As many of you know, my beautiful momma passed on July 15th, just under a month after receiving a terminal diagnosis. My cells are still ricocheting against the metronome of time as I try to metabolize all that has unfolded in such a short span. I have scattered notes everywhere, clinging to some as-yet-unshaped essay titled In Defense of Undifferentiated, a daughter’s attempt to imagine, understand, and exalt her new gossamer threads, but for now the coherence of those thoughts remains beyond my reach.

There is, however, something important to name. To leave it unsaid would be to miss the strange and sacred timing of Mom’s departure alongside next week’s premiere of Unbound, a film my dear friend first envisioned more than two years ago when she came to me with the simplest question: “Can you help?” Of course, I said yes, but never fathomed that its release would coincide with Mom’s own. But somewhere in the interstitial space beyond word and form, Unbound and Undifferentiated are sustained by the same breath, so here I am, stepping in. The water feels cold, dark, and deep and somehow, just right.

Bodies living with chronic illness have long since fallen off the pendulum of ordinary time. We find ourselves instead in the liminal space beyond productivity, expectation, efficiency, and the relentless rhythm of before and after. So it took all this un-time, for twenty remarkable people to create a dance stitched together across bedrooms, living rooms, backyards, wheelchairs, and long stretches of necessary rest. A dance where shackles and wings, illness and health, solitude and community, even self and other, blur into one another, giving way to a kind of Exquisite Corpse creativity that is carried as much through form as formlessness, becoming larger, more surprising, and truer, than any individual could have made alone.

Sara has held this vision, and my more recent unraveling, with extraordinary tenderness. Living with her own diagnosis, she has managed to be both fiercely devoted to the work and endlessly patient with herself and the people making it, understanding that honoring disabled, grieving, unfixed beings often means loosening our allegiance to deadlines, living outside the fences of conventionality, and allowing the work to be born again and again on its own looping timeline. I’ve watched her shepherd this film into the world, fostering meaning beyond the silver screen’s final choreography; we have all been nurtured and reconfigured in the making.

Yes, movement is a risk for many of these dancers. Yes, isolation has become their most intimate companion. And yet their lives embody a soft, fluid, sapience our culture rarely recognizes, and has never needed more. They have become masters of small gestures, pacing, enoughness, self-compassion, and the awkward grace beyond inherited rhythms of staged productivity and certainty. They know the terrain of the in-between, the undoable, the never-arriving. They have lived there long enough to discover that what is most life-giving dances beyond the fences of our knowing.

Since Mom’s last breath, I’ve been searching for signs of her everywhere. But it’s too easy, too comfortable, to place her in the dragonflies, the breeze, the 143’s, the thunderous sky. And believe me, I’ve been there. Just yesterday as the clouds rumbled overhead, I longed for my own body to thunder back, booming and cracking open to meet her. Even poets—especially poets—have long insisted that death is the opposite of leaving. But something in my heart wants to, no needs to, reject that safety now. Can I let myself feel the bones of my brokenness and trust that when I stay in the shards of that void, a new possibility, outside of here or gone, this or that, is waiting to be born through me? What if I am closest to Mom inside uncertainty itself, the edgeless space between tidy narratives where life aches and wails and unravels?

I’m leaning in because living with MdDS taught me something similar. Peace arrived when I stopped requiring life to fit inherited categories. Somewhere between movement and stillness, illness and wellness, constraint and liberation, a new way of being emerged. A living that doesn’t collapse under contradiction. I think Unbound has been exploring this all along and, through the extraordinary restraint and grace of a director who never insisted the film be anything other than its own becoming, I like to think we collectively loosened our devotions to duality. Bound and unbound dare to bound toward one another. Sick and well cohabitate in wellness. The living and dead vow happily ever after.

Next Wednesday, nearly a thousand of us will gather to celebrate this gentle, illuminating film and the beautiful humans who brought it into being. I would love for you to join us. To celebrate the many ways our boundaries soften and blur through love, creativity, illness, grief, and a beloved’s final unbinding. For six minutes, let these dancers draw you into a sonorous, gestural transmission, a cellular unbinding that happens while still alive. Stay long enough to feel your own outline become a little less certain. Whatever waits for us there, I’ll be holding the possibility that we have never been as separate as we imagined, each movement loosening where you end and I begin, until we collectively remember what the dancers have known all along, we were always emptiness dancing.

Unbound: Illness is not the end of dance

World Premiere: July 29th @6:30pm ET, followed by a Q&A with cast and creators, and moderated by author and scholar . Some of the cast here with us on Substack include:

If you want to learn more, read this thought-provoking essay and advance praise for UNBOUND by Renée K. Nicholson.

One might even call it a kind of charting that extends beyond the specificity of a disease. It is not clinical record, but it is a record of a body that refuses to be bound by circumstance. It is a body that communicates, and one that is unshackled from time and space. –Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities

Unbound features an original score by Colby Savary and Oscar-nominated composer Mark Orton.

Thank you to our partners and sponsors, whose work extends beyond this film and into the lives of the communities they serve. Their support of Unbound reflects a shared belief that every body, every story, deserves to be seen and heard.

Register for free

Words have begun leaving me as Mom and I enter her final days on this earthly plane. The silence we once assumed was part of normal aging revealed itself to be something far more frightening: atrophy of her midbrain, which on an MRI creates what neurologists call the “hummingbird sign.” Soon she will be without words, without the ability to swallow, walk, or speak her love aloud. Before that happens, she is choosing Colorado’s Medical Aid in Dying (MAID), a choice that allows her to leave this body on her own terms.

These days I am a tsunami of tears and, somewhere beneath that ocean, a hydrothermal vent of rage, both rising through me at once, meeting in a threshold where grief is its own untamed ecosystem. I don’t yet know what is being made there. I only know the shoreline of my thoughts is changing, sediment is lifting, stones are being carried somewhere new. The landscape beneath the water is rearranging itself in ways I cannot yet see.

Someday, when the current has slowed enough for the water to clear, I'll read what these depths have written. Until then, I'm grateful for this essay, and for all of you who continue to keep me company in the silence, while somewhere beyond language, a hummingbird is already gathering itself for flight.

I wasn’t a very verbal child. Or teen. Who am I kidding? I’m not a very verbal adult either. If I could communicate in sound, image, the press of body into another, or by making silly shapes in space, I would. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with dance. Why I chose photography and film long before I ever dared write. The irony isn’t lost on me, here I am, writing an essay. About how words, spoken or written, sometimes fail.

There’s nothing quite like transcending time and space through story, I’ll grant words that much. But still, I often feel them falter midair. Like in my only flying dream to date, I lifted off the ground—at last! flight!—only to crash, arms and legs and hair a knotted nebula, into the crooked arms of a tree. Often when I speak, my words feel like a terribly clumsy conduit for meaning.

So my request: Ok words, you don’t need to explain everything, but can you live as a gesture toward the unsayable? To cup it gently, like the time I held a hummingbird in my hands, dazed and panting after it trapped itself in the garage. For a moment, it pulsed against my palms like a living stanza, its fine follicles echoing my own. But I couldn’t grasp its fullness until I let it go. Only in flight, lifting beyond me into the sky, did its unlanguaged meaning arrive. How many other things in life can we only receive through release?

One of my favorite Substack writers rebecca hooper puts it this way: Language has always fascinated and frustrated me because I cannot reliably grasp it. It rivers and lakes, floods and droughts, slips and stops. It lets me enter other worlds, even create new ones, but it does not always let me share my own.

