Wendell Berry died Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92, and he died in the place he had spent his whole life refusing to leave. Because of course he did.

The obituaries will tell you about the books, the National Humanities Medal, the essays that changed how a generation thought about food and land and limits. They will quote “The Peace of Wild Things,” as they should. But I keep thinking about a barbershop.

I am the daughter of a town barber. I grew up in the unique weather of Modern Barber Shop—the snip and hum of it, the men waiting their turn on the long, wooden church pew along the wall, the talk that rose and fell all day like something breathing. My father knew everyone. More than that: everyone passed through his hands. The farmer and the preacher and the boy getting his first haircut before school pictures, all of them sat in that chair and told him things, or didn’t, and he held it all.

So when I first read Jayber Crow, Berry’s novel about the isolated orphan who becomes the barber of Port William, Kentucky, I did not experience it as fiction. I experienced it as recognition. Jayber is the town’s witness—the man at the edge of every story and the center of none, who comes to love the whole flawed place precisely because he has heard it, week after week, in his chair. Berry understood something I had known since childhood without having words for it: that a barbershop is where a town tells itself the truth. That the person holding the scissors is holding something else, too.

Berry called it membership—his word for the way a community’s people belong to one another whether they like it or not, the living and the dead together. He spent seventy years writing about one small fictional town because he believed you could see the entire world from one place if you stood still long enough and paid attention. He and his wife Tanya farmed a hillside in Henry County for decades. He wrote by hand. He was arrested protesting strip mining. He declined, politely and completely, to be modern in the ways modernity demanded.

Most of us are not good at staying. We are trained for leaving—for the bigger market, the better opportunity, the next thing, the bright lights. Berry’s work is a patient argument that this training has cost us something we can barely name anymore: the knowledge that comes only from affection, and the affection that comes only from time. You cannot love a place in general. You can only love it in particular—this hillside, this river, this church pew where the same men have held court about the weather for thirty years.

He once wrote that “the forest does not withhold itself from death.” Neither did he. There is no tragedy in a 92-year-old man dying at home in the town where he was born, surrounded by land he tended and people who still belong to him. There is only the completed shape of a life lived on purpose.

My father’s Modern Barber Shop is long gone. Berry’s Port William never existed. And yet both places are entirely real to me, and this week they feel like the same place—a room where the door opens, and someone comes in, and is known.

Pay attention to what you love, Berry told us, in a thousand different ways. And stay.

He did.

The Loved Ones
by Wendell Berry

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

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For several years, I saw Tim Curry every Friday and Saturday night at midnight. He was exquisite each time.

This was at Wings, a tiny art theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, where I worked my way through college as the assistant manager, which is a grand title for what I actually was: the marquee letter changer, the ticket salesperson, the concessions salesperson, the projectionist, and the janitor after every show. I sold you your ticket at the door. I sold you your popcorn at the counter. Then I climbed the stairs and threaded the film that would turn you, for ninety-eight minutes, into whoever you had come there to be. And then I would sweep up all the toast and rice you left behind.

Because the film was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the people lined up on the sidewalk at 11:30 were not the people who had filed out of the 9:00 show. Those patrons—the ones who had come for The Conversation with Gene Hackman or John Huston’s Wise Blood with Harry Dean Stanton—passed the midnight crowd at the door like two weather systems meeting: cardigans going out, corsets coming in. Fishnets and feather boas on a sidewalk in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the tail end of the seventies. You have to understand what that meant, in that Southern place, at that time. Or maybe you can’t, quite, unless you were there. They brought with them rice, newspapers, water pistols, flashlights, rubber gloves, noisemakers, toilet paper, toast, and playing cards. I might have forgotten one or two things.

Our print was old. It had been run through the projector twice a week for years, and it had the scars to prove it. Pieces sometimes burned. Pieces got spliced. The image sometimes jumped when the film finally played again—a little hiccup in time, a few frames of Tim gone forever. The regulars knew every scar. They shouted through the jumps the way a congregation carries a hymn past a coughing fit. It seems right to me now that a movie about a creature stitched together from spare parts was itself held together with tape—that Frank-N-Furter, who built a man on a table, was rebuilt weekly on mine.

Because when the celluloid broke—and it was not uncommon—I was the one who fixed it. The screen would go white, the theater would howl, and I would leave my post at the concessions counter, sprint up the stairs to the booth, and stand there alone in the hot lamp-smell of the huge, old projector, listening to the flapping of the reel, holding a little version of Tim Curry in my hands. His face, in miniature, melting slightly at the edges of the burned frames. I would cut, and splice, and press, and send him back up onto the screen, and the room below me would roar him home.

I knew exactly what he would say and sing before he said or sang it. I knew every glance, every smirk, every side-eye. His lips were almost indecent, anatomically unfair, a public safety concern. I saw the movie the way almost no one gets to see anything: dozens and dozens of times, from above, through a lens, while also making change for Milk Duds. The audience worshipped him from below, throwing toilet paper and toast. I repaired him. Ours was the more intimate relationship, I maintain, though they had more fun.

They were, I should say, the rowdiest crowd in Greensboro. Loud, profane, gleefully obscene, in costume and in character, playing their parts in the aisles while Tim played his on the screen. Every weekend, the same faces. And every weekend, new faces welcomed by the old-timers. So many fishnet stockings. Anyone watching them stream in past the cardigans would have locked up the register.

Here is the thing, though. When the film broke, and I abandoned the concessions counter—the cash drawer, the popcorn heating under a lamp, the tickets, the candy, all of it unguarded—to run up those stairs, no one ever touched a thing.

They waited in line.

Every time. The people that town had names for, the ones who could not have walked down some Greensboro streets dressed the way they were dressed without consequence, stood patiently at an unattended candy counter, in fishnets, at one in the morning, waiting for a redheaded college girl to come back down the stairs and sell them their Junior Mints and Dots.

It took me years to understand what I was looking at. The transgression was the costume. Underneath it was a congregation. They did not misbehave in my theater because my theater was the only place they did not have to—the one room in that city where they could be fully strange and fully safe at the same time. And you protect a room like that. You protect its ritual, its scarred old print, its candy counter, its assistant manager. Tim, up on the screen in his pearls, was only the presiding spirit, singing the doctrine every week in case anyone had forgotten it: Don’t dream it, be it. They weren’t dreaming it. They were being it, in Greensboro, North Carolina, at midnight, at a little theatre called Wings—named for the 1927 movie that won Best Picture at the very first Academy Awards in 1929, the only silent film ever to do so. A theatre named for a movie that said everything without a word, packed every weekend with people shouting every word back at the screen. The movies had come a long way. In that room, so had we.

The print is gone now, of course. They all are. Film became digital; midnight became streaming; you can watch Tim Curry any hour you like, pristine, unburned, unspliced, on a screen you hold in your hand. It is not the same thing, holding him that way. Not the same thing at all. I held him the other way—in strips of scarred celluloid, warm from the lamp, his face in my fingers while a hundred of the bravest people in North Carolina waited below, trusting me to put him back together.

I always did. We always do, for the ones who show us who we might be.

We love you, Timmy. You brought so many people together. And now you are iconic stardust. Still bringing people together. And, I hope, singing with Dolly. Both of you insisted that we love ourselves and be ourselves on this Earth, and we are better for it.

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1. I loved reading about the creation of this meaningful ceramic dumpling.

2. I loved this interactive walk-through of a modern apartment through the eyes of someone from the past, marveling at the everyday conveniences we now take for granted. Ordinary abundance, indeed.

   

3. There is one thing you should know about me. Or is it two things? I will never pass up reading an obituary, and I will never not read a story about what a death row prisoner asked for his last meal to include. Like Oklahoma city terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh’s requested two pints of mint ice cream or John Wayne Gacy’s dozen fried shrimp, a bucket of original recipe KFC, french fries, and a pound of strawberries. These are just a few of the ceramic pieces comprising the expansive series The Last Supper by artist Julie L. Green (1961-2021).

