Growing up, I always went to bed at night with my heart in my mouth, uncertain what the next morning would bring. If my mother and sister woke up fighting, which they did on most days, I knew my mind would go blank in school, my fingers too numb to even hold a pencil....

for Darryl Berlin At an open rehearsal of the LINES Ballet Company several years ago, I asked the choreographer, Alonzo King, if the dancers were free to improvise in performance. “The moves are all completely choreographed,” he replied, “although each dancer has a...

Lately, I’ve been wondering about civilizations long before ours, curious about what evidence of long-ago lives might be resting beneath the seas of the world. I am reading about “mythic cycles of creation and destruction by flood stretching back hundreds of thousands...

The October fires that we fear each year, fanned by the Santa Ana winds that whip the dry landscape into racing flames, have hit us hard. Whole areas of Sonoma County are devastated and the number of displaced, injured and missing people is growing daily. Some of...

for Pema Less than fifty years ago, when I was camping on the shore of Fernandina Island in the Galapagos, I awoke at dawn each day to a sky mobbed with birds: blue-footed and masked boobies, pelicans, frigate birds. On the rocks, tropical penguins jostled with...

for Priscilla Thomas For the past ten days there has been an unopened letter sitting on my bookcase. It contains the lab report on my tick, letting me know whether I have, or have not contracted Lyme’s disease, and I’ve been too scared to open it. I fear it could be...

During the Solar Eclipse yesterday, although clouds hid the sun here, the energy was palpable. I’ve been feeling a growing breathlessness for a week now, and yesterday I yawned until my jaws ached, and then sobbed my heart out, releasing some of the pressure surging...

for Giulio Perrone It is almost two years since Herb’s death, and I miss him – the shared minutia of our daily lives, the small intimacies of touch and affection. I miss his daily phone call from work and the funny haikus he would leave for me on the kitchen table. I...

I had no idea I’d been bitten by a tick because the bite was in the middle of my back, just at the level of my heart where I could neither reach nor see it. Priscilla’s massage found it. Ticks are clever that way; they somehow know the physiognomy of their hosts and...