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          A little over a year ago I wrote a post on finding gratitude in tragedy. I talked about being thankful for personal growth; for learning that I was capable of overcoming great adversity. It’s a strange concept to be thankful for pain and heartbreak, and when you first fall into it all you can think about is getting yourself out. But it makes more sense from the other side, looking back down that tunnel while the sun shines on your face. In the thick of that darkness I figured out that I was stronger than I thought; I didn’t die when J.J. did, even though I was so tired. The toll of 2 years fighting with cancer, with fear, with the truth I tried so hard not to believe. After that the ground was so inviting. It looked so soft and quiet and I just wanted to rest and get out of the ring. Just a temporary pause. I didn’t think I could survive it but I did, and I knew I had changed and would never be that person I was at 26, before we got pushed off the boa...

Dear J, We haven't talked in a long time. I haven't written to you in months. I'm sorry about that. Life has been a whirlwind, and I think part of me has been really trying to let you go. But the more I try to force it the more I realize that you just can't force these things, and I don't want to. It's okay for you to always be a part of my life, and Annabelle's life. You should be. We are who we are because of you and I like who I am. Even your death has shaped me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. I am strong and independent because I loved and lost you. Annabelle is mature and compassionate. She and I are warriors and every day I feel strong.           There are a lot of changes happening all at once. I fell in love, fast, intensely, and unexpectedly.  I married him and gave your daughters a daddy. And while Annabelle still loves her daddy in the stars I think you would agree that they deserve to have one here on Earth, to take them swimmin...

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past while about the concept of ‘home;’ how we put together the places that contain our lives, our families, the stuff that defines us, where we go to be with the ones we love, or where we go to be alone. I think about how we feel about those places we’re told we ‘belong.’ ‘Home,’ for many of us, is an ever-changing thing, whether it’s by choice or by circumstance. Where we live doesn’t always feel like home, and sometimes ‘home’ can be a world away. ‘Home’ for me has always been a complicated thing. There have been many times in my life when I’ve felt displaced, like an uprooted tree that hasn’t yet got a grip in its new soil. And while I have found ‘home’ in unexpected places (alone in Paraguayan apartments, in busy hostels on hidden street corners, in rundown houses in a town I never thought I’d end up in) other times places where I’ve planned to make home have tossed me right back out (I could have been a well-established West-Coast hippie by now....

My daughter Joy is the most ironic toddler because her favourite book is “Sadness,” from a popular children’s movie. We’ve been reading it for weeks and the character’s heavy sighs make my weirdo of a kid smile and giggle. This week, however, she’s been handing me “Fear,” and after a few days of feeling a weird, generalized melancholia, it has finally clicked in that this little genius is handing me my own problem to read out loud every night. So there it is: fear. Of what? Nothing in particular...and everything. I guess when you’ve experienced a worst case scenario- the one without the happy ending— it makes sense that you could come out of that afraid. Afraid of what the future has in store, afraid of what could happen, what may not happen, afraid of being not enough, or of being too much. Of failing, of leaving, of being left. Of change. There are a lot of rabbit holes I work hard to skirt around. But while turning this revelation over in my head I also stumbled across a reflection...

I want to talk about women. Not, this time, about human rights, misogyny, politics, or reproductive rights, as often times (as many of you know) I like to go on very passionately about. But while I proudly maintain my unequivocal desire to smash the patriarchy, right now I want to talk about women in a different context; a different level that is (like many important things that women do) largely overlooked, because women amaze me. Not just those women whose voices have been picked up—often begrudgingly—by the media/history books/general public. Not just those names that many of us now know. I want to talk about the women I know because every day they amaze me more than any celebrity, superhero storyline or epic trilogy plot. They are the heroines of life who often go unacknowledged because their acts of selflessness and bravery become so commonplace that it can be easy to grow accustomed to them, and forget that they are extraordinary.        ...

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core, under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made out of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself…             So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up. Many people feel small because they’re small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.” –Neil deGrasse Tyson    ...