I know that feeling. Too often, I’m standing on the shoreline of expression, catching only glimmers of what I mean to say as it rushes past. Like particles whose meaning shifts the moment we observe them, words collapse under the pressure of being named. What’s left is wave, intention, breath, the wingbeat of something true just beyond my mind’s grasp. Some things we can only point to, like a child reaching toward the sky to show you what she sees. Look past her hand. Follow the reach. Watch how she scatters awe, as if to say, Look! Look how everything is love.

At the dinner table growing up, words were plentiful. Mom, Dad, and brother Eric tossed ideas across the table like hot potatoes. I was often found beneath it instead, nestled into my own subterranean lab, conducting research on planted feet, sewing-machine knees, and napkin-fussing fingers. Psychology students studying family dynamics should be required to spend a semester under dinner tables. That’s where the real communication happens. When I’d emerge from my underworld, blinking into the brightness, the world’s messaging felt too much. Too loud. Too fast. And… off. I understood what was being said, but the human habit of saying one thing while feeling another bewildered me. I couldn’t reconcile the split between voice and flesh, between what’s spoken and what’s hiding just beneath it.

We are such a wordy species, placing so much value on articulation. On having something to say. And yet, the simplest question, “How are you?” often sends me into spirals, silenced by the impossibility of distilling a moment’s entire narrative arc into a single phrase. And what if once it’s delivered, it’s no longer true? Sometimes all I want is not to explain but to be met by warm hand, kind gaze, a chest to lean against delivers the message soft and clear.

Probably why I get a little grabby with my cats.

This need for wordless presence is something artist Marina Abramović calls “immaterial energy.” In her performance The Artist Is Present, she sat silently in a wooden chair at the Museum of Modern Art for more than 700 hours, offering what she called “unconditional love” to strangers who sat across from her, one at a time. More than half a million people visited the gallery. Many cried. Some said they had never felt more deeply seen, and not a single word exchanged.

We all long to feel seen. But do words really illuminate, revealing what was hidden? Or are they more like a beam of light in deep space—brilliant, yes, but narrow—only tracing one path through the dark, while everything else remains just out of view?

Recently, I listened to a paradigm-shifting podcast, The Telepathy Tapes, in which journalist Ky Dickens explores the lives of non-speaking autistic children, children whose families have come to understand that they are communicating powerfully, just not in the ways we’re used to recognizing. Through a trusted teacher or parent, sometimes even through one another across continents, they share knowledge, feeling, memory, even glimpses of what’s to come. As one boy says to his mother, “I’m not reading your mind, my consciousness isn’t reading your consciousness. It’s simply that we are the same consciousness.” Some even describe a shared place they visit, a kind of inter-dimensional meeting ground they call The Hill. It exists beyond geography, beyond bodies, a space where understanding rises up between them, already known. It’s as if they don’t meet on The Hill but as it. They don’t need words to share their inner lives. They don’t need a mouth to speak books. They are living, it seems, outside of linear time and three-dimensional space, where a more refined communion is possible.

Some even describe it as love, an energy that surrounds and precedes. Love as connective tissue, yes. But also love as field itself, the medium everything moves through and originates from.

As Mom ages, I find myself wondering if something similar happens at the other end of life. We call it aging, dementia, Alzheimer’s, categorize it as loss, vacancy, absence, but what if that’s because we’re trying to reach her using a number no longer in service? A landline, when she’s moved on to quantum signal, no dialing, no voice to carry, just connection through this expanding, law-defying, field we don’t yet understand.

On a recent trip to Mexico, a circle of family surrounded her. She spoke very few words, at first disconcerting after decades of her booming Leo life-force. While we lazed on a sunny beach, tossing stories around like a beach ball, Mom sat quietly amongst us, only occasionally catching and passing, but mostly hearing the blue-sky everlasting beyond it that birthed those stories, gave them buoyancy and freedom and life.

On our final night together, we gathered for dinner at a long table. Toasts were offered, words of gratitude spilled from the heart-shaped mouth of her grandson. We sat, made shapes with our mouths; the meal became story in the telling. Conversational pairs formed, reformed, plates arrived, glasses emptied, voices, even tears, swelled, softened. The fires of vocal communication were alive and well, a hearth as old as the human desire to belong. But it wasn’t until the long meal was over, when we rose, then gathered, then huddled our arms and bodies around her small frame, that something else expanded. Heads bowed, like petals of a daisy closing for the night, we stopped talking. So many words—four hours, seven days, a lifetime—suddenly insufficient, surrendering into their hushed, ineffable, origin.

So instead of asking her to speak, we leaned in. Her diaphragm more feather than flesh. We pressed ourselves into her quiet, feeling it ripple outwards, like the fabric of space-time stretching into her children, her grandchildren, the universe.

We listen and hear: in her silence, and now, in her death, the meaning arrives.

While taking a month-long pause from her own newsletter, The Untangling, my friend spent a few weeks spotlighting writers whose work has moved her. I was honored to find my essay In Defense of Longing among them.

I first encountered Tiffany through her luminous, searching stories and essays long before we met in person. Later, at ’s book launch in Los Angeles, she drove up from San Diego and we finally shared the kind of hug that makes you believe in past lives. We’ve certainly crossed paths before, probably ones navigated by dragon and wing.

Tiffany writes with extraordinary tenderness about grief, belonging, memory, and how to remain human in a world that asks us to harden. I recently finished reading her forthcoming collection, The Constellation of Forgotten Things, created alongside the writings of her late son, Renley N. Chu, and found myself moved by the living conversation at its heart. Through these stories, Tiffany and Renley remain in conversation, much like I crafted through imaginary letters & poetry with my biological father, Charlie. Her own storytelling moves alongside Renley's, creating a collection that feels part memorial, part living exchange—a body of work that continues to travel beyond death's interruption to find new homes in the hearts of readers.

I’m looking forward to welcoming Tiffany onto the Unfixed podcast when her book launches later this fall. In the meantime, if you’re looking for a thoughtful companion in your weekly reads, I highly recommend her newsletter.

And now, a revisitation of longing. Because this one has us in its sweaty embrace until end.

Love Dogs 

One night a man was crying,
“Allah, Allah!”
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?”
The man had no answer for that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage,
“Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“This longing you express
is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.

- Rumi

Before I could speak, I strummed empty air.

Fingers fanned, hands like petals opened to honeybee hum. Mom said it was angelic, a celestial harp in my reach. But I’m not so sure. Maybe it was simpler than that.

Years later, I’d learn that when I was five and a half months old, I was left with a babysitter who drank herself into a stupor. My parents came home to find the front door open, the sitter half-dressed on the couch, and me, shivering in a diaper, a bruise blooming on my cheek. I wasn’t crying when they found me, I had already curled away from reaching, from wanting. The terror of unrequited ache was too much for my unformed nervous system.

But my body didn’t forget. I wonder now if those early, outstretched fingers were reaching for something lost, or trying to knit me back to source. Each gesticulation a re-gestation of longing. I want. I want. I want. I want the warmth of my own wanting, returned, revitalized, restored. Less for memory, more for re-membering. For the stitching together of what was once whole: want with body, need with response, ache with touch.

I pause now, mid-sentence, and do it again, letting my fingers stretch into the invisible. Plucking space, grabbing air, ten digits calling life to come close. And I feel it, the gesture begins in my hands, then runs deeper, threading through sinew and bone, and then beyond, all the way back to star-dusted source. That first breath, that first scream, the moment one rends into many, the moment life begins in rupture. Longing is the echo of that rupture.

