[October 2026] Life is a dance of questions. We are wired to be in connection and, given the many ways humans have become disconnected with each other, there are many things we are curious about when encountering one another. Who are you? Who are your people? Can you understand me and my community? Are you…

[November 2025] Always, I want to begin with seeds. With blossoms. With beauty. Foundations, I can forget. Or maybe it’s more I expect them to sprout from the ground magically of their own accord. Like tender tendrils of new plants pushing through carob-colored rain-soaked soil. I am at home in the fluid, find cement suspect.…

[October 2025] The smell is unmistakeable. At least, to me. Pungent as citronella, sharp as pine, bitter as citrus rind. Yet somehow soft, slightly soothing — not quite bay leaf or nutmeg. My grandparents had trees in their yard and this time of year my brother and I would scurry around with the squirrels, collecting…

[September 2024] Though the physical photographs have long since disappeared, I can still close my eyes and picture Céline, the exchange student from Paris who lived with my aunt Cherrie for a year. Her short brown hair, stonewashed blue jeans, shiny boots, black leather jacket. She seemed so chic and cool, so mature, though she…

[July 2024] Even my words are sprinkled with sand here. It sifts through everything, swishing swirls of air holding tiny grains aloft. I am in Yucca Valley again. This past January I traveled here for the first time since family members moved, initially from L.A. to Joshua Tree and then from that lower plain to…

[December 2023] Floods are not only water. Floods can also be memories, mistakes, and miracles: we consider ourselves overflowing with each of these from time to time. Recently I’ve returned from my first plane travel in five years. I am awash in the experience of arriving, carrying the sunshine of where I have just been…

[June 2023] Birchbark. Newspaper. A match, when struck against raspy side of box.  Please, inventory with me: dry oak wood, pine needles, handful of hay, last year’s leaves, length of linen, letters you wrote and never meant to send.  Old corn flour. The contents of long-shelved canisters – cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, powdered garlic.  Hillsides, mountainsides,…

[April 2023] amalgamation /əˌmalɡəˈmāSHən/ noun the action, process, or result of combining or uniting. Maybe, like me, whenever you see an unusual word you ask: why this one? Or perhaps that’s just poetry, which thrums through my mind always plastering the walls with rhyme and meter, endlessly sussing roots and rhythms. I am not sure when…

[January 2023] “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela Let me be clear: the gravity I must defy is my own.  Here I am, at two-and-a-half or three years old, just discovering the wondrousness of words, how they zip out from my mouth to light up the world like fireflies. My parents take…