   

4. Oh, god, so many things I love are in this one piece of gigantic art made to look like a monumental junk drawer. Also, I’ll be following along on the artist’s Instagram.

5. I really love this heartfelt tribute to Dolly by Sam Cieri of the Nicotine Dolls.

   

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What have you discovered this week? I would love to hear from you. Inform me! Surprise me! Amuse me! Charm me! Bless me! Confuse me! Irritate me! Don’t deny me! Scare me! Make me dizzy with cuteness overload! Frighten me! Explode my brain! Tickle my fancy! Introduce me! Fool me! Poke me! Enrage me! Teach me! Alarm me! Embolden me!

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Coat of Many Colors

by Dolly Parton

Back through the years
I go wonderin’ once again
Back to the seasons of my youth
I recall a box of rags that someone gave us
And how my momma put the rags to use
There were rags of many colors
But every piece was small
And I didn’t have a coat
And it was way down in the fall
Momma sewed the rags together
Sewin’ every piece with love
She made my coat of many colors
That I was so proud of

As she sewed, she told a story
From the Bible she had read
About a coat of many colors
Joseph wore and then she said
Perhaps this coat will bring you
Good luck and happiness
And I just couldn’t wait to wear it
And momma blessed it with a kiss

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money
I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

So with patches on my britches
And holes in both my shoes
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

And oh, I couldn’t understand it
For I felt I was rich
And I told ‘em of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch
And I told ‘em all the story
Momma told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes

But they didn’t understand it
And I tried to make them see
That one is only poor
Only if they choose to be
Now I know we had no money
But I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me
Made just for me

Congratulations on your acquisition of a marriage.

Before operating, please read all instructions carefully. I know you will not do this. No one does. Most people begin operating a marriage with no instruction whatsoever beyond having watched their parents operate one, sometimes badly, the way you learn to drive by watching someone drive angry.

Please retain this manual for future reference. You will lose it. You will look for it in year seven and again in year nineteen, in the junk drawer with the dead batteries and the takeout menus, and it will not be there.

Proceed anyway. Everyone does.

Getting started

Step one: marry someone. This is the easiest step and the only one anyone prepares you for. Most of the time, there is cake. There are toasts. Someone’s uncle cries. (Note: We had none of the above, and it worked out fine. Going on year 35 now.) The entire wedding industry exists to help you complete step one, then goes home and takes the chairs with it, and you are standing in a kitchen with another person, holding the manual that doesn't exist.

Step two: begin daily operation.

Note: there is no step three. There is only step two, repeated for the rest of your life.

Routine maintenance

Your marriage requires regular maintenance to remain in good working order.

Daily: Say one true thing. Not a large true thing. “I’m tired” counts. “That was funny” counts. The machine runs on small true things the way some engines run on used cooking oil. Unglamorous, but so it goes.

Daily, also: Touch each other on purpose. Not in passing, not the accidental brush at the sink. A hand on a shoulder, deliberate, the way you’d touch something to confirm it is still there.

Weekly: Ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. After enough years, you will believe you know all the answers. This belief is the single most common cause of mechanical failure. The person across the table from you is not finished happening.

Annually: Grieve one thing together. Celebrate one thing together. The order doesn’t matter. Doing it in the same room does.

As needed: Apologize before you’re ready to mean it fully. The meaning always catches up. Waiting until you mean it entirely is how people end up meaning it alone.

Troubleshooting

If your marriage begins making a strange noise: Do not ignore the noise. The noise is information. The noise is always free data. A marriage that has gone completely quiet is not fixed; it is unplugged.

If your marriage will not start in the morning: Check the connections. Someone has usually been running on empty and not saying so. Refuel. Coffee is a temporary patch, not a repair, but it can extend operation by several hours.

If the thermostat becomes a site of ongoing conflict: It will. This cannot be repaired and is not covered under any service plan. One of you runs hot, and one of you runs cold, and you will spend decades adjusting a small plastic dial in increments of two degrees, each of you certain you are being reasonable. We recommend blankets, and surrender, in that order. I just bought a red fan for myself, in honor of this step, and in recognition that I now take a medication that gives me hours-long hot flashes every day.

If you find yourself keeping score: Stop. The scoreboard is not included with this model, and installing an aftermarket one will damage the unit. Nobody wins a marriage. It is not that kind of machine.

If you cannot remember why you acquired this marriage: Do not attempt to resolve this at 11 p.m. Nothing about a marriage can be accurately assessed after 10:30. Sleep. In the morning, look at the person eating cereal across from you, reading something on their phone, existing in their entirely ordinary way, and check again.

Parts not included

Mind reading. It was never included. It will never be included. Every attempt to operate the marriage as though mind reading were included will result in error messages, most of which sound like you should have known.

Other parts not included: A referee. A finish line. An exit that doesn’t cost something. But keep in mind that sometimes, exits are called for.

The other part not included is the version of you they married and the version of them you married. Those models have been discontinued. The units currently in operation are different units, updated continuously without notice, and this is the whole point.

A note on vintage models

Ours has been running a long time now. Long enough that parts they don’t make anymore are held together with solutions we invented ourselves and could not explain to a technician. Long enough that we know the exact quirks: The sound it makes before a hard conversation, the precise spot where you have to make it laugh to get it going again.

Newer models are faster, I’m told. Sleeker. Fewer strange noises.

I do not want a newer model. I want this one, with its odd rattle and its history, the one that knows how I take my tea and when not to talk to me and which of my silences means tired and which ones mean come here.

What this manual gets wrong

Everything, a little. Because a marriage is not operated. I have been lying to you with the premise, the way all manuals lie by suggesting the thing can be controlled.

A marriage is not a machine. It is closer to a garden. Something you tend, something with seasons, something that dies back hard some years and you stand there in the frost thinking it’s gone, and then it isn’t. Something that produces, without warning, in a year you thought was fallow, more than you know what to do with.

You do not operate a garden. You show up to it. You show up in the good weather and you especially show up in the bad weather, and you learn that the tending is the thing—not the yield, not the anniversary photos, not the toast someone’s uncle cried through. The daily, unphotographed, on-purpose showing up.

So. Revised instructions, complete:

Show up. Say one true thing. Listen to the noise.

Repeat for the rest of your life.

There is no warranty. There was never a warranty.

There are only the two of you, and the dial on the thermostat, and the long, ordinary, astonishing, maddening, luminous running of it.

I enjoy reading The Guardian online, especially its author column, “The Books of My Life,” in which writers answer a questionnaire about the books that have mattered to them. So today I thought I would answer one myself, to see what I might discover.

My earliest reading memory

I vividly remember sitting in my mother’s lap with a book spread open in front of us as she read to me. Or perhaps I remember the photograph of this happening; sometimes I’m not sure where memory ends and photographic evidence begins.

My brother was two years older and learning to read in first grade when I was four, and evidently I decided I would not be left behind. So I learned to read at four.

After that, I was set free.

I can remember the feeling of hiding under my quilt after bedtime with a flashlight and a book. Fooling exactly no one. We went to the public library in my hometown every Saturday. I read constantly and indiscriminately. I loved the short biographies that were part of a set the library owned. Books were not separate from my childhood. They were one of the places where my childhood happened.

My favorite book growing up

Definitely Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren. Nothing else comes close.

Was it a coincidence that Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump had bright orange hair and so did I?

I think not.

Pippi was my role model for character, strength, whimsy, and imagination. She was wildly independent. She was unfazed by adult rules. She was strong enough to lift a horse. She lived alone with a monkey. She slept with her feet on the pillow. She had a suitcase full of gold coins and absolutely no interest in behaving properly just because someone told her she should.

But she was also kind and generous.