When I was in my early twenties, I lived for a time on the fairy-laced landscape of Findhorn, Northern Scotland, trading garden work for bed and bread. I spent quiet mornings in meditation with founder Eileen Caddy, then slipped behind a studio door where I could dance the rigidity of fifteen years of ballet into unstudied abandon. I was alone most of that year-long journey through Europe, and longing became my closest companion. Longing for purpose, for meaning, for magic. Longing for my life, and my buried grief, to finally make sense. But the things I chased to fulfill that longing never left me full, or filled.

So I danced longing instead, a shape that has no counterpart, emptiness that needs no opposite. We’ve been taught to treat longing like a means to an end. A vacancy to fill. But what if longing isn’t actually something missing but the manifestation of something ancient? What if longing is how love breathes, its pressure valve, the body’s way of staying in conversation with the cosmos? I danced myself concave, a vessel from some distant time, and let the void become my vow. My fingers, my arms, opened again as blossom, as tributary, as low tide. I stopped trying to fill the ache and let the ache sing. And while it may’ve looked like I was reaching for something, I was reaching with something. A part of me that remembered the before. Before memory, before story. A cosmic spark that splits into leaf and limb carries within it the seed of our return. Could longing, then, also be our re-membering?

Rumi writes: “This longing you express is the return message.”

But even now decades later, the sharp, hollowed ache arrives uninvited. Around my period, the emptiness turns me inside out, like the moon inverted by night sky every month. I walk this cyclical vacancy outside, my old impulse to fill returning. Maybe spring’s abundance will come rushing in. Maybe today I will discover the one thing that, at last, balloons me into lasting fullness. The lilacs haven’t yet bloomed, and the air smells like green hesitating toward perfume. A chorus of birds sings, their voices just shy of piercing the veil. Earth, her mouth wide open, licks the sun with infinite, insatiable tongue.

The longing is too large for one object. It’s ambient. Atmospheric. It asks not for this or that, but for everything. There is no ridding the world of this feeling, so I join it.

Lie down in the bowl of a dry lakebed with me, faces lifted, arms and legs wide, remembering the dream of rain as we become the crystalline salt aching and arcing with thirst. Feel how our shape calls with sharp knowing of other, something ineffable but true. Feel its promise and how we yearn toward it. And then we watch: the sky swells, pressing her darkness into our bodies, one drop at a time, then all at once. We soften. We receive. But just as our longing subsides, another grows beneath. Longing unfulfilled yet transmuted. Once electrons seeking balance, now sprouts breaking through soil, the urgent push of cellulose and sinew reaching toward light. Longing waves cerulean tenderness up up up until she too is plucked with another’s appetite, a daisy-chain of mouths with dreams and young fingers clawing the air. We strum a dissonance that never, truly, resolves.

Author Sophie Strand writes in her transcendent memoir The Body Is a Doorway: “I have not been inside a love story. I have been a love story: my very body a clamorous, complicated interplay of beings disagreeing, singing, swooning, and melting together. As a year, then two years, passed during which I did not take human lovers, I realized that I was not really “single.” I was deeply plural: my whole life was erotic, flush with sensual, multispecies love.”

Most feel a longing to fill, but Sophie’s is a longing to host. Longing that rushes through cells and stars, as it rides the looping continuum of separation and union, a signature of entanglement, like quantum particles still responding to one another across time and space. Longing is the murmur of microbiomes remembering each other, the skin’s way of calling to pollen, to wind, to touch, the way Earth pulls on Moon in orbital foreplay.

I shared the sitter story with my brilliant friend and writer Veronika Bond during a recent interview. We were exploring her Synchronosophical approach to trauma when she paused and said, “It’s not the story that matters, it’s how the longing lives in you now.” And she was right.

It lives in my daily cat grabbiness, in my gutted sadness, in the way my womb aches for the moon, the way I curl around a pillow, in the feral impulse to love-bite Dave’s shoulder just to feel that ache in my jaw meet something real. They call it “cuteness aggression,” and I’ll admit, cute gets me going. But isn’t biting, ingestion, also one of our most primal, and perhaps most sagacious, ways of returning to One? If trauma is jilted longing, then healing is the return to wanting. To let it praise and stretch like sky and rain unto itself. Longing as midwife to the possible, even the unimaginable. Humming, howling, singing without consonance and crashing into birdsong. It is both the love dog howling into the void and the void, echoing back. If Earth had fingers, she would strum the sky. If gravity had voice, it would moan like a dog for its master.

Even extinction remembers the ache. In 1987, a lone Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō bird was recorded singing the final song of its species. A duet, missing its partner’s reply. Between each phrase, he left space for an answer that would never come, and still, he sang. His song became a haunting echo of life’s insistence to reach, even when no reply comes.

Give your life to be one of them, Rumi says—
the Kaua‘i ʻŌʻō
a love dog
one of the ones who know: when we can be with our longing, we finally be-long.

Because without longing, nothing would begin. Or begin again. My fanning fingers join the howl and strum life anew. The first spark, the one that blew the universe apart was a longing. And now, millennia later, we carry the torch. Our very ache the hallowed hollowing of endless becoming.

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Let me back up. I need to reverse engineer how I got here, where much of my life I’ve lived with low expectations and therefore am delightfully surprised by even the wad of gum on my shoe. I learned early that modest expectations amplify gratitude and are an effective hedge against despair. This is why disappointment feels so violent and ugly when it’s mine to experience, it means somewhere today, yesterday, last year, I let myself to want something. There’s that needy word, “want.” The last time I remember feeling this level of collapse was during the long years trying to cure my dizziness. After one particularly expensive and elaborate Neurolinguistic Healing Program, I spent eight weeks marching past-present-future patterns across Mom’s basement floor repeating empty affirmations about stillness and ease while imagining my future healed self waiting ahead of me like a patient midwife at the threshold of my own rebirth. I feel silly when I think about it now, but at the time the want was with animal sincerity. I wanted my life back, I wanted my body back.

Last November my memoir launched and wow, readers found it, landing something like the opposite of disappointment right in that soft spot beneath my breastbone. It was fulfillment, gratification, yes. I experienced a similar response to Unfixed Media, all those strangers describing how they finally felt seen, less alone, even inspired. It was beyond satisfying, more beautiful than anything I had trained myself to un-expect. So un-disappointing! And because life seems devoted to paradox, delight unfurled its wings and revealed vulnerability nestled right inside its downy softness. The more I loved the work, the more power I unconsciously assigned outside the work, to people, to institutions, gatekeepers, outcomes, and all the shimmering clout humans build around creative output. And slowly—shame on me I’d repeat in my darkest moments—I bought it.

Over the years, I have applied for more grants than I can count. And every time I send an application into the digital void, I feel like I am giving a piece of myself, my worth, to gatekeepers. The big "they" decide whose stories get seen and whose stories get hidden away. I'll be honest, I have never made a single penny from Unfixed. Not from the films. Not from the podcasts. Not from the book. So a few weeks ago I threw up my hands after another grant refusal and another unmet fulfillment and said to Dave, “I’m worn out, I’m done,” but what I really meant to say was, “I’m so very disappointed.”

Dis-appoint, a mistaken appointment.

