Category: Uncategorized
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Wild Geometry
Whenever you feel weary What I wish for youIs to not take a pill or a drink or a man To distract your soul. But insteadTo put down your phone,Pour out your glass, And take a long, aimless walk Beneath the tall oaks and maples, Who will offer With their hand-sized leavesA kind, gentle shade. Alone, may…
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How Does Your Garden Grow?
Living a nomadic lifestyle made it difficult -if not impossible- to keep plants. Now that I’m putting down roots, I’ve become a plant mom to a motley crew of flora and fauna: a regal ponytail palm, a stubborn spider plant, a finicky but fragrant basil plant, a collage of multi-colored succulents, and a quartet of…
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Discovering Our Maladies
About This Week’s Post Fellow readers, As someone who used to carry a bit of hubris with her health, it’s been an adjustment setting up shop in a world that revolves around scans and lab work and a forever intake of thyroid medication, all rendering me liability and last-pick on the dodgeball zombie apocalypse team. What…
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Where Do You Eat Your Cheesecake?
Richmond Street Miami, FloridaMay, 1992 When I first heard the news that Dorothy was getting married, I felt joy and excitement. I had watched her over the past seven years plow through the many dead-end relationships, each suitor nowhere near her levels of grace, wit, and resilience. Then she met Lucas, an equal to her intellect,…
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Making Peace When You Feel Like You’re Too Much: A Meditation on Surfing Life’s Waves
Part I. Invisible Currents When life becomes overwhelming, I tend to slip into controlling armor and robotically project manage life’s little and big miseries. But this approach -of trying to control everything- leaves me exhausted. Over time, I’ve learned to instead deploy an internal braking system by asking myself: “Anna dear, can you control the…
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Art Connects
Prologue: What war strips from us, what it takes from cradled arms, it leaves in exchange a deep recess. What people choose to fill in that empty space depends on many factors. I feel immense gratitude that my great-aunt chose to fill her void with art. Because art can be dangerous. Incendiary. Irreverent. Illuminating. As…
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Memento Mori
Kutná Hora, Czech Republic | 2024 I recently visited the Sedlec Ossuary in the sleepy town of Kutná Hora, a fifty-five-minute train ride outside of Prague. The ossuary sits beneath the quaint Church of All Saints, a vestige of the Middle Ages that is still in use today. Surrounding the church rests the modest Sedlec…
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My Condolences to the Phrase “I’m Sorry for Your Loss”
In her book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Susan Cain describes how American rituals seldom allow us to express our grief in connective, meaningful ways. This, Cain explains, is captured so obviously in America’s condolence cards. Often these cards fume with underlying notes of shallow positivity, overlooking that the bereaved must now…
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Fireflies in the Mangroves
I have a complicated relationship with control and uncertainty. As an expat learning my host country’s different norms and systems, I’m constantly navigating life in the dark. Of course, confronting this kind of uncertainty is part of the deal- and the thrill– of living abroad. On the other hand, I am nothing if not a…
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New Year’s
One of the perks of living in countries like Korea is that you get to celebrate two new years. In case you tripped out of the gate with the Gregorian calendar’s kick off, fear not: there’s always Seollal, the Lunar New Year celebrated in many East Asian cultures.
Circuitous Wanderings 