I wanted to be all those things. Or maybe I felt secretly that I was all those things.

When I was 43, I traveled to Stockholm. It was January 2002, bitterly cold, and Astrid Lindgren was dying. I stood outside her house in the freezing weather for a while, simply because I needed to.

In homage, I suppose.

She died a few days later.

I could never watch the Pippi movies, by the way. I didn’t want anyone else’s Pippi. Only the one I had created from the books.

The book that changed me as a teenager

As a young teenager, one book stands out because I read it many times: Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster.

I was enthralled by its epistolary form; perhaps I hadn’t encountered that before. The main character, Judy Abbott, writes monthly letters to the anonymous benefactor who is paying for her education. She wants to become a writer. Perhaps I did as well, without naming it yet.

But what I loved most was that she wrote about ordinary life.

Nothing enormous had to happen.

She wrote about school and friendships and clothes and books and people. She noticed things. We watch her grow and change through the accumulation of those small observations. Her ordinary life was worthy of being recorded simply because it was hers.

Perhaps somewhere in there I understood that mine might be, too.

There is a passage I have remembered for years:

“It isn’t the great big pleasures that count the most; it’s making a great deal out of the little ones—I’ve discovered the true secret of happiness, Daddy, and that is to live in the now.”

Looking at it now, I wonder whether I have spent much of my writing life trying to say some version of that sentence.

As an older teenager, the book that stands out is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

I imagine my response to it was strongly influenced by having been an exchange student in Sri Lanka at sixteen. Buddhism wasn’t an exotic philosophy I had encountered in a textbook. I had lived among people for whom it was part of daily life. I had seen temples and monks and offerings. I had watched people practice it. I had studied with Buddhist monks in orange robes.

So when I encountered Siddhartha, something in it felt familiar.

More than familiar, perhaps.

I felt at home.

The writer who changed my mind

This question is asking not for the writer I admired most. Not the writer whose sentences astonished me. But the writer who made it impossible for me to continue believing something I had been taught before.

It has to be James Baldwin. As a young person growing up in a small Southern town, with visible and invisible racism lapping at the edges of, well, everything, his words took me into new territory where I could see differently. Where there was an enlarged sense of shared humanity. And justice.

The book that made me want to be a writer

I’m not sure there was one.

I don’t remember reading a book and thinking, I want to do that.

Okay, if I had to choose a book, it might be The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers or The Recognitions by William Gaddis, both books whose intellectual, historical, artistic complexity is woven into story so beautifully. I wanted to be able to do that.

Maybe wanting to write happened much more quietly than that. Maybe it happened underneath the quilt with the flashlight. Maybe it happened with Judy Abbott writing down the small particulars of her days. Maybe every book I loved added another almost invisible vote.

Perhaps I became a writer long before I understood that was what I was becoming.

The book I reread

[Still thinking about this one]

I’m interested less in which book I have read the greatest number of times than in which book keeps changing because I keep changing.

But also, unless I am studying a book, I tend not to reread it because I cannot see it again for the first time, and that frisson of discovery is such a big part of reading for me.

The book I could never read again

Anything written by J.K. Rowling.

The book I discovered later in life

There are writers I encountered late enough that my first response was almost annoyance:

Where have you been?

Or perhaps more accurately:

Why didn’t anyone give you to me thirty years ago?

[There are several candidates for this one.]

For example, I didn’t read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry until I was in my 40s. And I realized very early in the book that it truly is a Great American Novel. My husband was a friend of McMurtry’s, which is why I picked it up in the first place. And, by then, we had watched the amazing miniseries made from it. I hadn’t read it before then because I’ll admit I am turned off by books that are too popular or made into movies. They often seem suspect to me, as if they have gained popular press mentions, but people often haven’t really read them. Instead, I like to discover books on my own. I like to enter them without any preconceived notions or expectations. At a time of my own choosing. I am glad I overcame that to read this book.

The book I am currently reading

I am reading Claudia Rankine’s newest book, Triage, because no matter what this woman says or writes, I know my world and life will be all the richer for it.

My comfort read

I don’t think “comfort” necessarily means cozy.

A comfort book, for me, might be one that restores me to myself. One whose intelligence I trust. One that slows the world down enough for me to notice it again.

I’m still deciding which book that is.

And I am noticing my itchiness about some of the authors and books I haven’t been able to mention here: Jesmyn Ward, another Great American Novelist; Moby Dick; poet Toi Derricotte; Toni Morrison; George Saunders; Carol Shields; Elizabeth Strout, Henry James, Borges. So many others.

Answering these questions sparked an interesting conversation with my husband, John. John’s list would include Catch-22; Kurt Vonnegut’s writing; Johnny Got His Gun; Siddhartha as well; The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh; Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; Borges again; and a wealth of historical and technical nonfiction.

But having answered these questions, I find myself wanting to add one that The Guardian didn’t ask.

The book I haven’t found yet

This may be my favorite category.

There is, somewhere, a book I don’t yet know exists.

Perhaps it has already been written and is sitting right now on a library shelf or a bookstore table or someone’s bedside table. Perhaps the person who will write it hasn’t written it yet. Perhaps she hasn’t even begun.

I don’t know its title. I don’t know its author. I don’t know what it will change in me.

I only know that after more than six decades of reading, this still happens: I open a book and find something I didn’t know I needed.

At four years old, learning to read set me free.

Sixty-three years later, it still does.

What about you? What are your answers?

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1. I like it when things bump up against each other. Like Renaissance-style portraits and modern recyclables.

2. I have long collected obituaries. They enthrall me. One of my favorites mentioned that the deceased was a master at operating heavy machinery. So, I was drawn into this essay about obituaries: “What readers cherish about obituaries,” Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc.” And who among us isn’t fascinated by the idea of an immensely compact narrative arc?

3. Without any warning, I was sucked into this story my friend Lyndsay sent me about The Great Silence. Soon I was reading about things so large I cannot comprehend them.

4. Well, how many of the 100 have you read? How about these from 2026?

5. Earlier this month, I started making veggie sushi to surprise Feliks, and he is now requesting it a lot for dinner. I bought this kit to help me get started. Speaking of sushi, did you know that the word translates loosely to “vinegar rice” and that the rice in sushi wasn’t originally meant to be eaten, but was used as a way to preserve fish? Last night, one roll in our house was veggie (blanched asparagus, cucumber, carrot, mango, avocado), and the other one was marinated and sautéed tofu with blanched asparagus. Below is my new favorite tofu or tempeh marinade. It is so good. I am here for you.

• 2 Tbsp olive oil (or omit, if you are oil-free)

• 2 Tbsp tamari or soy sauce

• 2 Tbsp maple syrup

• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar

• 2 tsp garlic powder

• 1/2 tsp cumin

• 2 tsp paprika

• 1/4 tsp turmeric

• 1 Tbsp parsley flakes

• black pepper

  ---

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Do you have a project you feel stuck on? Are you hopelessly disorganized in your creative life? Do you want to move from making to finishing? Is self-doubt showing up? Do you need someone who will always show up for you in hard moments?

My amazing clients and I work together one-on-one on things like book projects, first-time novel writing, creative blocks, event planning, building sustainable creative practices, deepening creative confidence, imposter syndrome, and much more!

My coaching calendar is full until October 2026. More info about how my coaching works is here. Or click the button below to complete a short questionnaire about what you want and need. No commitment is necessary. After I get your questionnaire answers, we’ll schedule a “discovery call” to see if we’re a good fit.

Go here to express your interest

What have you discovered this week? I would love to hear from you. Inform me! Surprise me! Amuse me! Charm me! Bless me! Confuse me! Irritate me! Don’t deny me! Scare me! Make me dizzy with cuteness overload! Frighten me! Explode my brain! Tickle my fancy! Introduce me! Fool me! Poke me! Enrage me! Teach me! Alarm me! Embolden me!

