Until going to the Amazon, I had never seen a black swan in my life. In fact, I didn’t actually realize they were real: I just thought they were something popularized by the hit Natalie Portman film of the same name and more a metaphor for the rare and unexpected. It turns out they’re very […]
Category: Updates
Updates to my life, where I currently am, what I’m currently doing, and what I’m currently thinking. Sometimes, the line between “essay” and “update” is a bit blurry.
Falling in Love with the Earth
Emails and doomscrolling make up too much of my life these days, and if I’m not grieving what I know is coming for our planet in the next twenty-odd years, I’m grieving what’s happening to our country and what feels like an inevitable collapse into entrenched authoritarianism. To be honest, I’ve found this reality really […]
Fear and Loneliness – and Hope
I oscillate these days between crippling fear and endless hope. It’s a strange dichotomy, actually. The fear is both very real and very fantastical. By that, I mean what I have an imagination for – climate collapse, the collapse of our democracy, economic collapse, the pending authoritarian threat and the very real damage it could […]
Dealing with the Scary Stuff
A friend and colleague of mine who does human rights work alongside me mentioned recently that she went on vacation and left her work phone off the whole time, only to fear when she turned it back on she would learn someone she’d been in touch with had been murdered the night before. It wouldn’t […]
Art and the Sacred in the Unexpected
Most every concert I’ve ever been to, when the main act starts, the crowd goes wild. Everyone paid for it, everyone anticipated it, everyone is glad it’s finally here. Even when the music was slower, there was always something about that first note that sends the crowd over the edge. There’s one notable exception in […]
R&R in the time of social upheaval
Been on the road a lot lately, which is something I struggle with given that it’s a pandemic, but between N95’s and a vaccine, I’m doing what I can to find the balance I know we’re all seeking. So, between island hoping, West coast adventures, and hiking in the Poconos, the last few weeks have […]
Big moves, tiny mountains
The world of remote work, even if some eventual return means being in the office a few days a week, opened up the doors and possibilities to moving a little farther from the City, and we took the chance. It’s not that we were tired of the City. I will always need to keep one […]
Vaccine.
I got my first vaccine shot today. That’s not really newsworthy; most of us are getting it and I had scheduled to get it a few weeks ago, before New Jersey had opened it up to everyone. Problem was, the only location available was in upstate New York, so rather than rescheduling once Jersey opened […]
One Year, Alive.
I told myself after a year of “quarantine,” of “surviving” a pandemic, after documenting the months and months of it, that it was only fitting to make sure, one year on, that I would document that too. It’s like a rite of passage, is it not? All the loss and all of the loneliness and […]
Charged with Terrorism for Speaking Truth to Power
One of my colleagues has been named a terrorist by the Egyptian government. Authoritarian regimes, it turns out, don’t like it when human rights organizations criticize their efforts to quell dissent. For now, my colleague is safe, as he lives in the United States, yet in retaliation, Egypt has jailed and tortured his cousin and […]
