For everything you have missed,

You have gained something else

and for everything you gain,

you lose something else.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson 

I saw two geriatric pets in the span of a few hours; an ancient dog lurching through a hike and an old cat being helped onto a pee pad outside an apartment.  Both pets were accompanied by gentle humans who held them, cheered them on and smiled at them.  Owning their special needs with dignified embarrassment, the animals were busy living and dying. The ready compassion – the animals’ compassion for themselves, the humans’ compassion for their pets - slowed me down, made me breathe deeply and think about the cost of living. 

The new decade came sharply for me, like a scare in a haunted house. I turned the corner and there it was – 2020 – armed with a chainsaw.  To add insult, I bought the most confrontational calendar of my life; its cover art reads BEST YEAR EVER.  No pressure.  I bought it under the pretense that a new year can’t sca...

The manufacturing company that makes our trashcan is called Simple Human.  Isn’t that romantic?  We invented trash; the credit is ours.  Scientists found four new species of animal and plastic at the deepest point of the ocean. We’ve been completist in our waste inventions, romantic too.  But trash as human legacy?  I didn’t see that coming when I was a kid.  I didn’t see the plastic bag I threw away everyday after my peanut butter sandwich for lunch or the paper plates we used at breakfast every morning. It didn’t occur to me that cans of soda were wasteful or that the Aqua Net hairspray I brandished for prom night hair could erode the ozone that protects us.  It took seven shampoos to recover my hair’s natural texture after prom.  I knew the stuff was toxic, just not its cost. 

The notion of what is disposable came up in conversation Monday night but dressed up as letting go.  I Marie Kondo-...

I keep seeing feathers on the ground.  Am I molting? And a couple of weeks ago I saw a shimmery snake skin lying on the ground.  It glistened next to one of those red-brown husks from the big palm tree presiding over the hill.  It seems like everything is stripping off its layers in this heat but not me.  I keep buying more clothes.  The quest for the perfect pair of jeans – I hate to admit – continues. I find it easier to stare at racks at a thrift store than an empty page.  Do you buy in goodbyes?  I seem to. I’m even tempted to pick up all those feathers (bird flu be damned) and make dream catchers, anything to slow the tide of time and its advances.

And yes, we did just move house.  Our skin not shed but altered post-move with new ink.  Last Friday marks another trip around the sun for me and the overlapping of all this change is rather startling.  In boxing up what we own, every paperclip, bobby pin and...

Great-ing.  Grating.  I’m not sure what great means.  It’s a stock-character of language; someone you’ve met a bunch of times and still don’t know.  But as a response to leadership, to the climate crisis, to threat of war, to caged children, to mass incarceration, to a broken education and healthcare system or anything that matters, great isn’t good enough.  It isn’t anything.  It’s a dodge, an avoidance, a mockery of meaning. 

Here’s a screeching, possibly grating detour... I just spent two and a half months working on a new play in New York.  And even though I lived there for twelve years, went to school there and started my career there, it was a new New York for me.  A lot has happened since I left and this return, a chance to be on an Off-Broadway stage, felt auspicious.  Honestly, the whole experience made me feel a lot of everything.  Doing the play was kind of like riding a horse.  The horse’s dandru...

I woke up today with this question: “what do I hope for?”  And it is a serious question after years of living towards a goal.   At dinner Monday night, I expressed with some embarrassment that acting is the only idea I’ve ever had for my life.  I’ve dreamt too of having a family and of a chance to see the world, but individually and as long as I can remember, I have wanted and still want to act.  Alongside survival jobs, adapting and some innovating, acting iswhat I’ve done.  I ask myself often why I didn’t become a social worker or a teacher, run a non-profit or for political office.  There is good I might have furthered and time I can’t get back, yet in my wrestling for dignity and meaning, I still think the possibility for a better world is strengthened, not weakened, by a solitary dream.

Maybe it comes with the territory of being a performer, my worry that this pursuit is selfish or self-serving. But selflessness has i...

This is for creatives, so all of us.

