On chickens, growing kids, and this truth: Fledging is essential to flight. If we are alive and growing, we will bust out of the earlier versions of our life, we will grow our capacity and our range. It’s as true for our kids as it is for ourselves.

We tend to coalesce in groups and sub groups, political groups, affiliations, parent groups. When was the last time you you came together with strangers because wonder and beauty and cosmic amazement compelled you to do so?

Growing up around boats, I developed an early appreciation for how even the smallest, most undetectable shift can change an entire trajectory. Years later, I discovered surprising echoes in the nervous system: small changes can set your course to a different land entirely.

An unexpected trick of light turns birds into a web and how - when our small human mind start grasping - we can find solace in wider listening.

Sometimes, when you’ve been off radar for a bit, there can be a temptation to show all you’ve been up to, accomplished, and done. But then you come upon a Mary Oliver quotation, stuck to the back of a red Toyota outside the Kettle Cove Creamery, and you remember that what you’re most proud of is not doing.

Getting out from under necessary to discover a rich field of possibilities in what Mary Oliver calls the “whimsical.” Whimsy contains the germ of your true responsibility: the care and keeping of your wild and precious life.

From the outside, retreat and refuge may look utterly indistinguishable, and each have their benefits. But if retreat is our gold standard, we miss opportunities to make our lives more habitable through regular old care that's just...part of life.

I’ve never had much luck thinking my way out of feeling squeezed, but I have found solace in a phrase Quakers offer when the path forward feels opaque: Way will open.

4,000 years ago (okay, it was 1997) I worked as an interpreter at the Grand Canyon. These days, I wonder if we put too much stock in making meaning. Especially when it comes to chronic illness, what might happen if we offered direct witness instead of interpretation?

Discovering flexible, living tissue in structures we might have dismissed as lifeless can change the way we see ourselves and our whole notion of support.

My husband Jon is preternaturally kind and a Southerner, so it was a bit of a jolt when an innocent “how have you been?” made a room full of Swedes go uncomfortably quiet. How a cultural difference points toward wider permission in sharing how we are.

“I paused in the silence after he left the room. Weak as I was, I knew a relationship of care would not override my sovereignty. “ Revisiting a moment that showed the importance of bodily autonomy and collective care.

Looking at a joint that invites us to consider our habits of bearing and teaches us about the relationships between capacity and support.

Perhaps the secret to healing is very much like the secret to a good joke . . . timing. If we’re paying attention, there are a thousand right-timed moments which might offer us a kinder way of meeting ourselves. Moments where we choose, against all odds and training, to be our own ally.

Grieving without a discrete event to organize around is confusing. The sheer ongoingness of this pandemic winter means we are in constant and nebulous mourning. Our condition feels chronic. But if having a chronic condition teaches me anything, it’s that when you can’t find the thread of what works, adopt extreme gentleness. Meet this moment with an inartful but deep truth: This sucks, and I love you.

In this in-between time, many of us find ourselves, as Octavia Raheem tells us, in the pause between “what is ‘no longer’ and what is ‘not yet.’” How do we summon the courage to stay in the pause? How do we meet ourselves with kindness in the midst of paradox?

A chance encounter with a rescued dog shows us a blueprint for recovering our health: Not doing what we’re told.

When we push ourselves into shapes we cannot make, we leave our body - and its knowing - behind. When we only listen to the part that wishes this all away, we are wishing ourselves away. Our bodies keep demanding that we live into the stories they’re actually telling.

As pandemic restrictions lift, could I gently request, dear reader, that you not become a moon to all that is required of you? But that somewhere inside you hold the truth that your actual life is here, on your own planet. That there is an entire world to inhabit, full of mystery and its own wise pacing.

Finding parallels between the pandemic and early parenthood - exhaustion, ongoing-ness - only to find solace in the remarkable discovery of how an octopus can detect light.