Oh! Snap! How often have I been appointing my power to the wrong thing? Giving authority outside the pulse of the work as if the stethoscope drives the heartbeat? Why am I giving someone else guardianship of my creative aliveness? Unfixed was alive long before anyone else touched her, before the exposure, before the publisher, she was alive when I lived her, she was alive when film subjects first shared their stories on camera, alive when I started writing my own memoir inside the eye of the storm, alive when she reached another nervous system and made a stranger feel less alone at 2am in Illinois or Portland or Dublin or wherever these little paper boats wash ashore. The work, moving along channels I couldn’t see, finding the people it was meant to find, having its own life outside of human agenda?

Still, disappointment exposes my yellowing bruises, some tired old insecurity that I am not quite enough, real enough, smart enough, savvy enough, to deserve solidity. Never enough. That I am allowed to make things so long as I do not ask too much of the world in return.

I feel how disappointment finds my oldest wounds, how quickly it draws blood: I am only pretending, I have slipped accidentally into rooms meant for real filmmakers, writers, artists, real adults who get how the world works. Ouch. I go green. I want to hide. I start shaming my openness, wondering if my vulnerability was wrong. If all this soft-hearted hopefulness is really just naïveté. And in my hiding, mental fists come out, fight back fight back. I imagine all the ways I might flatten people and systems into the bad guys. Sometimes I really want to. It would be easier, but then I remember all the moments of genuine goodness that were also true. God we are messy multitudes, loving and maiming simultaneously. The complexity of this has been the hardest part for me to metabolize because disappointment would be so much easier if people and organizations and systems were simply monstrous shitheads. Disappointment is my body reclaiming itself from all these illusions, sediment and stones becoming visible as water clears, my nervous system finally seeing what was beneath the beautiful story.

With every hope, I place something pink and fragile into uncertain hands. We give each other our unfinished hearts even though we know we have been hurt and we will be hurt again. We do it anyway because deep down we know that isolation and giving up deforms us far more than disappointment ever could. And while my knee-jerk reaction to the shame of disappointment is to hide, I’ve already been there done that, dizzied inside a narrative no longer true, I reached the end of my own self-sufficiency in that story and now find myself believing in those standing beside me, the integrity of family and friends, Dave sitting quietly with the part of me that feels foolish and tender and scraped raw by wanting too much from this world. I whisper the mantra every time I need it, which is a lot these days, “I will remain soft, I don’t want to only trusts what cannot wound me.”

It’s an unsettling yet clarifying groundlessness. Me oh my I’m getting good at thriving on fluid foundations. Eventually the collapse reveals another awareness, wetter and wider and less in charge. My blood moves through my veins with devotion, fungal threads pass nutrients beneath the forest floor. Despite my disappointment, existence keeps reaching, placing my bruises in a bigger context where hurt and beauty nestle up alongside one another like Otis and Nova curled together one minute and then a fur storm of hisses the next. Beneath the storyline, an arc much older, more fractal, more relational—maybe not an arc at all but spiraling—continues moving. My body remembers it belongs to rivers and seasons and kisses and stars. The fruit will fall, the beloved will change, the illusion will break. Disappointment returns my own little stories to the larger compost heap of Life, all this heaviness slowly warming into hot fertile dreaming.

I want to defend disappointment because it belongs here among the rest of this beautiful mess, among winter and decay and failed crops and tides pulling away from shore and apples collapsing into the earth after an entire season spent reaching toward sweetness and light, I defend it because disappointment shows me how much I have loved, how dearly I have hoped, every dis-appointment the possibility of a re-appointment—a sucky, sweet, opportunity to return trust to a more sacred source. Tomorrow morning I’ll sit at the edge of my bed, left sock on then right, a certainty to step into a day of its opposite, and imagine another human also sitting there, realizing the story they told themselves can no longer hold, and somewhere beneath that collapse, fresh water moves underground.

There’s a beautiful new anthology coming into the world on June 28 that I’m honored to be part of: Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, from ELJ Editions, lovingly curated by . It gathers 28 voices circling the weird, tender terrain of family and what happens when someone once unknown turns out to be deeply, irrevocably yours. Stories of searching, being found, and identities rearranging.

The essay I contributed to the anthology is titled Becoming Water. It begins with a literal, fluid convergence: my adoptive father’s ashes scattered in Lake Winnebago, traveling through rivers and locks and channels before eventually emptying into Lake Michigan, where my biological father’s bones rest beneath the water. In writing it, in living it, I’ve become the body of water too. I am the estuary where these two fathers and inheritances continue meeting inside me, and I return again and again to the halocline, that trembling, sometimes turbulent, threshold where different waters touch without fully blending. Where truth is its own kind of continuous motion.

Preorders are open now.

preorder today

And here’s a special one for your listening queue—my conversation on Fear Unzipped is now live. Hosted by Sandi Serling—podcast host turned new friend, someone I’m fairly certain is an angel—it lingers at the brittle edges of fear and keeps going, toward its fleshy center, where something vital and vibrant awaits. Together, we look at fear with fresh eyes, maybe not as something to clear away but an energy that unzips our conditioned layers, revealing something truer at its core. We wandered into some pretty tender places together. I’d love for you to listen.

Listen to the full podcast

And lastly, here are a few clips and photos from a full, heart-bursting weekend in NYC—Friday night celebrating with at her beautiful launch party with and Debbie Roberts, and the Empress team, authors and friends Molly Zakoor and Saturday at the conference, where I had the joy of joining three fellow memoirists with fab moderator Melisse Gelula to talk about living and writing beyond the traditional redemption arc.

And in between, so many moments that can’t be quantified—meeting fellow authors, feeling their genuine support, spending time with the publishing team, sniffing the NYC air and savoring her stench (all the more tolerable knowing I’d be back inside a grove of Doug Firs in less than 24 hours). A rare kind of trip where you realize your own journey is just one thread among many, all briefly crossing, making the whole thing feel a little more alive, a little more unforgettable.

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I used to meditate. Legs folded, altar arranged, a carved wooden Buddha, the protective ankh Brother Eric gave me to carry on solo travels. And of course, a candle.

In my early twenties, I fell into the practice like slipping into a warm body of water. A quiet homing at the start of each day, first to my thoughts, then to their loosening, then to the silence that held them. It felt easy, easier than normal life, an escape from this loud, look-at-me, world. My nervous system craved the ritual where the boundaries between body, mind, and my surroundings became soft.

And then Mal de Débarquement happened, the nonstop sloshing in my head; I have become a human wave pool. At first the flailing-armed amygdala inside those waves screamed with each crest and crash. Now she’s used to it, body surfing along the rhythms. But when I stop moving, when there is no motion at all, the waves are often still too much. I wiggle a lot. Someone once told me in those early days, “Just go within, Kim,” and I wanted to punch her in the neck. The last place I felt I could be was inside my body, inside my tormentor, inside my brain’s hokey-pokey-as-it-turns-itself-around. That’s-why-I-wanted-out.

And there is only one way out. Motion. As long as my body is moving, I am free from dizziness, not just a little, but completely. My favorite is driving. Like a golden retriever with the windows down, I am in breezy bliss, cars zipping by, hawks perched high on poles scouting their prey, but their talons have no purchase in me. I.Am.Free. The dizzies fly out the window like litter, gone before anyone can tell me to give a hoot. And while passive motion is the most effective, really, any kind of motion helps. Biking, walking, rocking back and forth, even wriggling my feet, anything that offers just enough proprioceptive feedback to drown out the drunkard in my brain.

I did try to “go within,” as suggested by my not-friend, because I would have tried anything. But the waves grew louder, larger, all-consuming. I clenched my mind around the swaying sensations, made them my mantra, my mudra, my slow dance with God, but my body kept answering back, insistent, almost pleading: move. I would step off the cushion in a ball of sweat and nerves and finally understood, this is no longer my way.

