These reflections come from the questions, changes, losses, discoveries,
and ordinary moments that ask me to stop long enough to put words around them.
In my twenties, I wrote that my life would be my greatest work of art. More than fifty years later, I began to understand that the masterpiece might not be something I made at all.
I entered ceremony asking for my body to heal. What followed brought me face to face with the way I had spent my life force, pushed past my limits, and mistaken survival for strength.
I had spent years creating things meant to offer other people warmth, safety, and the feeling of being held. It took a night in the hospital for me to understand what it meant to let that same care reach me.
For years, I tried to close the distance between who I knew myself to be and who others believed I was. One conversation with my son brought me to the point where preserving the connection mattered less than speaking the truth of who I am.