What helps?  Logan tells me 50,000 people drove to Lake Elsinore over the weekend to see the super-bloom.  After the massacre in New Zealand last week, en masse Los Angelenos sought wild flowers.  Nature helps.  And helping helps.  A neighbor locked herself out of her house – Max and I could feel her frustration rising like steam, fogging up her thoughts.  We stopped, we stood with her and we listened. She came to a decision, we kept watch and waited until she returned from her next-door neighbor’s house with a spare key.  To her credit, she’d prepared for this and found the solution herself.  I think she just needed reassurance.  It’s easy to feel invisible when you’re in need. And anyway, needs aren’t sexy or impressive, just human.  Seeing someone else need something helped me tolerate my own needing.

Breathing helps. I meditate twice a day, twenty minutes a time – sometimes it’s glorified napping –...

The liquor store down the street caught fire. It has a diorama on top of it of a little house and chimney with a half-circle of smoke clouds, trees and a white picket fence. It’s called the House of Spirits and Max always says he needs to take a Rolleiflex of its charms.   There is a sign in front of it now that reads “Close For Now”.  The exterior looks oddly like it’s old self, but the interior is ruins, charred and empty.  

Jackie introduced me to this haiku after the fire at their farmhouse…

Barn's burnt down --
now
I can see the moon.

It was written by a 17th century Japanese poet and samurai, Mizuta Masahide, who studied medicine and words.  There is something about writers who study medicine, I am thinking of Chekhov, that make words suit life and life reverberate in words.  It’s an alchemy they achieve, a diagnosis of how things are, an anatomical romance with the world. 

The missing “D” in the sign outside the H...

I was supposed to be a home-owner and a mom by now. I was supposed to be out of debt from graduate school. I was supposed to be the star of a popular TV show and have a successful film career.  I was supposed to have written a book and started a podcast. I was supposed to be bilingual, well-traveled, better read and in general more accomplished. I was supposed to make a lot of people a lot happier than they are and I was supposed to have a flatter stomach and whiter teeth and more toned arms. I was supposed to discover deeper truths about humanity and life and massage those truths into my work as an artist. I was supposed to carry less burdens and stand up straighter and eat less saturated fats and wear more color.  I was supposed to use fewer plastic cups and paper plates and buy less cheap clothing and volunteer a lot more. I was supposed to rest easier and do a lot less waiting for things to turn around and I’ve complained, judged and succumbed to fear way more than I was supposed t...

My nephew Graham is a smart and inspiring person.  Over the holidays, he planned a kickball tournament for his friends, family and neighbors because he’s really fun and has great ideas but also because he wanted to get better at playing kickball.  He planned a tournament so he could practice.  So instead of making goals or resolutions for this new year, I want to be like my cool nephew and practice the following things I want to become better at:

1.  Kickball.  Or any fun, not too serious group sport that gathers people I love together to play and run around outside. 

2.  Doing things.  I think about doing things a lot and I want to do less thinking about doing things and more doing them. 

3.  Spending quality time alone.  I am going to be away from my home and my partner for a few months this spring and I am dreading it. I hope I can date myself while I am away and enjoy the silly subtlety of my own company. 

4.  Less “helping".  I am read...

Our third night in Kauai, we go to the southwest shore of the island to watch the sunset.  We find a cove where families sit on blankets and dogs chase driftwood and a sense of calm prevails.  We watch the day saturate with pink and orange and the tide recede.  The moored boats lilt and bob.  My new husband smiles and closes his eyes to feel the last of the sun on his face. 

We walk around the cove and discover a slab of black volcanic rock teeming with crabs, mussels and plankton.  Where the ocean meets the rock, the island, the earth, there is a family fishing.  The father and the older son crouch to harvest bait but the other boy, the boy that is Graham’s age, maybe not even ten years old, has a fishing pole and is casting.

The sun drops to just about horizon level.  It is a tangerine; it is a bowl firing in a kiln. It is God’s blushing cheek and the burning heart of this day.  I feel like the orange ball teases us honeymooners,...