Now, I putter. Faithfully.

The kind that begins on the heels of slumber before thought organizes the day, when hands move first and the rest of me follows, a little of this, a little of that, attention drifting and landing wherever the whisper calls. I feel no urgency, no familiar shoulder tightening around outcome, just a steady, grinning motion that generates its own sense of enough.

When puttering, I become a babbling brook, wandering without ambition, wetting pebble and root and fallen leaf with easy curiosity. I become a bird bathing in the pond, her flitting both deliberate and spontaneous at once. Or a dog on his morning walk, nose low, led onward by a thousand invisible delights rising from the ground. A jazz pianist noodling, an artist doodling. Puttering meanders like small talk with a best friend, the kind that rolls out in parallel play, phrases and inside jokes drifting up then falling back into silence.

My muscles soften when inside it, breath unremarkable, posture unguarded, eyes receiving more than seeking. The world presents herself in small, specific ways and my body answers. Crumbs are gathered into my palm and brushed away, arms refold a throw from last night’s lounging, a plant is lifted, turned, its leaves thinned with a careful pinch, water poured until the soil darkens and drinks. Outside, hens cluck and scatter as I toss meal worms, eggs gathered into crook of arm, a feeder refilled, a weed loosened from the path with a small, satisfying pull. Each gesture completes itself and opens into the next. And within this continuity the morning finds its way into hands far more infinite than my own, shaping what I no longer have to hold still.

Eckhart Tolle once shared that setting aside time for meditation can keep us tethered to the very structure we hope to soften, that the act of doing it carries its own bound insistence. How funny that we need so much time and practice to finally realize there is no time (and therefore no practice), and yet here, in puttering, I recognize that release almost immediately, when practice marries life, and my body no longer has to choose between stillness and relief. The moment I stop trying to arrive somewhere else, I settle into what has always been here, an aha! that was waiting beneath the effort to reach it. In the relaxed drift of attention and response, silence gathers inward. Even with eyes open and body in motion, a quieting balloons within and around, a stillness revealed through movement.

While puttering, it’s almost as if my hands and body become their own ancient mudra. A cupped palm along the spine of Otis, fingers pressing gently into soil, hands moving through the kitchen, pulling ingredients from shelves and cupboards, rinsing, setting them out in readiness, a circular sweep of cloth across the floor as I lower myself down, knees finding the ground without ceremony, the turn of a wrist, the gentle touch to whatever is in front of me. These tasks of the morning become offerings, my body holding the poses of tending, of care. The most ancient mudras of all, long before yogis brought pinkies to thumbs, our bodies bend into the oldest shapes of caring, arms like the canopy of a tree, hands like the bowl of a tulip opening to bees, body bowed like leaves returning to the ground. These mudras arise on their own, formed in contact, the body taking on the posture of care again and again. The gesture holds, then dissolves, then returns in another form.

Puttering asks only that I stay open and present, a kind of presence that gathers deeper in the body, closer to the chest than the mind. Would I call it puttering if I didn’t care? I don’t think so. Something in it would fall flat, lose its warmth and inherent reciprocity. Puttering asks that I listen to and remain with what is here, it asks that I let relation lead. And when that guidance is followed, the same actions carry a generative pace as though tending and giving move in a circle I am already inside of; entanglement not only understood, but felt. If I’m quiet enough, I can feel the current running through it, subtle but continuous, as though each object, each surface, each small living being is participating in the same exchange. The plant leans into the water as I tend it, the dish warms inside my hands, the animal arches into touch. Even the floor takes in my slow, circular motion of cloth and shines her reply.

I think the earth putters. Today, a light breeze wanders through the yard, lifting and carrying scents of spring from one place to another. Hummingbirds whiz by, a pink pleasure here and there, squirrels trace paths up and down trees, a thousand hellos a second as life touches life. Pausing, I become the one being greeted, and then move on.

Puttering doesn’t last forever though. The moment I turn toward the computer, my attention pulls forward; fingertips curl to meet the keyboard as my body and mind snap into a fixed rhythm. A narrower awareness and pace take hold. Some would call this productivity, but when I look back at the hour that came before, I see how much has already been touched and tended. Productivity stems from the Latin producere, to bring forth, but in puttering, it’s impossible to know who is bringing whom forth, the act unfolding in many directions at once, where the isolated me loosens into a dancing we.

Putter, putter, putter. Say it under your breath. The phrase carries its own delicateness, a light humor, enunciating in my mouth an ease that bubbles just beneath the surface. And inside it, I begin to recognize a familiar quality, one that many years ago involved crossed legs, a candle, a mantra, a breath. Now, legs meander, hands reach, light kindled not through wick and match but through presence. A way of being that homes itself through relation, through the simple act of loving what is already within reach. My body continues her small, responsive shapes, held then released, a continuous unfolding of gestures that ask nothing more than to be inhabited as they arise, and occasionally, to be repeated for no reason other than they feel good in my hands. Sorry Otis, I’m not done petting you.

So this is puttering, my meditation. Next time you think to sit, set a timer, and make time to lose time, you might notice the stillness already there, always there, revealing itself when you stop trying to find it. From there, putter away, and feel your presence open, body, mind, and environment moving as one in small, shared devotions, unstudied, unoptimized, unnoticed by anyone but the ones living it.

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In Josh’s words:

You can’t treat grief with a pill. But you can treat it with a story. Last week I spoke with @Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed,” a memoir about family identity and chronic illness. It turns out there is no separating the two. After Kim lost her father, she took a DNA test that revealed he wasn’t her biological dad after all. But her biological father had died, too. Those revelations set a complex cascade of grief in motion. Kim was grieving the man who raised her, whom she thought of as her real father, but the DNA test upended her sense of self. And then she never had a chance to meet her biological dad. By the time she discovered that he existed at all, he was already dead. In the midst of all that stress, she began experiencing vertigo. The ground beneath her feet felt like the deck of a boat on open water. There was a name for her illness – Mal De Débarquement Syndrome – but there was no cure. Doctors are impatient with chronic illness. Because there’s no fix, there’s no chance for them to play the hero. Symptoms present physically, but they might have mental or emotional roots that no pill can touch. That’s why illness narratives matter so much. By shaping their own story, finding order in their confusion and pain, a person who suffers from chronic illness can reclaim their own identity. Instead of being the patient who “failed” to respond to treatment, they can be the storyteller who extracts meaning from suffering. I know a little about grief. Before I left academe in 2021, I lost two grandparents and a cousin. My grandfather died of natural causes in January, my grandmother died of grief in August, and my cousin had a brain hemorrhage from COVID in October. Then I left a career that I’d formerly loved. The only thing that helped during that time was storytelling. I shared memories of the people I’d lost, perhaps to convince myself that I carried them with me still. And I wrote my way through my life transition, interviewing many others about their pivots from academe to industry, trying to see where I fit in that new story. Grief breaks you in a thousand different ways. You can't put yourself back together again in quite the same shape. There’s not much medicine can do to help. But without storytelling, you might never put yourself back together at all.

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For a full-beige immersion, listen to Arvö Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel while reading this essay.

*

A team of astronomers recently reported, after surveying and then averaging light from over 200,000 galaxies, that the universe is beige. Upon their discovery, they reached out asking for suggestions for names, and some of the responses included: Cosmic Latte, Cappuccino Cosmico, Big Bang Buff, Cosmic Cream, Univeige, Cosmic Khaki, and my favorite, Primordial Clam Chowder.