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Don’t Hesitate

by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed
or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

We long for uninterrupted time to soak in the world and then write about it in the kind of detail that makes others swoon with startled recognition.

We long for languid afternoon conversations about what belongs in our memoirs and what needs to be cut from them. This is hard to decide on one’s own because all the moments add up to something we know, and we can’t imagine it otherwise. Others are not as bound to our chronology and causality claims.

We long for clutter-free rooms that invite an exhale, that don’t excite the vacuuming gene, and in which dirty dishes don’t exist.

We long for someone to really listen to our words, not multitask as they do so.

We long for community, plain and simple, with other people who love words, who honor words, who sometimes fight with words.

For many years, at the end of my writing retreats, I have heard the same question in different forms: “I need to find a writing group to belong to. What should I look for?”

And for many years, I knew how hard it was to find what they were looking for. I had found writing groups myself that didn’t serve me. Some seemed performative, like every time I shared my work was an audition I didn’t sign up for. Some seemed like a mini-cult I didn’t belong to. Some were designed to equate criticism with a higher form of intellectualism and if you couldn’t take it, you just weren’t smart enough.

So, finally, with my creative collaborator and teaching partner, Julie Gieseke, we created our own writing group. It’s called The Writing Exchange, and it opens September 1st. Membership enrollment ends on August 31st.

If you are looking for a healthy, supportive, craft-focused, community-oriented writing group to inspire you, hold you accountable, and deepen your writing, I hope you’ll consider joining us. Open to all writers and people who want to write.

Go here for information!

His shop was unmarked. For a long time, no sign announced what those dark green doors led to. It sat at a corner on a tree-lined Georgetown street in Washington, D.C. Expensive homes surrounded that door. Statesmen, actors, diplomats. An occasional scientist, important in their day, now old, would wander in. Nobel prize winners stopped by. I knew who none of these men were, but John did.

Outside, a barred window held books, but that was all. The books were hard to see through thick white-painted bars without feeling as if you were peering too intently into someone’s living room. A bowl of water was reliably beside the closed door for neighborhood dogs when John was in the shop. He always had treats for them, sorted by size, inside. Of course.

It was a shop, this space. Not new and modern, but old and worn, full of antiquarian and rare science and math books, maybe leather, maybe dusty. Two rooms connected by a thin hall full of books, making people walk sideways through it. Specialized. Not for the passerby, but for someone on a search for the first time an influential scientific formula appeared in print. That kind of thing.

I was in awe of his knowledge. It was so far removed from mine. I sat sometimes in the shop behind his large wooden desk, its top piled with notes and books, and listened. I would later go with him to one math “expo” to play Vanna White in his “booth,” which drew so many visitors because it looked like an old European bookshop, not a shiny, manufactured cube. It stood out. He stood out. I learned to fake knowing whether we had any Dirac. I met Chandrasekhar and loved pronouncing his name. I heard scientists read their poetry, which sounded like hell when I was invited, but was actually quite lovely.

In his shop, scientists and mathematicians felt sure and celebrated. Random people off the street, not so much. One man came in, looked around a while, then asked if the books were for sale, or if it was the bookshelves he was selling.

I finally commissioned a sign painter to make him a sign. We hung it over the door. It was thin and long. Dark green, black, and gold. Stately, even. I doubt anyone ever paid attention to it, but I did.

When old men came in and stood a long time in front of the physics section, John would inevitably wander over and ask what they were doing in 1942. Long conversations ensued. Now he is older than those old men.

Once, he tried to correct Murray Gell-Mann on how to pronounce "quark." He knew Gell-Mann’s name, of course—the theoretical physicist who introduced quarks as the building blocks of matter, the man who coined the word itself. He just didn't recognize the face standing in his shop until it was too late. To be fair, the pronunciation was contested—Gell-Mann himself pronounced it against the rhyme of the Joyce line he'd taken it from in Finnegans Wake.

People who visit D.C. even now often stop by the shop to pay their respects to what was there for so long. They text us photos. They sometimes serendipitously meet his landlord outside on the corner, a diplomat who still lives above it. He and John always called each other by their last names; getting familiar with such a distinguished man felt uncomfortable for both of them. For decades, it was always Mr. Ptak and Mr. Wendt. It still is.

Emma spent a lot of time as a baby in her old-fashioned Emmaljunga stroller beside his desk. A quiet baby, she held up one fist and marveled at it for hours. Then switched fists. She later went to the Montessori school in a stone church just down the street. John was her person.

The shop smelled like old books, leather, and Fahrenheit cologne, a dizzying mixture that always takes me right back there. That mixture of scents led my friend Gay to announce very clearly and succinctly that John was a man to leave your husband for. She was right, as she often was.

His shop was featured years ago in the Washington Post, where John was described as “as thick and sturdy as a textbook.” And he is.

“Not many people ever seem to be inside, which is fortunate, since there's hardly any room to maneuver amid the clutter of books, maps, journals, lithographs, laboratory gadgets, test tubes, thermometers and fossils.” It goes further: “In a glass case is a wax model of the interior of a lung. This is information of sorts, in a particularly visceral form. Look closely at that blob floating in formaldehyde: It’s the larynx of an owl. The proprietor, John Ptak, is as thick and sturdy as a textbook. From the look of his shop, he’s more collector than salesman. In Alexandria he has a storage facility so packed with books it is impenetrable, essentially a solid cube of paper.”

John never did suffer fools gladly. An interior decorator who wandered in to find 20 feet of old red leather books for a client’s new library in Georgetown was sent on his way summarily, even though we really could have used that money as new parents. These were important books, not decorations. I always loved him for that.

A bookshop from the West Coast bought the bottom half of his large stock years ago to open their own science and math outpost. They bought bound books and left scientific pamphlets, papers, and prints, along with the most important books, now housed in a building as large as our house, just down the hill on our property. People don’t stop by anymore, but John still works every day, cataloging, researching, finding, noticing, cross-referencing, and selling online to people who know. Collectors, libraries, all over the world.

No sign was ever needed.

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(One of my favorite birthday tableaux)

Today is my birthday (and my daughter Emma’s birthday). I am, suddenly and without any warning, 67 years old; she is 34, a year older than the age I was when I had her. And here are 67 things I know for sure. Your mileage may vary.

