The Guest House: "Gem Tactics"

Do not try to savethe whole worldor do anything grandiose. Instead, createa clearingin the dense forestof your lifeand wait therepatiently,until the songthat is your lifefalls into your own cupped handsand you recognize and greet it. Only then will you knowhow to give yourself to this worldso worthy of rescue. - Martha Postlethwaite, “The Clearing” Journalling was my first formal practice. At the...

Washington was the city of my formation. It’s where I arrived as an undergrad with a box of scribbled journals and a smoking habit. Also, where I smoked my last cigarette. It’s where I met my husband and landed my first job, among many other firsts. Now that I’ve resided among the juniper and chamisa of the Southwest as long as I resided among the cherry blossoms, even a quick visit to the Distric...

Deep autumn. Breath takes shape again on the air. Walking with the ghosts of this warring world as day tips toward evening on the cross-quarter between Equinox and Solstice. Within each of us exists an encoded instinct to burrow. The farmers (who are among the remaining few of us with seasonal sensibility), have gathered their harvest and readied their stores for Winter, and now they’re moving tow...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve often noticed the part of me that longs for silence, for inner coherence in a fractured world. The part that doesn’t want to say a word that could disturb the air, nor add an ounce of the weight in my heart (the inverse of hope, which Emily Dickinson described as “the thing with feathers”) to the too-delicate balance of so many others’ hearts. It takes time, integrity...

Today. Scenes from inside Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where thousands are sheltering and seeking care. Three or four children are curled in each bed. A fatherly-looking doctor pauses. He wraps a child in his arms. He turns her face so she won’t notice how he is cupping silent sobs into her hair. There’s an ache in my arms. In my bones. In the ground beneath my feet. In the leaves. And this reminder fro...

Sunday morning at home. The hum of my children’s voices. The scent of cinnamon and pumpkin waffles. I roam from room to room, seeking a patch of autumn light on which to lay my mat. I settle on a place in the midst of it all, between the portal and the kitchen — only to discover this morning’s practice is simply to lay my tired heart in sunlight. “In Blackwater Woods” is with me again. Some poems...

I have a quiet aversion to conversations about wellbeing . The term conjures images of privilege and appropriation, like the time I was instructed to wave a stick of incense at a merchandised “altar" before disrobing for a spa treatment. Over the years, I’ve heard many conversations in yoga studio lobbies devolve into insensitive recommendations for the latest bestseller on grief or a self-paced o...