If the universe is beige, I argue that hugs are beige too. Let me explain.

It is conjectured that the human brain releases large amounts of the compound N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) during death and dreaming. Sometimes dubbed “the spirit molecule” this alkaloid can cause intense psychedelic experiences, which might explain the imagery some experience during sleep or upon exiting this world. As a child, teetering on the sand-drift of sleep, I would sometimes experience my own Dimethyl-trip, a strange ballooning in my body always accompanied by an expansive color beige. Fawn-hued innocence filled and then pushed my physical borders out and out and out until my form held itself within an infinite border of cafe au lait. I became smooth. I became safety. I became the lasting hug that never lasts long enough. I became round and full and front-middle-and-backlit buoyancy. But just as mysteriously as it arrived, I would shape-shift into sharp and jagged, like wrinkled newspaper, both the shape and sound tearing holes into my inner landscape. I called it my “Creamy Crinkly” experience, always much preferring the cream to the crinkle. Even now, I recall her unbound expanse but remembering it in my mind is very different than feeling her swoop in and knead my existence into a cosmic loaf of bread.

It’s impossible to recreate this experience, though I have tried. She appears when she wants, and much less frequently as an adult. But I’ve found a stand-in. At least once an hour, especially after spending too much time staring at a screen (like now) and my brain begins to unravel her relationship to gravity, I kneel down and hover my face an inch away from Otis or Nova’s belly. Have you tried this with your pet? An aura of buff warmth wraps around their physical presence. Close your eyes and rest inside this border for a minute or two. Time will stretch into more as overworked nerves melt into less. Breathing slowly, I suspend in an invisible embrace. And while some may say this emanation is purely heat, I don’t feel the same honeyed magic with my face pressed against the floor vent. (I’ve tried it.)

A French word, beige means “the color of natural wool.” Not washed, bleached, or dyed, but natural wool. This makes me think of a sheep in a field; their wool isn’t white or one color, but full of heady, yet humble, hues. To create beige, one mixes equal parts: red, blue, yellow. I love that these primary, dominant notes sing loudly in any landscape, but together marry into understatements. Alone we shout Be Bold. Be unique. Be Loud. Together we whisper Be gentle. Be silent. Be.

Maitri Space Awareness practice, conceived by Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, works with the colors blue, red, yellow, green, and white—each color represents one of the Five Wisdom Energies in Buddhism. Maitri translates as “loving kindness” or “unlimited friendliness toward self and others” and by sitting within these colors or energies, one encounters the opportunity to be with whatever arises from a ground of non-aggression. In my 120 count box of crayons this ground of non-aggression is beige, a loamy blend of all life on a continuum of emergence and decay, where calm, kindness and compassion are born not from rising above but by experiencing, digesting and marrying ourselves to what is. I’ll call it Buddha Beige.

Last week, as a practice, I carried around my imaginary Buddha Beige crayon, and whenever I experienced contraction or resistance, I colored in, or around, my experience with warm ecru. When the neighbor’s dog went missing and heaviness overwhelmed, I held my sadness in a downy nest of beige. When a grown woman embraced her dad in a coffee shop, I offered my longing beige. When the sky turned cold and shy seedlings refused life, I joined the earth’s consolation in beige.

According to design trends for 2024, beige is back. But after a quick google search, there is plenty of noise about this claim. We’ve all heard someone say beige is boring. Beige is bland. Beige is background. In our look-at-me, individualistic culture, it’s no wonder this gentle creature has been historically shooed to the corner, though I sense she’s quite happy to be there in hushed simplicity. One architect wrote, “Hogwash. Near-white is the color of non-commitment” and later described it as “death’s waiting room.” Another opinion compared beige to quiet despair and a grim communist aesthetic, claiming “Our dreams are not beige and yet! this color haunts the suburban landscape.”

I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe in beige, and I think I’ve been delightfully haunted by it since my earliest days. We imagine spirit as a foggy apparition, or draped in cloth, clanging around the kitchen looking for spoons. But what if the presence of spirit is a color just like the universe herself? When a brain senses the unfamiliar, it makes associations, giving it shape, texture, scent; it cozies up to what it already knows. In a childhood recurring nightmare, Cookie Monster wrestled my sleeping body into his detergent-blue arms and carried me off into the night. While his lumbering shape moved me through space, I’d sleepwalk into mom and dad’s room, his dream paws releasing their grip as I cocooned on a shag rug at the foot of their bed. The wool fibers tickled my nose, their musky warmth spooned me like a big, gentle dog. When eyelids finally surrendered, a Saharan-scape of plush, beige pile hugged my darkness.

So if the universe is beige, and beige feels like a hug, then I’d like to reason the universe is one giant hug—a shag hug built from every galaxy, gas cloud, star and star seed that is you, you and you. In beige, I trust.

Beige is grandma’s soft arm

and the bones of last year’s leaf

beige is Charlie’s sepia-gaze

on a horizon never reached.


Beige is furry

beige is free

beige is Dave’s hen-egg proposal, 

Marry me?


Beige is kindness

and Arvö Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel

beige is a pause on thinking

to enter our feel. 


So when senses retreat

and this life turns her last page,

I will follow darkness out

into unblinding beige.

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The dizzy world mirrors my dizzy brain, an unnerving reunion even when Rumi told me to treat everyone as a guest, this world never still but lately even more so, liquid everything as I write this, bobbing and herky-jerking on my invisible bow. I once again say, Surrender Kim. Allow it all. And I do and then I don’t, then I do, then I don’t. And in the don’t I hear my no, and through my no an escape—

Mid-vertical, hot hindquarters aquiver, I let go.

Limbs loosed and listening for good gravity, I roll off the wild mare and crash and tumble through scratchy grass, bramble and stone tearing my skin, and I feel the bruise of saying no bloom underneath because I never want to disappoint, saying thank you to the gods by only saying yes, still learning how a no is sometimes the greatest yes of all. Sometimes survival is not holding on but learning how to fall.

And then I slow into stillness.

Solid ground, sweet, soft and cool. I no longer hear the fire horse’s thunder, only the settling of my breath, full and contained. I press my ear to darkened earth, the chitter and squish of birth and rot in slow motion, and claw myself a reverse pillow and listen to how nothing feels like everything and no movement feels like travel.

I give in and it gives to me. Everything melting toward instead of racing past.

Harnessed now to my breath, the mare fading in the distance, I feel the horizon of my own diaphragm rising and setting in its own pink fire.

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Rachel shares what it felt like to release her memoir Dizzy after years of writing fiction (“it felt like I left my diary out”), and why hearing “me too” from strangers has made the exposure worth it. Together, Kimberly and Rachel trace the brutal, invisible reality of long-term dizziness and vestibular migraine: the brain fog, the relentless appointments, the medical gaslighting, and the deep loneliness of suffering that doesn’t show up on a scan.

They also explore what illness clarified rather than simply took away—especially around self-reliance, relationships, and the slow, vulnerable practice of letting other people in. Rachel talks about the rare doctor who could read subtext, see her suffering, and keep treating her even when insurance refused to pay—restoring her faith in clinicians and in care.

Threaded through it all is Alaska: the wild, quiet vastness Rachel returned to in her mind when her nervous system was overloaded, and the way landscape can become a kind of medicine. She shares how she kept writing through the worst years—literally training herself to write with her eyes closed on yellow pads as an act of survival and escape.