1. Love grows when given freely.

2. Saying no is a complete sentence.

3. Rest is not a reward; it's a right.

4. Not everyone will understand you, and that’s okay.

5. You don’t owe anyone your story.

6. Laughter can heal a lot.

7. Grief is love with nowhere to go.

8. You can begin again—at any age.

9. Beauty deepens with time.

10. Trust your gut. It’s wiser than your brain sometimes.

11. There’s nothing noble about self-sacrifice if it erases you.

12. Children know more than we give them credit for.

13. Forgiveness is for your freedom, not their absolution.

14. Good socks matter. Also, always take a sweater and a good book wherever you go. And an index card. And a pen.

15. Drink the good tea/coffee.

16. Use the fancy soap.

17. You are allowed to change your mind.

18. Books can be lifelong friends.

19. Solitude is not loneliness.

20. You will never regret being kind.

21. Some people are soul family and soul friends.

22. Listen more than you speak (and never interrupt a child).

23. The body remembers—so treat it gently.

24. Joy can be a rebellion. (It is, as poet Toi Derricotte said, “an act of resistance.”)

25. It’s almost never too late to write a book.

26. Most things aren't as urgent as they pretend to be.

27. Nature is a reliable sanctuary.

28. You don’t have to earn your worth. Let me repeat that one: “You don’t have to earn your worth.”

29. Everything doesn’t have to be fixed.

30. Sometimes you just need to be witnessed.

31. Music can carry you through decades.

32. Rituals matter. Light the candles.

33. You get to decide who sits at your table. And who doesn’t.

34. Less stuff, more space.

35. Boundaries are an act of love.

36. It’s okay to outgrow people.

37. Learning never ends.

38. Crying is holy work.

39. There’s power in saying “I don’t know.”

40. Be curious instead of judgmental.

41. Your voice matters.

42. Your presence matters more.

43. Play is not just for children.

44. Aging is not a decline—it’s an unfolding.

45. Magic is real.

46. You are allowed to want more.

47. Time is not the enemy.

48. Your body has carried you through everything—thank it.

49. Traditions can be remade.

50. Small things often hold the most meaning.

51. Quiet is necessary.

52. Hope is a discipline.

53. You can hold both joy and sorrow.

54. The people who love you see the real you.

55. Let them take the picture.

56. Say the thing before it’s too late.

57. You can be soft and strong.

58. It's okay to not be okay.

59. The truth feels like freedom.

60. You are never too old to surprise yourself.

61. Grace is everywhere.

62. Start conversations with strangers.

63. Trust slow things.

64. You are still becoming.

65. Live there when you get there, not before. (Be fully where your feet are.)

66. Show up in person. Mail the letter. Lick the stamp.

67. This life—this exact one—is worth living with your whole heart.

Whether you're 26 or 86, maybe something here resonates with you. I’d love to hear what you know for sure, too.

With love,

Patti

It is second grade. I have a new teacher after loving Mrs. Halliburton so much in first grade, and feeling her love me right back. This new one seems harder. More angular than Mrs. Halliburton, so much taller, younger, not at all grandmotherly. Less shaped like a hug. Scarier, somehow.

I am older, too. Taller. My red hair is brighter after the summer sun. My father, the barber, has cut it into a rather unfortunate shape, trying not to make it into a boy’s haircut, I imagine. So now it is just awkward; not gendered, just bad and objectively so.

This year feels different. There are expectations I feel I must meet now, from teachers and from my parents. Unspoken, but I feel them. That’s what success will do to you, I guess. First grade had been a glorious entrance into my schooling career. I guess I’d best keep it up, I thought to myself. I never once questioned that stance until recently.

My black cat-eye glasses are severe against my bleached-bone-colored face and only make the crooked, extremely high bangs Daddy cut for me even more obvious. There are little silver inlays at the upper corners of each cat-eye. Otherwise, the frames are flat, matte black. They make my nose look even smaller than it is, and it is already too small for the width of my head.

I look studious. Nerdy. Brainy.

This will follow me all my life, but I don’t know that yet.

My dress is a Polly Flinders Original. My mother has been fond of them since I was a baby. This one is blue and black and green plaid, with the smocked front that marks it unmistakably as a Polly Flinders. I imagine she thought those dresses improved her standing in our small town circle of mothers, an early iteration of fancy, for sure. Too expensive for a barber’s salary, but still. That would never stop her.

It is the first week of school. I sit in my desk chair and listen to the teacher like the good student I am, ignoring the jumpy feeling in my legs and bottom until pee starts flowing out of me.

Immediately I am warm.

It fills the chair seat and then drips onto the floor. I am amazed at the stream that comes out of me. Finally, the smell reaches my nose. I don’t try to stop peeing—or maybe I can’t—and it just keeps flowing out of me and onto the floor.

I have never peed so much pee at one time. It feels like it will never end. I am curious about this. Like Encyclopedia Brown curious.

The brown-haired boy sitting next to me lifts his feet off the floor. He doesn’t say anything.

I sit very still in the puddle and act as if nothing is wrong.

Finally, my teacher follows the smell to my desk. She stands over me while I pretend to write something, surrounded by my own pee.

To my relief, she moves away.

She asks the other students to line up single-file in the hall and wait for her. They do.

I am left in my pee puddle with her.

“Patti,” she says quietly, looking down at me from a great height. “Did you urinate in your desk chair?”

“No, ma’am,” I say.

It isn’t a lie. I don’t know what “urinate” means.

She tells me to sit still while she goes to the office to call my parents and ask them to bring me a change of clothes, underwear, socks, and shoes. She asks the janitor to come to the classroom. Then she tells my classmates, still lined up quietly in the hall, that it is time to go to the library.

When she comes back, she takes me to the bathroom in the corner of our classroom and helps me clean up. We hear the janitor arrive with his mop and blue bucket on squeaky wheels.

I stay there in the bathroom until Daddy arrives with a new outfit from home. I change my clothes and return to my desk, now cleaned, dried, and sanitized by Mister Sam.

After Daddy leaves, but before my classmates return from the library, my teacher sits down in the brown-haired boy’s chair beside me.

And teaches me the word “urinate.”

It is only now, all these years later, that I understand what Mrs. Thomas did for me that day. She emptied the classroom without announcing why. She gave me privacy before I knew enough to ask for it. She cleaned me up without making me feel dirty. And then, when everything else had been put right—the floor mopped, the chair dried, my wet clothes replaced with clean, dry ones—she sat beside me and gave me the one thing I was still missing: the word for what had happened. She did not laugh when I told her no. She did not accuse me of lying. She understood that there are things a child can experience before she has the language to name them.

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1. You can now search the digital collections of over 4,000 museums at the Last Museum!

   

2. Oh, this is interesting! A Tourist Map of Literature! Put in an author’s name, and you’ll see a floating map of other authors read by people who like the author you entered. Find new authors to read this way!

   

3. Did you know that the bullwhip (video) was the first human-made object to break the sound barrier? It produces a small sonic boom heard as a crack when flicked quickly. NOW YOU KNOW.

4. Well, you know I love these. Fictional self-help titles. Johan Deckmann presents existential notions of life, love, and self-doubt as self-help titles on hand-painted books. You can visit him on Instagram and his website.

5. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. This by artist Radhika Chitalia: “After my father passed away, his expired passport remained tucked away for years,” the artist says. “Rather than throwing it away, I began painting every page with gouache—working over visas, immigration stamps, and empty pages as a way to not just cope with the grief but fill up the pages that he never got to fill.” Go see all the pages, really.

6. Also, Barack’s summer reading list. KEEP UP!

   ---

Strong Offers

Opportunities for People Who Want to Write

AUGUST 2026

Aug 15 - WORKSHOP: Read Like a Writer” —Every text you love is a series of choices someone made. In this workshop, we’ll read closely, uncover those choices, and discover which ones belong in your own writing. August 15, 11 am–2 pm Eastern / 8-11am Pacific.

SEPTEMBER 2026

Write Where You Are Retreat — An intimate virtual retreat for just six women writers, September 17–20. Yes, real creative community can happen on Zoom—this one is proof. Limited to six writers; three spaces remain.

One space available for October - Coaching for Creative People

Do you have a project you feel stuck on? Are you trying to live a more creative life? Are you hopelessly disorganized in your creative life? Do you want to move from making to finishing? Is self-doubt showing up? Do you need someone who will always show up for you in hard moments?

My amazing clients and I work together one-on-one on things like book projects, first-time novel writing, creative blocks, event planning, building sustainable creative practices, deepening creative confidence, and much more!

My coaching calendar is full until October 2026. More info about how my coaching works is here. Or click the button below to complete a short questionnaire about what you want and need. No commitment is necessary to join the waitlist. After I get your questionnaire answers, we’ll schedule a “discovery call” to see if we’re a good fit! I love this work!

Go here to express your interest

What have you discovered this week? I would love to hear from you. Inform me! Surprise me! Amuse me! Charm me! Bless me! Confuse me! Irritate me! Don’t deny me! Scare me! Make me dizzy with cuteness overload! Frighten me! Explode my brain! Tickle my fancy! Introduce me! Fool me! Poke me! Enrage me! Teach me! Alarm me! Embolden me!

