering and my alms. Since it costs me nothing, I can afford it. The outreach exceeds the initial investment and plays the long game.

May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy.May all beings live in peace and ease.

I am here in my body, moving into the late middle of life. If you are here too, you may find yourself amazed, and a little concerned, by how we arrived.

Blink once. Blink twice. Point to yourself in an old photo. Notice the angle of the light as it bathes the room. Notice the period furniture — the original Eames dining set that I convinced my mom to get rid of right before it exploded in the marketplace.

I see it all frame by frame, like a carousel — the color mostly gone, the edges soft. Sometimes the frames move too quickly and I can’t grasp the moment before it’s past. Who is that beside me? What were we laughing at? Sometimes they move too slowly and I have to stay inside the bad years: the regrettable haircut, the poor wardrobe choices. In one photograph I am wearing something I stole from a department store. I have to relive that every time the frame lands there. I have never fully decided what to do about that — whether to confess it, return something, or simply let it sit in the past where it lives.

There is a photo of the four of us sisters with our mother. I was probably eleven. We are in Rock Creek Park, being photographed by the fine artist Shelly Langston. She worked in black and white, with natural light. The photos from that day are dreamy. It’s easy to see us as we saw ourselves then — the young, perfect family. We were the Cramer girls, practically perfect in our matching rayon Danskin outfits, insulated from nearly everything except the mumps and chicken pox.

The photo books held our childhood, and mom will often declare that if there were a fire, she would only save the book of Shelly’s work.

In one portrait, the faces looking out at you are smiling. But if you look closely, you can see that my mother’s face is tight and her hands are clenched around our arms. We had been fooling around, wasting the light, and she was understandably pissed.

That is my story, frozen in the photograph. I remember the actual moment and the feeling of her disappointment. The edges of that image are blurry now — or maybe it’s my eyes — and the four of us have become an unsung three.

And time traveling into this fragile present, where fate or destiny or whatever God you believe in has rearranged the board: I’ve fallen in love late in life with someone I knew when it wasn’t so late. Traversing the landscape of accumulated memories, you get a panorama of who we were.

I personally don’t like time travel, and I’m not nostalgic, but I can blink and will the carousel backward. I don’t see you only as you are presently. I remember you as a young man. A boy, really.

I remember the shape of your torso, clothed. The way you leaned with your back against the fence by the tennis court. I was in the pool practicing my double ballet legs. The contours of your serious face. How shy you were, though you probably didn’t know it then. Your terrible cursive, rising on a diagonal in the letters you sent me from camp.

I remember lying in bed on the air-conditioned third floor of my grandmother’s house, completely sunburned, the whole afternoon still bright inside me. She was rubbing me down with witch hazel to take away the sting. I was somewhere else entirely — back on the beach in Bethany, in my white bikini, your hand in mine, the waves timed, the light relentless. We walked for miles on the beach that day saying maybe ten words.

I remember the way you looked at me then like I was a goddess — you could not believe your good fortune. Sometimes, when you don’t know I’m looking, I watch your face, and with very little effort I can see the lines smooth and you become ungray.

Underneath the man you are now, earlier versions of you move through time I didn’t share — on trails I wasn’t on, at tables I didn’t sit at. The laughter we fall into now, when our defenses are down, feels like something that was always going to happen. We just took the long way.

Consider this, husband. We are here now in a slim envelope between adulthood and old age. You love me in a way you can’t quite help. It’s not even entirely your preference. But I know it’s true — I can feel it — and when you do, I begin to see myself through your eyes: disappearing slowly into a once upon a time, and then, just as effortlessly, loving myself right back into the now.

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Traveling to New York with my mother this weekend was an assignment. My mom is the most vibrant, vital, and beautiful older person you would ever feel blessed to meet. She is temperamentally grateful and rarely stops talking. I’m often a careless daughter — distracted, a little self-centered.

But on this journey I was determined to be the archetypal good daughter.

Unusually early, we caught the train from Union Station and arrived seamlessly in New Jersey to visit my aunt and uncle.

We settle into our gathering and my mom asks me to fetch the presents from her suitcase. I unzip it and the first thing I see is a giant heavy winter coat. I had helped her pack everything the night before, so I knew she had just snuck it in there.

Mom, why did you bring that heavy coat?

That’s not my coat.

In fact, it also wasn’t her suitcase.

Twenty minutes later, the police arrive at my aunt’s building. They knew precisely where to find me. I didn’t look arrestable and they left with only the suitcase. The person whose luggage it was is apparently smart — smart enough to have an AirTag.

We didn’t even have a name tag to identify my mom’s suitcase. When asked what it looked like, I kept repeating: it’s blue.

Anyone who has ever tried to call Amtrak knows there is no link to the living other than a bot named Julie. Julie is unspeakably unhelpful. I spent three hours looking for a human and found one who could trace the suitcase to Boston.

Unfortunately, we were in New York to honor her best friend’s distinguished dance career. At this point, all she has are the clothes on her very small back.

I plead with the angel Amtrak attendant who was my link to a better future — one that would deliver a blue canvas suitcase. Knowing I had one shot, I connect with her on a heart level and use the C card. The C card was what my sister Beth would use whenever she wanted preferential treatment. It worked everywhere except Sloan Kettering, where she was receiving chemotherapy, and nobody got preferential treatment.