Finally, Rachel describes the metabolic migraine research that helped change her life after COVID knocked her symptoms back to square one: glucose testing, continuous glucose monitoring, and a medically supervised keto-to-carb-threshold protocol that helped move many participants from chronic to episodic migraine—bringing her own symptoms down to just a few days a month.

A candid, funny, and fiercely tender conversation about illness, hope (and how it can hurt), resilience, and the surprising ways suffering can spin you—“in the most arduous of ways”—into a world of kindness.

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This episode of Unfixed: Uncut is with , the founder of Charter Book Club Adventures—aka the woman who casually slid into my DMs with an idea that was basically: “Want to do a virtual book club… and then end it on a freaking sailboat?” And yes, I immediately said: are you kidding me, YES!

We talk about Monica’s roots as a junior high teacher and coach, the kind who made books feel like doorways and classrooms feel like circles you actually want to sit in. She shares the story that lit her up as a kid (The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle), the teachers who shaped her, and the way she now designs book clubs as immersive, personal voyages—not “read chapters 1–4 and report back,” but slow down, reflect, and let the book meet your real life.

Monica walks us through her R.E.A.D. framework—Reflect, Explore, Adventure, Discover—including captain’s logs, “catching the wind” action steps, and a final-week love letter to yourself (which… yes, made me a little shivery). But why should that surprise me? Monica is an honest-to-god angel.

Also: it’s my birthday in this episode, so there’s an orange Crush cake to honor my beloved Tang—who, for the record, is thriving in his new home.

If you’ve ever wanted reading to feel more like belonging… welcome aboard.

Join the crew

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So last January, when an orange tabby as feral as my bewilderness showed up in the coop, I did wonder: maybe he was our old matriarch Karckles, a giant orange Buff Orpington wanting to try life as a predator, golden-eyed, lithe with pounce and twenty-hour naps. But while Karckles had enjoyed a good cuddle in her aging body, it was clear this boy had never seen a human lap in his life. We would get within a hundred feet of him with the finest crunchies and he’d vanish into thin air, returning only for fast, cautious feedings before disappearing again, body low to the ground, tail tucked so completely over his giant orange balls that we couldn’t determine his gender for months.

But his tough guy act didn’t fool me. One day I saw him bounding through the front yard like a Disney character, leaping skyward for god-knows-what. I watched in disbelief, the joy of it, feeling cuteness aggression rise into my teeth. That was the day my love was reborn. We named him Tang after our late twenty-one year old tabby Pang, her tree of love branching into endlessly new possibility.

Month by painfully slow month, his one-hundred-foot boundary eventually shrank to fifty. Then to ten. Then, the slightest touch on his back while he fed. He didn’t lean in, but he didn’t resist either—hands on fur doing the ancient work of building interspecies trust. By summer, he’d scaled the old plum tree and made a bed high among the ripening fruit, draped across branches like a Bacchanalian god. From there he’d look down at us with a soft gaze, quiet, amused, a benevolent ruler surveying shared territory. Sometimes he’d scamper down the trunk to dine with company. He still rushed through his meals like each one might be his last—or his first in months—but the inverse relationship between his growing girth and our shrinking distance told the truth.

Within those widening and narrowing shapes, a kind of trust emerged that, in my fifty years, I had never experienced with a wild animal. Oh, how my heart leapt the first time my hand rested heavily on his back during feeding. No petting. Just a solid reassurance. Like the steadiness Dave once offered me while the sidewalk undulated under my feet. Hand in hand, hand on fur—sometimes the most important things are said without words.

As autumn approached, leaves falling and Tang’s tail finally rising with abandon, we began to worry about our boy. How would he survive the winter? His teenage shape was transitioning into something sturdier, but despite his obvious intelligence—any cat to survive up here longer than a year is someone special—we knew the hungry only grow hungrier as branches bare, their bony fingers licked clean come first frost.

So Dave did what any good dad would do for his boy. He built him a fort in the tractor shed. We’d already seen Tang’s golden fur on the tractor seat blanket all summer, so he moved the makeshift bed into an upper cupboard, removed its door, and turned the space into a cozy nook and patio. He set up a night camera, and within a day Tang was napping and bathing in his new home. If we’d had a graduation cap to toss, we would have.

From that moment, his trust and my joy grew in tandem. Within days we were touching him freely, hands delighting in his sturdy shape. A few days later, he was rolling onto his back, belly exposed, tempting himself with more touch. And once he got some, he couldn’t get enough. This feral nervous system—never in his short life having known affection—reached for these new sensations. But the same way I fizz and then frazzle with too much sugar, Tang would relish and then react. Blood was drawn, like some ancient, sacred bonding ritual. I longed to meet, to know, his wildness and accepted the swats like a ceremonial exchange.

Then, our front porch gargoyle began accompanying Dave on his evening walks around the property. Flashlight in hand, Tang wove in and out of Dave’s feet spelling We’re buds with his Crazy Ivan path. Nova and Otis grew accustomed to his visits too, no longer bristling but waiting calmly by the window for Cuz’n Tang to arrive. We bought him a second sleeping shelter. A heating blanket. A brush for his nappy dreads. We doubled our canned food subscription.

And then came the too-long deliberation. We asked ourselves the question again and again: What is the most loving thing to do? Should we trap him? Fix him? Would he forgive us for the shock and sudden confinement? Would indoor life feel like safety or theft? Were we protecting him, or exerting our will over a being who had made no such request? We imagined him on couches, on laps, safe from teeth and talons, but we also imagined the way he scaled trees and bounded through the world on his own terms. We tried to reason our way into the right answer, as if love were a problem to be solved rather than a force already in motion. When raccoons and other cats threatened, Tang was above fighting. He’d sit stoically on the railing until their yowling or mewing tired and they’d wander off. It felt cruel to imagine taking him from his kingdom when he so clearly reigned.

And then one day, he disappeared. I told myself he was fine. He had survived maybe a year before he’d ever found us. But beneath my cautious calm, owls and bobcats and bears loomed. One day became a week. Then another. But just as we were assuming the worst, Tang returned for a belly rub and a brief bite of food—he wasn’t even hungry—then vanished again. I was elated he was alive and heartbroken he’d left again, the two emotions pulling hard in opposite directions.

Above the toilet in my childhood home hung a Winnie-the-Pooh print, offering some version of the familiar wisdom: When you love something very, very much, let it go free. If it doesn’t come back, it was never meant to be yours. If it does, love it forever.

I never liked the saying. Even then, something about it didn’t sit right. If it doesn’t come back, you stop loving? And if it does, you’re allowed to love it forever? I didn’t have language for it yet, but love didn’t feel like something you turned off. It felt like something that kept moving, through hands and paws, through different form. I think of a down jacket I loved as a child. When I outgrew it, my mother passed it on. Years later, my aunt used that same jacket to cover a stranger injured in a car accident while they waited for help. I’ve always wondered if love moves that way too, without knowing where it’s going, or who it will warm next.

Two weeks later, I texted a small circle of homesteading friends up here, each of us feral in our own way, and asked if anyone had seen Tang. One responded: There’s a big orange tabby here. Been feeding him for several weeks. A gray one keeps trying to fight him. Poor guy’s getting beat up. I thought he was feral, but he’s as friendly as can be. I’m planning to get him neutered next week so I can bring him inside to safety. This isn’t Tang, is it?

I knew it was.

Physics shouldn’t allow collapse and expansion in the same moment, but my heart managed both. Dave and I hiked across the hill to confirm. He didn’t approach us; he just plopped down in the dirt, belly up, offering himself for rubs. A teary homecoming and a goodbye in the same beat, like the reflexive hug after words have already been said.