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Meanwhile It Rains for Two Weeks and the Heat Never Breaks

By Morgan Parker

Sometimes I text my friends I’m crying
and they reply lol.
It’s not their fault. My lack
of tact and legibility is divined.
On Wednesday I resolve to be friendlier
with myself, more encouraging.
Thursday I call myself a stupid cunt before breakfast.
It’s almost funny how much
I’m actually crying. It’s kind of funny
how I know exactly what Gordon Ramsay is like when
his kids don’t clean their rooms, but I don’t know my neighbor’s
last name. I don’t know any attorney generals offhand.
I almost never know my login on the first try.
I don’t know if I’m taking the right medicine
for the right disorder. I don’t know if I’m being
who I really am
from day to day
if the priority should be
me or all of us and what
if any distinction there is and why.
I’m either asking or answering the wrong question here.
I like how the dog knows when I’m about to cry.
I like how the record player never asks me to log in.
Sitting at the typewriter there is no notification.
No one is laughing at me but myself.
It gets old, but I get used to it.
I get older and more used to it.
I am hanging in there, I keep saying, clearly
meaning something different
than what we all have decided those words mean
or more precisely what they demand.
Society and community and that stuff.
Whatever instructs me to say “Don’t worry about me.”
It’s nobody’s fault,
but today the last line of my horoscope was
“there is no such thing as a soul,” so
maybe horoscopes have gotten out of hand.
I wonder if I could heal
my own energy eventually, for free.
I just need to be reminded
which moon makes me bleed
and which moon
makes me want to. Let me
preface this and
everything after: I’m not joking.
There is no such thing as my soul.
Remember when Heidegger said, “All distances
in time and space are shrinking”?
I know, right. I could be drowning, and
all my friends would be laughing
at my impression of me drowning, like oh yeah
You would totally drown that way
like with your face just like that

At the end of every writing class I teach, or every retreat I host, people muse about finding a writing group to join. And they ask how to find a good one, one that is nourishing, supporting, safe, and challenging, one that won’t tear them down, but will build them up.

I never have a good answer. I’ve been part of damaging writer groups. Ones that feel like a clique I don’t fit into, with a history I don’t understand, with stand-outs who like to stand out, with grammar queens and people who don’t know how to provide feedback that can actually be heard, who confuse criticism with intellect.

Some groups have even stopped me from writing. Made me doubt myself. Made me perform rather than learn or experiment.

After years of hearing that question about finding a writing group to join, my teaching partner, Julie Gieseke, and I have finally created our own. It’s called The Writing Exchange.

Among other things, the centerpiece of the group will be twice-monthly workshops, a private space for r…

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Step one: Get sick on a weekend.

This is not strictly necessary, but it helps. The emergency room early on a Sunday MORNING is the overture to the whole opera: Even if the waiting room is empty, you will likely wait at least four hours to be told what you already know, but the telling will be documented, and documentation is currency in the kingdom we are about to enter. When the ER doctor says the word—in my case, “vertigo,” said with a shrug that suggested the room was not, in fact, spinning for him—do not argue. Do not say “I know” or “No shit, Sherlock.” Take my word on this. Receive the word like a coin pressed into your palm. You will need it later.

Step two: Bring a witness.

I brought John. Thirty-five years of marriage and this is one of his finest roles: the corroborator. He sits in the plastic chair by the wall, hands folded, and when I say “the ER doctor said,” he nods with the gravity of a man testifying before Congress, his little red glasses making him look more than a little bit like Ben Franklin. You cannot be believed alone. This is one of the first rules of the medical establishment, though it is written down nowhere. A woman reporting her own symptoms is merely anecdote. A woman with a man nodding in a plastic chair is evidence. Would that it were not so.

Step three: Hear “urgent” as meaning “urgent.”

The ER doctor stressed repeatedly that it was urgent for me to get an MRI very soon. John and I both heard him say that at least four times before they discharged me. ER doc also stressed that I needed to see an ENT as soon as possible. He left the room, and I stood up to leave too, pushing on the locked exit door of the ER before I was stopped by a nurse who asked if I really wanted to leave the hospital with an IV still stuck in my arm. “I’m dizzy,” I explained.

So, the day after the ER visit, I started calling. Neither the neurologist nor the ENT office had received anything from the ER. Not a peep. The neurologist that the ER doctor said he had personally talked to while I was in the ER had left for vacation. They needed a referral from my GP to schedule an MRI. The ENT doctor would see me, his office said, but only after I had an MRI, which depended on the neurologist now sunbathing in the South of France.

My friend Kathleen shared her strategy of going to a doctor’s office with a bagged lunch and her laptop, telling the front desk that she could work there in the waiting room for as long as it took to get an appointment. It’s a brilliant move.

I had already made a GP appointment when the vertigo started, so instead of sending John to take up residence in someone’s waiting room, I move on to the next step—seeing my regular doctor the next day with the ER documentation and test results.

Step four: Know your audience.

The young man who sees me first at my GP’s office—before the doctor, always before the doctor, this is the choreography now—looks like he is still in school, or maybe this is his residency. An earnest face. Big brown eyes that sometimes appear to be working overtime at the puppy dog look we mistake for compassion, but maybe I’m just weary and cynical. He leans forward when he listens and never breaks eye contact, which could read as humorlessness, but I test that every visit and every visit he passes, despite himself. He is a newcomer to this practice, maybe two years, working alongside the doctor we have all seen for decades. I like him. This matters less than you’d think and more than it should.

Step five: Understand what you are actually asking for.

A referral is a precious thing. It looks like a piece of paper, or these days a click in a portal, but it is actually a key, and the door it opens has two locks. One must tread lightly sometimes to angle the sun just right between the two great pillars of the health establishment and the insurance industry, like two large damn precarious rocks of Stonehenge. Stand in the wrong place, and the light never comes through. Stand in the right place at the right moment—solstice, essentially—and the beam falls exactly where you need it: on a specialist’s calendar, on an appointment three weeks out instead of three months, on the word approved.

So we are talking, the earnest young man and John and I, and I am laying my coins on the table one at a time. The Sunday ER visit. The earlier Urgent Care visit because of the blood in the ear. The two falls. The documented word. The witness. I am sitting up near the end of the exam table with my legs outstretched on the little tray table they scoot out for lower extremities. The table is laid flat and therefore requires actual ab muscles to sit up on, so I am also doing a low-grade core workout while supplicating, which feels about right.

Step six: Allow a young man to grab your head.

I did not see this step coming. Suddenly—and I mean suddenly, no wind-up, no “I’m going to try something” —this earnest young man takes my head in both of his large hands and swiftly lays the top half of my body down flat with my head turned toward him. “Keep your eyes open,” he says.

The room tilts. My eyes start going back and forth like Sri Chinmoy.

“Oof,” I say. I grab his arm.

He pulls me back up—by my head, I want to note, the way you’d right a lamp—and we talk a bit, and then he moves to the other side of the table, turns my head toward him and does it again, watching my eyes go wild. This time it all goes: him, the room, John in his chair, the instruments hung on the walls like the world’s least whimsical mobile. Everything around and around me, and me at the still center of it, eyes open as instructed, being extremely cooperative about the whole thing. Bad words may or may not escape my lips loudly.

Later I learn this maneuver has a name—Dix-Hallpike—and that my spinning eyes were exactly what he was looking for. The test working that dramatically is the point. What I experienced as a small ambush was, in fact, the fastest anyone in this entire process had moved toward an answer. Weeks of “let’s wait and see” and then one earnest man simply lays you down and looks.

Step seven: Receive the word, again, officially this time.

“That’s vertigo,” he says, as if we had not all known it on Sunday, as if John had not been nodding about it for twenty minutes. But now it is different. Now it has been witnessed, tested, produced on demand like a magic trick. The unofficial word has become the official word, and the official word unlocks the first pillar. The referral is written. The sun angles through the stones.

Whether it makes it past the second pillar—whether the insurance industry agrees that my spinning eyes are spinning in a covered fashion—is next week’s essay, possibly next month’s, depending on hold times.

