322 The Earth burns. Citizens are shot for no reason other than the color of their skin, and children are sent to unsafe schools and back home again. The pandemic is ignored or politicized and masks are
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204 I live in a rural sanctuary, but who can forget the pain of the world—the environmental, pandemic, and political threats, racism, families separated, and people dying alone? Who can forget that many won’t help others stay
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216 July 12, 1967 Dear Esel, After your bus left, I couldn’t face the apartment, so went to the cycle shop. Maybe mindless people could make me forget. No hope. I finally got the strength to sulk
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139 The bluebird boy uses his beak to carry bugs and caterpillars for his nestlings and haul away nestling excrement deposited in fecal sacs. He keeps a tidy nest. The female does all this and has a
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140 It’s my safe spot now. I don’t love the dark walnut wood, but I love memories of climbing in bed between my grandparents as a child. After grandpa died, Mom slept in this bed with Grandma
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150 Two little girls stand in an open field, close to each other but not touching. I’m the straight-haired girl with glasses, 7 years old, wearing a wool coat with plaid trim. The dark-skinned girl wears overalls
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274 In the American Brahman Bookstore in Ithaca, NY in the late 1960s, a group drawn to the store and teacher learned meditation sitting on lumpy mismatched cushions. At home, Vic and I committed to sitting in
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236 I walk to my husband Vic’s cairn in the forest to honor his life and death. Along the way, I peek in the nesting boxes to see if the bluebird eggs have hatched. I pick lupines
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408 Rushing toward Strong Hospital in 2008, I call the pulmonologist, the oncologist, the cardiologist, and our family doctor. “Should we put your husband on a ventilator?” they ask me. “Can you give him chemo after he
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196 During this quarantine without life’s usual distractions, anxiety follows me like my puppy. I’m safe, but the Earth trembles. I smother one flaming fear by reminding myself I’m OK. Then another flares. When my husband was
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