My sister and my mom are the same size. Extra extra small.

The suitcase contained the beloved red leather pants that were originally my sister’s — that my mother coveted and wore proudly to every celebration. Also Beth’s boots, size 5.

I am heartsick. And ashamed. My sisters are going to be so pissed at me. And the idea that if the suitcase wasn’t returned, my mom would lose the tangible things she had left to connect her to her youngest daughter.

How we fasten ourselves to things is what’s occupying my thoughts right now. How we sort through the piles of stuff that hold our memories. Right: keep. Left: donate. Center: toss. How we cradle the past and carry it forward. There are things that cannot be replaced or repaired. Maybe alchemy, maybe witchcraft, can redeem those we’ve lost.

So much of what we inherit is simply handed off without meaning — passed to the next person, who then has to decide whether to pass it further or finally let it go.

What was warranted: a speed shopping trip for brand new clothes.

Shepherding my beautiful mom — who cannot see curbs and has great difficulty with steps — I pushed and pulled her through pelting rain with an unruly umbrella into the land of deliverance: the Bloomingdale’s women’s department. We had a slim window to get her presentable. No makeup, no toothbrush, nothing. I dragged her into the makeup department and half-begged, half-bribed the Clarins consultant to put some foundation on her.

There are a few good things that came out of this.

There will be a blue suitcase waiting in Washington when we return home. The new clothes are now earmarked for Mother’s Day.

And the acutely loving conversations about my sister, who we lost two years ago, whose birthday falls every year on Mother’s Day. Listening to a mother who lost a child say:

I’m lucky to have had her at all.

This is the finding and the keeping.

A note: each year around Mother's Day, I think about the jewelry I make in this same spirit — pieces meant to be passed down, held onto. If you're looking for something to give or keep, the collection is here.

Much of what we recognize as familiar is not simply memory. It is embodied experience. There are places I have grown up with that still live in my body.

I remember being a young girl in Washington, D.C., when my mother served on the board of the Modern Dance Council. We would go to the Kennedy Center, and after performances I would leap down its great, hallowed halls, across the red carpets — my very small body filled with very big aspirations. I was certain I was destined for a life in dance. We saw every company that came through Washington. There was a distinct hometown pride in each performance: Paul Taylor, Martha Graham, American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey, Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp. To witness them there felt like belonging to something larger than yourself. Art and dance were not distant or rarefied. They were alive, shared, and accessible — among the most democratic forms of expression I had ever known.

A place holds itself in time with its own authority. Renaming a cherished building does not alter its essence. The original remains. And loving it as it once lived allows us to be carried into the artistic reverie of remembrance. We recognize something sacred in the familiar. It strikes us with a kind of cellular memory. Real places, like real people, hold their shape. They outlast the chaos of noise. They do not contort themselves to accommodate shifting postures of power, nor to those who only momentarily lead.

And yet, here I am — at war with myself, feeling almost traitorous to my own beliefs — and still I choose to go to the Kennedy Center to watch my friends’ daughters dance. In deference to my loyalty to these young dancers, I choose love over resistance. I choose them over this moment in time. I choose to love them more than I resist what this moment represents.

Perhaps that, too, is a form of faith.

Because in the end, the building is still the building, the art is still the art, and the dancers are still worthy of devotion. Power may rename a place, but it cannot rename what it has meant to us. Some things live deeper than language. Some things remain in the body.

I’m one of those people who feels happiest when I get to play in the dirt.

Dirt is malleable. It holds microbes and memory. When my hands are in it, my brain loosens its grip and respectfully takes a seat in the background.

There’s a modern term for this now — earthing. It used to be called gardening.

I don’t have a garden at the moment, but I do have a small terrace. There are herbs, and a flowering clematis — one plant in particular that refuses defeat. Rooted in a pot, it climbs with determination, surviving serious temperatures, overwintering against the odds.

It’s crowded out there. This is not a place to amble.

Without the extravagance of space, you begin to understand dimension differently. You work with what is available. You create consciously within borders. Planting becomes more deliberate, more curated.

There are fewer volunteers.

Volunteers are the incidental offerings of nature — a bird drops a seed, the wind carries it forward, onwards. A collaboration between chance and life itself.

I think about this often in my work.

In jewelry design, there are similar constraints — materials, cost, proportion. And sometimes, what appears to be limitation becomes the opening to something new.

As the price of gold rises with almost alarming insistence, the question becomes: what now?

As a creator, it’s my responsibility to respond. I can abandon what I’ve always favored. I can combine metals — silver with gold — allowing contrast to become part of the language. I can work lighter, reduce weight, let form do more with less. I can explore negative space, letting absence hold as much power as presence, opening a design without compromising its integrity.

Constraint demands intention. And still — I wonder about the volunteers.

What arrives without an invitation. What finds its way in anyway.

What insists on growing, even here.

It starts with inventory. What is within my power? What can I accept that I cannot change? Can I be here, in this exact moment, with unwashed hair and mismatched socks and not feel diminished?