Step eight: Do not forget to be grateful, which is different from being satisfied.

Here is the thing I keep pondering. The earnest young man did everything right. He listened, he leaned forward, he tested, he found. I am grateful to him specifically and genuinely. And also: I should not have needed the Sunday ER coin, the witness in the plastic chair, the careful angling of light. The gratitude and the fury can sit in the same room. They do, actually. They sat in that exam room with me and John and the young man, all of us going around and around, and only some of us aware of it.

When the room finally stopped, I thanked him. He almost smiled. He passes the test every time, despite himself.

P.S. I cannot visit an ER waiting room without reminding you to never, and I mean never, sit near a trash can in an ER waiting room. Just trust me on this. And, if at all possible, keep your back to a wall. I have experience.

The referral came through. I got my hearing checked again and then saw the ENT in record time. The neurologist is still sunbathing. I’ll soon have the hell for claustrophobics known as an MRI. The room, as of this writing, has mostly agreed to hold still, with exceptions whose etiology I cannot quite track.

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I have been down with a bit of vertigo this week, and all that comes with it, including difficulty looking at screens. So I am offering an essay from the past (2005) for your reading enjoyment. It is one of my favorites, and I hope it resonates with you.

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”–Albert Schweitzer

Well, I was going to write about convertibles and fuzzy boots until I watched this week’s installment of videos from keynote speeches presented at the 2004 Omega Institute “Women in Power” conference.

It was 77-year-old Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman who captured my imagination with her address on “Women, Power and Soul.” Even the introduction she got from the conference organizers was compelling. Described as having “unrelenting intelligence” and being both “sweet” and “formidable,” I settled into my folding chair to hear her talk to me about the loss of relatedness and recognition in our patriarchal world, and about surrender.

She spoke slowly and quietly and clearly about the “loss of the feminine principle” in the world; she wasn’t talking about gender, but of “an energy in the world.” “If patriarchy is a power principle that has become a parody of itself,” she said, “what we need more of is the feminine principle: the receptive side, the soul, the heart side.”

“The feminine is the energy that holds presence, the deeper and slower aspect of ourselves,” she said. The feminine looks for relatedness, asking “where are we alike?”, “how can we connect?”, “can you see me?”, and (perhaps most importantly), “do you care whether you see me or not?”

She told of people who come to her for therapy; people who were never heard by others and who felt invisible. She talked of children, anxious for their parents’ undivided attention, which never came. When she was a teacher, she perceived clearly the power of being a “witness.” Through careful observation, she noticed that when her attention wavered during rehearsals, “…something went wrong on the floor. The energy became lax, muffled, attenuated, an edge of fear crept in, the courageous spontaneity was lost. I suddenly understood that perceiver and perceived were one.” (from Woodman’s Leaving my father’s house: A journey to conscious femininity, 1992).

Quantum physics tells us, she warned, that “the presence watching an experiment changes the experiment.” Or, as physicist Erwin Schroedinger put it, the act of observing affects what is observed.

“What an awesome responsibility,” she gently noted.

Her questions were clear: “How do you hold presence for others? How do you hold love for others, with no agenda? Who was able to hold presence for you as a child, without asking you to perform to their standards? Who really saw you and heard you and didn’t ask for something in return?”

How are we changing the people around us by how we respond to them, or don’t?

Her message was compelling, and yet it paled in comparison to what I heard next.

During a stay in India, Marion became very sick with dysentery, captive in her hotel room for weeks. Finally, desperate to escape the room, she gingerly made her way to the hotel foyer one afternoon to sit and write a letter to her husband. Sitting quite near the end of a long, empty couch, she began to write.

Soon, though there were many other seats available, a very large brown woman came and squeezed between Marion and the end of the couch, so close to her that their arms were touching, so close that it made it difficult, even impossible, for Marion to write.

Marion scooted away, angry at the invasion of her space. The woman scooted closer, pushing up against her. “Every time I moved, she moved, until,” as Marion described it, “we ended up at the other end of the couch.”

Once she stopped moving away, Marion realized what a nice, big, warm arm the woman had, and so they sat, a thin bird of a pale white woman and a big brown woman, arm to arm. Not sharing a common language, they couldn’t speak, but sat in silence. Marion gave in to the broad warm arm, the presence of the other, and relaxed into her.

The next day, she went again to the hotel foyer to write. And, again, the woman came and sat touching her, next to her, silently. And the third day. And the fourth day, as Marion’s health improved.

This couch dance continued for a week. And one day, a man appeared as the two women finished their silent, warm-armed vigil.

“You’re all right now. My wife won’t come back tomorrow,” he said to Marion, nodding toward her couch compatriot. “Your wife?,” she thought to herself, startled at his intimacy. “Why is she here in the first place?”

She was unprepared for his quiet and simple answer.

“I saw you were dying and I sent her to sit with you. I knew the warmth of her body would bring you back to life,” he said.

It took a moment for the magnitude of his message and the enormity of what these two strangers had done for her to sink in.

“She did save my life,” Marion said quietly as she recounted the story. “That this woman would take the time to sit with me…and, most importantly, that I could receive it…” That,” said Marion Woodman, “is relatedness.”

That is what it means to hold presence for others.

I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if we all gave unconditionally and held presence for others, even for strangers, just as the warm-armed woman did for Marion Woodman in India. Squeeze in beside someone so you are arm to arm. Stop moving away. Be fully present, listen to their story without being tempted to respond by recounting your own. Be there, with words or not. Don’t check email, calculate stock gains, or cook dinner as you listen. Recognize and own how your presence “changes the experiment,” changes them. Find out how you are alike, how you can connect, how you can really see them. Show them that you truly care whether you see them or not. Lend them your strong, warm arm. Let them relax into you.

Or ask yourself: how freely can I accept their gift of an arm?

“The great paradox is that the more you find yourself, the more you find the soul of everyone else.” –Marion Woodman

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1. An interesting perspective on UFOs from the early 19^th century. "Learn About Japan’s Centuries-Old Legend of the Hollow UFO Ship" by Sage Helene: “In 1803, something strange washed ashore on the coast of Hitachi Province, in what is now Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. Local fishermen found a round, hollow vessel bobbing in the shallows. Inside sat a young woman in unfamiliar clothing. She clutched a small box and refused to let it go. She spoke a language no one recognized, and strange writing covered the vessel. Then, according to the old records, she vanished from history. The story is known as utsuro-bune, meaning “hollow ship.” It appears in several manuscripts from Japan’s Edo period, which lasted from 1603 to 1868. Centuries later, the legend still puzzles researchers. The vessel’s unusual shape and the woman’s mysterious appearance have earned the tale a nickname: Japan’s flying saucer legend. It predates the 1947 sighting that helped spark America’s modern UFO craze by more than a century.

2. “Centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users.”

   

3. 4500 free nature and climate science videos, a great resource from This is Colossal. A collaboration between Studio Silverback and Carnegie Mellon’s CREATE Lab, the new digital library contains a growing collection of climate and nature footage available for free use.”

   

4. A sobering report by Frank Landymore in Futurism, explains that Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly trained on their own slop, creating a need to train them on pre-2022 writing uncontaminated by AI itself—that’s the particular sales pitch made by ISBNdb, a company supplying bulk orders of books to tech companies—with purchases of between one thousand and one million volumes at a time. On the unhappy fate of some books being sacrificed to scanners of the AI world brain, from Hyperallergic.

   

5. "African American art and social justice" by Dr. Elizabeth C. Hamilton "addresses how slavery continues to resonate in contemporary African American art and how it is connected to social justice movements." From SmartHistory.

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Prose in a Small Place

by Rita Dove

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it? All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring—is that the scent of daffodils drifting in?