We’d been dumped.

A year of nurturing and patience and shared memory had carried him to a place where he could be loved by another. In Tang’s world, leaving carried no rejection. Love simply moved on, the way it always does, changing shape, finding new ways to know itself and inhabit the world. I felt it as if something had broken, but he knew it as a sign that something had worked. Love moves through. And then beyond. Like the spent hydrangea blossoms outside my window that once sang periwinkle love songs to the sky and now find new intimacy with decay. When I step out of the way, I can see the joy in how beautifully it dances through time and form and space. What Dave and I shared with Tang was not the love itself. Just the shape it took for a while. And then it took another.

I will love you for the rest of my days, Tang. I’lll always wonder if we should have acted sooner, done something differently, if you might have ended up not only nestled in my heart but curled in my lap. But it was never mine to decide.

Elizabeth shares how she once refused to look at her MRIs—“horrifying” proof of a progressive disease—until she made a radical pivot: transforming those clinical images into art, reclaiming her medical data and finding unexpected beauty in brain folds that resemble calligraphy. As MS progressed and she became quadriplegic, she adapted again, turning toward writing, speaking, and the ongoing practice of “making friends” with her body.

The conversation moves through reinvention, intimacy, and agency: how to articulate what you need when your body changes; how caregiving reshapes relationships; how swearing can be its own kind of medicine; and how aging, in a strange way, can become a homecoming—“I love getting older because I’m now normal.”

What emerges is not a neat lesson, but a lived philosophy: let it suck when it sucks, stay curious, keep redefining intimacy, and notice the people around you who make your life possible. A gathering full of grit, tenderness, laughter—and the kind of gratitude that feels like oxygen.

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More about Elizabeth:

Elizabeth is a vibrant illustration of grace and grit, real chutzpah, turning lump of coal into diamonds and MRI’s into works of art. In other words, she is an artist and writer exploring what it means to live in an imperfect body as part of the shared human experience.

Elizabeth Jameson’s journey with multiple sclerosis has spanned over three decades, but before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she worked as a public interest lawyer, representing incarcerated children and later advocating for kids with chronic illnesses and disabilities to receive the medical care they needed.

As her own disease progressed, she began transforming her MRIs into art — reclaiming her medical data and turning those clinical images into invitations for deeper, more human conversations about illness and disability. Her work now lives in permanent collections across the U.S. and internationally, including the National Institutes of Health, major universities, and medical schools.

Due to the progression of MS, she is now quadriplegic and can no longer create visual art without assistance. She writes and speaks widely about living with illness and disability. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The British Medical Journal, WIRED, and MIT’s Leonardo Journal. Her piece “Losing Touch, Finding Intimacy” was also included in the New York Times anthology About Us.

She gives talks around the country — including a TEDx talk called “Learning to Celebrate and Embrace Our Imperfect Bodies” — and her new book, An Intimate Journey, comes out later this spring that chronicles the various art methods the artist has used to understand her relationship with a disease that continues to advance: textile paintings, solar plate etchings, embroideries, and digital renderings created from the clinical data that she initially refused to face. Jameson has often referred to her MRIs as containing a secret language she yearns to comprehend.

You can view her expansive, extensive art and writing collections here.

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It also weaves in lines from the ecstatic poem Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I highly recommend reading it in full when you’re finished here.

You dip one toe into the water and immediately regret it. You always do. Cold as a reprimand, cold as a dare, slapping your skin like a sentence unfinished. Thoughts of your day are frozen mid-syllable. You hover longer than you need to, sucking air through your teeth, telling yourself you don’t have to do this, no one is watching. But you are. The road can’t see you, but the sun can; mid-winter sun, the kind that pretends to give warmth from a sideways glance.

Then something in you overrides something else; it always does. You step in. Left foot first, then right, the same order every time, superstition a thin blanket on your naked skin. Slowly, you’re in no hurry, the creek couldn’t get any colder. The sky mirrors its ice, nothing warm between it and the water except your own beating heart and he’s about to question your sanity. The water climbs your calves, your knees, your thighs, and by the time it reaches your waist, breath goes strange, shallow, animal. Tiny knives everywhere at once, your skin recoils and your mind bargains, but you don’t listen.

You lower yourself until the water closes around your ribs, your chest, your shoulders. When it reaches your neck, your ego collapses to meet its certain death while deep, cellular warmth pushes forward. The evergreen tree line conspires, so you stay. In a heap nearby your clothes lie—shed skin, nearly worn through but a lifetime yet to live. The breeze moves across your back waking hairs, and you think, as you often do at this moment: How long can this continue? How long can I?

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

You’ve been carrying Hopkins’ lines with you again, worrying them the way you turn old-friend stones in your pocket. You don’t recite the whole thing, just pieces that remind your heart of the fire that breaks from thee. Fragments, sounds, rhythms to rev your own beat. You feel your life force falling with the falcon, the sheer force of hurl and gliding scraping you raw for renewal. You know this feeling, the lift, the fight, when wind meets mastery’s sail and tests it. But how much abrasion can you take? Gall. Such an ugly word.

The water hurts less now, you’ve slipped past the part that needs to name or claim the pain; heat moves inside you, your cells striking flint against themselves. This warmth isn’t coming from the world, it never does, it comes from somewhere older, the place where resistance and pressure are catalysts not foe. Off-season, when most boats are pulled from the lake until safer, smoother days, you sail away.

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

You think of how you built the house without plumbing on purpose, how everyone thought it was stubbornness or nostalgia or some half-baked philosophy. You never knew how to explain it, you never wanted to explain it, you only know that when life is too simple something dulls, that the rub keeps you alive and near.

You sit until the tree line shares its poem; each limb a stanza, each reach a perfect echo of your own silence. Finally, you can hear it clearly. The branches don’t apologize for their angles, how they stretch and twist and make homes for birds without ever asking if they’re doing it right. They don’t ask you if you’re doing it right, and on a quiet bow-bend your wimpling wing alights.

When you finally stand, the cold bites again, sharper this time, as if offended you thought the worst was over. You wrap a towel around your body and laugh a short bark of disbelief. Still alive. Still here. Still uninvited: Is it time for a change? You’ve been asking it too much lately.

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle!

In town, under fluorescent lights, you want to hide. You stand in line holding pipes and valves, fittings for a future that don’t feel like yours. And then later, trenching through clay, hands blistered, shoulders arcing and aching, you repeat under your breath, It’s the responsible thing, and you hate it every time you do. A house sealed in should’s: roof and walls and amenity should rebuff outdoor extremity; water should arrive without effort; a man should answer to more than the weather.

When the plumbing is finally finished, the house feels different, armored. Rushing creek now trickles through walls, broken into lines too short to matter. You turn on the tap and listen to the poem that has forgotten its body: water speaking evenly, saying only what it means to say, thin, didactic, complete. You watch the flow and feel more than water running down the drain. So that night, you leave the lights off. When thirst comes, you go outside instead, drink under the open sky as the cold dares you again into regret, until its blue-bleak skin gashes open your own gold-vermillion.

From that day on, you wash in the creek anyway. A private, proud, correction.

Lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover.” Haven’t read it? You must.

Happy New Year, friends,

Whether you’re beginning the year imagining how you might fill a fresh calendar, or sitting quietly with the spaces between those dreams, I hope you cup those glowing embers and blow on them gently—holding intention, willfulness, and exhale in careful balance.

I’ll be doing the same: some days already marked in ink, others held in…

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