Can I look through the lens that asks — am I enough? — and not flinch? Am I brave enough to let go of a revised self-perception, the one I’ve been polishing like a stone, so I’m not always trying to seduce or entertain you into seeing me in a more flattering light?

The Serenity Prayer, on repeat.

When I reach for someone to comfort me and they don’t answer, where do I go? If I call on myself, will I always be home?

We all have methods of self-care, of self-reliance. Some of them work better than others.

Today our family welcomed a new baby. My nephew’s first child. And I found myself thinking about all the firsts — what we do when we see that sweetness arrive in the world. A newborn creates a particular kind of awe. Time slows. We look through a different aperture, one that tells us a story outside the chaos. How could anything that innocent hold anything other than pure love?

And we rise to meet it. We rock and swaddle — to regulate, to calm a nervous system that has just arrived in a very loud world. We coo and sing lullabies. All of it unconditional.

So how do I stay here, when it’s so often easier to fold or run?

Can I be the source of my own reservoir of that love? Can I see it, tap it, touch it, play lullabies to it?

True serenity lives in places that aren’t obvious. It asks us to look beyond what we’ve been taught, to guide ourselves past our oldest, most entrenched core beliefs about who we are and what we deserve.

Listen for the lullabies and rewrite them.

They’re still there.

Oscar Wilde wrote that beauty is a form of genius — higher than genius, as it needs no explanation. Aristotle thought beauty was measurable in proportion and symmetry, perhaps best revealed in mathematics and nature — the golden ratio, the perfect and repeatable equation in sacred geometry.

My experience is that it’s deeply personal. Sacred even. Often so ephemeral that you recognize it only as it’s disappearing.

When it comes to beauty, what is left out is of equal importance to what is included. This is true of a piece of jewelry and it is true of a life. Restraint is a kind of precision, a way of honoring what remains by refusing to crowd it.

Seeing beauty, naming it — I hold space in my mind to etch an indelible mark. Whatever and wherever your personal view of beauty originates, it offers a common language. There is a universal aspect to the moment you see and recognize it. A flash of memory that lifts the curtain and offers up a sense of wonder. The feeling is an interruption from the present moment that brings you into an even more present space.

Beauty feels like an embodiment. As essential to me as breathing.

In cities I sometimes have an overwhelming sense of grief for a loss of nature that was never there to begin with. Absent are trees and the topsy-turvy layering of vines and things that are unbidden and sprawl without form. That grief is strange because it’s hypothetical — a mourning for something the place never had. Absence, I’ve learned, has its own shape. Once you’ve been trained to see beauty, you feel its missing outline just as clearly.

Sometimes we need to create beauty just so we can experience it. It’s a kind of conceit, but not an inconsequential one. Making things that are beautiful feels like a conduit into a better world — more powerful than words, existing at the intersection of music, poetry, dance, and nature. When you have all of them at once, the experience is ecstatic.

When I make something I’m often thinking about a specific person. I hear their voice, or listen for their laugh, and an image gets constructed in my mind. I have an impression of a neck or an ear. The way someone holds themselves when no one is looking.

Jewelry is intimate. It lives on the body. It touches skin. There’s a responsibility in that proximity, and also a kind of privilege — to be trusted with what someone carries close.

There’s an intimacy in creating something beautiful when it’s shared. The common thread from intention to matter, with someone who also sees it, is a divine partnership. What I’m making, every time, is a point of recognition. Beauty as a common language. The moment the curtain lifts and something briefly shared becomes possible.

That thread is what I’m following.

Design begins with the notion of the middle way. For an artist to create honestly, the outcome is not guaranteed from inception. From this perspective, in order to create, the artist begins with the ground of a blank canvas.

Being patient with the process — open to where imagination will send you — is a practice. In Yoga, we call it beginner’s mind. To engage and approach each posture with curiosity and openness requires full presence. When I want to be present, adopting beginner’s mind helps me be available to new possibilities rather than tethered to old conditioning.

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Anything we’ve done habitually — hundreds and thousands of times — is replete with expectation of outcome. And yes, there are desirable outcomes from our habits. Clean teeth. A car with a full charge. But there are other gains we’re rewarded with when we drop expectation from our actions.

I always want to create something beautiful and pleasing to the eye — with enough weight to feel grounding and light enough to be playful. But it’s the unexpected that is often the most interesting as an artist.

I remember as a dancer how much I loved being on stage. I loved the feeling of arriving in my full athletic power, my body springing to release everything that had been learned and taught and practiced in the studio. I remember our choreographer saying that we’d better love the process of being in the studio with no one watching, because that’s where we spend 85% of our time and energy.

These are the places where creativity lives — never witnessed except by the floor, the mirror, and the other dancers you’re sweating beside.

In jewelry making, the tiniest details matter greatly on something that lives on such a small canvas. A finger. A neck. An earlobe. The balance of what you leave out is as important as what you include.

Often I’ll go back to a design that intrigues me and keep tinkering long after it’s been completed. Because we’re not static — we keep moving, we keep breathing, learning and unlearning.

This is the living process. This is the middle way.

Thank you for reading and supporting my work.

-Mauri Pioppo