Daffodils don’t smell but prose doesn’t care. Prose likes to hear itself talk; prose is development and denouement, anticipation hovering near the canapés, lust rampant in the antipasta—e.g., a silver fork fingered sadly as the heroine crumples a linen napkin in her lap to keep from crying out at the sight of Lord Campion’s regal brow inclined tenderly toward the wealthy young widow . . . prose applauds such syntactical dalliances.

Then is it poetry if it’s confined? Trembling along its axis, a flagpole come alive in high wind, flapping its radiant sleeve for attention—Over here! It’s me!—while the white spaces (air, field, early morning silence before the school bell) shape themselves around that one bright seizure . . . and if that’s so what do we have here, a dream or three paragraphs? We have white space too; is this music? As for all the words left out, banging at the gates . . . we could let them in, but where would we go with our orders, our stuttering pride?

Thin, long, silver, metal. Even though thin, it was extremely strong, not fragile, not dainty. An angular, tubular stem topped by a flat, 2-dimensional flower, with tiny holes drilled straight through and a jagged upper edge like the peaks of mountains or the outline of some tulips.

We were in Helsinki, this time not in winter drinking pepper vodka at a Russian restaurant to warm up, but walking through the streets unencumbered by puffy coats.

I was there to speak at a conference for human resource professionals, and my husband, John, came with me. I was unprepared for, and mesmerized by, the appearance of a troupe of avant-garde dancers at every coffee break during the conference, dressed like the Blue Man Group, their wiry bodies writhing and reaching to the sky, accompanied by atonal music unusual to my ear. The meaning of it all was hidden to me; I was intrigued in the way the uninformed and unprepared can be. HR professionals in the U.S. aren’t anywhere near this cool, I thought to myself.

After the conference ended, John and I stayed on for a few days to walk around Helsinki together. We happily wandered, noticing things around us, listening to people talk, looking at the birds, peering in shop windows.

In the middle of a block, I saw a storefront and entered. Suddenly, I knew I was mistaken. John had followed me to whisper, “This is somebody’s house; let’s go.” I was confused. I turned to hurry out.

A tall man with an impressive red beard entered the room, chuckling. “It is my studio,” he explained. “And my home.” We apologized, but he invited us to stay. The three of us talked for a long time. Then he showed us his work. He was a jeweler, working in metals. There was one piece that immediately called to me, but I said nothing. Maybe he didn’t sell his work. Maybe it would be far too much for me to afford, and I would feel uncomfortable saying no after asking. I touched it gingerly when he handed it to me so I could see it up close. I held it for a few moments, then smiled and handed it back reverently, like a Japanese CEO once handed me his business card.

We talked some more. The three of us had so much in common. He fixed us strong coffee and served it in beautifully rustic mugs made by a friend of his. I think if we lived in Helsinki or he lived in D.C., we all would have been good friends. As we prepared to leave, he handed me a box to take with me. “A small gift for keeping me company today,” he said.

I opened it when we got back to our hotel. It was the flower brooch I had felt so drawn to. Delight is not a big enough word for what I felt. For many years, I wore that brooch every day. It became a most treasured possession. There was magic in it. I am unsure what drew me to it so instantly, but knowing its creator and understanding his gift also contributed to my love for it.

I don’t know how or when or where I lost it. It did not announce its leaving, but it is gone now. I still long for it,

I remember so many things about my father–his dimples on both sides of his mouth when he smiled, the crinkles around his eyes, his crooked grin, the ways he was respected and loved by so many people, the extreme care he took in polishing his shoes and in inviting me to bleach the whitewall tires on his car with a toothbrush, the smell of the hot lather machine and astringent aftershave in his barbershop downtown, the phrases I heard from him many times—like “If you want a job done right, do it yourself”--his leadership as a church deacon, how he loved the Wrangler blue jeans we gave him for Christmas one year, the way he wore daily the Mickey Mouse watch I bought for his birthday, how he wore his hair combed straight back revealing two receding hairlines joined by a chubby and rounded widow’s peak between them, the time he dyed all that hair jet black to see if we would notice (it looked like shoe polish and looked so bad we dared not mention it), the hurt he felt at being overlooked by his mother who favored his older sister and younger brother, his sunflower square dancing outfit to match my mom’s sunflower dress and big crinoline, the red and white Mustang he refurbished for me when I got my driver’s license, the money he would slip me as I left to drive back to college after a weekend at home. And then the day he died in ICU at Grace Hospital, my mother throwing up in the family room, me calling the preacher to ask him to come, and seeing my mother put her nose in the plastic hospital bag with his clothes in it that we took home instead of him, closing the top around her nose so she could breathe him in.

I remember so much more of Daddy, but I cannot remember the sound of his voice.

In my youth, I proudly claimed the title of “painter.” Classes at the Burke County Recreation Center sealed this achievement for me. I won prizes and sold paintings at the regular Rec Center community shows, not knowing at the time that family friends bought the paintings to return them to my parents. Those red dots indicating “sold” were a badge of honor. Even the most famous artist in our small town, Ruby Ivester, said she loved my paintings and encouraged me. Of course, her husband owned a frame shop, so maybe she had an ulterior motive.

My painting of a large orange monarch butterfly done when I was 11 adorned my family’s den over the fireplace for many years. Two pencil portraits I did as a teenager of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my father’s side, framed in grey wood from the old homestead by my mother’s brother, Uncle Max, hung over the dining room table. Those two portraits were likely my best creations. A painting of old-timey ladies in the rain with umbrellas, mostly blue, a handful of still lifes done in oil, which I thought was a very fancy, slightly dangerous, and grown-up medium, and many more. By any objective measure, they were not good art (with the exception of those pencil portraits that I did as a teenager), but I thought they were all beautiful. They were the kind of beautiful only a mother could love, really. I was around 10-11 years old when most of them were created.

They are all gone now. The bank repossessed my mother’s house immediately after her death, but John and I didn’t know that, and when we drove down the mountain to start clearing it out, it was padlocked, with a neon yellow notice from the bank. She had lived in my brother’s basement with Alzheimer’s for company for the last few years of her life. So I guess the warning notices arrived there, and no one opened them—the way mail piles up in a house where someone is slowly disappearing.

The paintings, all my school papers and report cards, my childhood stories and poetry, everything left of my father and stepfather who had both died by then, things I had saved and left there, all those historic front pages of newspapers about Moon landings and assassinated Presidents, childhood toys and old memories, all the family photos, all irretrievably gone. Thrown away by the new owners who bought the house for nearly nothing from the bank, or sold at a yard sale that would have mortified my mother, so focused she was on appearances. The new owners renovated the house and flipped it, selling it for way more than they paid.

A high school classmate sent me a message on Facebook to tell me who had bought the house. I messaged the buyer, hoping to recover at least the art. Instead of expressing empathy and offering the paintings to me or even offering to sell them to me, the owner sent photos of my paintings hung in the rooms of her house. “We love them so much!” she said. “They are so neat!" She blocked me on Facebook soon after.

For a few years, I felt sudden patches of shame about that house sale, garage sale, and vivid, passing memories of what had been lost. My face would go hot and red quickly, my heart would race and feel so big in my chest. But over time, those moments lessened in impact, dissipated in my system, until they no longer held a charge. Instead, I grew thankful that the new owners had done the awful job I would have had, to clear out the house. My mother had filled the house with so many magazines stored under the bed that they lifted the bedframe. The last time we were there before she moved out, we had seen a spare bedroom knee-deep in QVC items she bought late at night when she couldn’t sleep. She lived on the edge of hoarding as the dementia did its work on her brain. It would have been a terrible job to clear out that house. And I would have kept too many objects from it, things made precious only by holding memories.

Instead, it was liberation—a loosening in my chest where the heat used to rise.

Some things I have lost, I still long for. Some, it turns out, were carrying me the whole way down the mountain, waiting to be set down.

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