Entering through suffering
Slightly edited from an email to my friend Ken today: “I’m glad you liked [my writings]. You know, I used to talk to one of the priests at [a church in Lower Manhattan] for a while, right after I...
View ArticleUnrequited
I am seventeen. I am powerwalking around my small Southern town listening to Alanis Morissette on my walkman. It is summer and I know every word and I am screaming along. I am so in love, so in love....
View ArticleGame of hearts
A convergence of events has me thinking about romantic relationships a lot lately. Old ones, new ones, potential ones, hypothetical ones, ending ones, evolving ones, aching ones, scabbed-over ones,...
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Epiphanies are hard
Last summer I went to a party in Williamsburg, the kind of party where both illegal absinthe cocktails and tater tots were being served and there were random Ouija boards and 1980’s...
View ArticleFor the sick
Like a good liberal, I’ve always been strongly in favor of healthcare reform. I was uninsured for three years, from 2001 until 2004. I was 18-21 years old and healthy. I didn’t see a doctor or a...
View ArticleSee the distortions
Palm Sunday, 2010. He says he needs me to go ahead and do it — to reclaim myself. He says it is important for the world. I dream that he’s telling me the secret, he’s telling me how to do it, but I...
View ArticleThe teacher
By the time I went out looking for a new teacher I no longer had any idea what I was doing. It was the dead of winter, my mind wasn’t functioning properly; I was a wreck. I didn’t remember what I...
View ArticleSeven days postpartum
I hear my daughter crying every time I run the water — in the shower, the sink faucet, the squeaking pipes. My uterus contracts and I rush to her, where someone who has been watching her insists that...
View ArticleOn motherly love
Yesterday my baby smiled at me for the first time, and my heart was filled with joy. Today 20 kindergarteners were murdered in their school. I cried on my nursing baby while I read the news. I read the...
View ArticleOn peak experiences
A discussion in a graduate seminar (on delay of gratification) last week somehow lead to my trying to a disentangle a Zen parable about a father who kept seemingly reacting nonchalantly to all these...
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