—speaking, finding form
Work the Craft and Listen | notes on attention and practice
Conveyance | four notes
a real human child | notes in situ
Lavender Pants | hotel breakfast, august 2026
Work the Craft and Listen
Since my daughter moved out a few weeks ago to attend college, I often practice singing in her room. It’s quiet there, away from the rest of the house. The time I spend practicing there knits my heart to hers across the miles—she would sing and practice there, too.
I walk in and prop my phone on her dresser. I adjust the curtains, close the windows. I declare and contain my practice with a timer—to make this effort count. I listen to vocal exercises and the comforting voice of my singing teacher as she leads me through a sequence of movement and sound. Soon I’ve relaxed my shoulders, deepened my breath, and opened my chest and jaw, easing my voice from wherever it rests to presence. Resonance.
Last week, though, I sat at the piano to practice. It’s meditative, to sing scales and long tones. The mind eases, the mind wanders.
Sometimes, the mind notices.
Mouth open, diaphragm engaged—I listened and made tiny adjustments as I sang. I don’t know where I was looking, but one moment I shifted my focus from inside my body to the world around me, and I saw something beautiful on the music stand of my black Baldwin piano.
Shells.
I sat with their arrangement for a moment, my mind imagining the image I could make in black-and-white. But I was engaged in official singing practice. Didn’t the timer say so?
I picked up my phone quickly, composing the photograph I saw in my mind. Later, I slowed down to work the craft and listen. Blurred reflections appeared when I reduced the exposure.
Before the image changed, I’d known that moment was beauty. Knew I had to bow to it.
For now, a scale.
For now, another sound.
Conveyance
one.
Today I descended these stairs. When I got to the bottom, I turned back around and climbed slowly to the top again, stopping to photograph a flight of birds undulating across the sky from open air to the eaves of a seven-story apartment building and back again.
two.
Today I worked, listened, cried, meditated, stretched, ate and walked.
I explored. Made some notes about stuff.
I wrote, and I sang five-note scales in a rooftop garden.
three.
Life calls us up sometimes—demands the offering up of a depth of wisdom or humor or patience we don’t yet know we possess until it’s time to share it out.
I decided today that life demands the ungrasping too, like something young and somewhat new floated by the wind from the safety of an outstretched hand, carried in the current with newly-strong wings that you just know will bear, bank, glide…
four.
Seat 20E, not my favorite but the best I could do given that the plane takes off tomorrow.
I will land in the supper hour.
I will drive to my mother’s sister.
I will love, and I will listen.
a real human child
My womb aches today. This I know precisely, because yesterday my doctor sampled tissue from its lining, a procedure technically simple (and, in my case, somewhat routine), to see microscopically the world where my daughter was formed—a way to keep me safe from medical things that happened long ago.
The algebra was almost funny. An illness occasioned a treatment which produced a cure that prompted a support which triggered an injury.
The unexpected sum? A state of mind, this state of mind—
To be truthful, I am grateful.
Grateful to have been born in a time and place where compassionate scientists can monitor, inquire and, when necessary, heal.
Grateful to have a felt sense of a place inside my belly where a beautiful human life began.
(And grew. And went onwards and away to college.)
Grateful the pain is faint and subsiding, despite that it came about through inconvenience, invasion.
Grateful for the doctors, eager, kind and hell-bent in my youth.
Grateful to be able to witness the absurdity of it all.
There were knives and beams and chemical torches too terrible for the occasion.
There are imprints, latent, that bind some of my cells, some of my vessels, parts of my life even now.
My biography has been shaped by medicine.
My appreciation of the goodness in the world has been aided by streams of helpers wearing white coats and badges.
My belief in miracles was sparked twenty years ago when my once-battered body conceived, sheltered and formed a real human child.
My awareness of my womb today, my ability to sense its interior precisely, to appreciate its interior whole-wombedly, is only possible because yesterday it was momentarily harmed to help me.
It is quite something to have a life to live. To get to live it with an unblinking gaze, a heart that’s strong despite it all, and a place in me I once shared but now call my own.
Lavender Pants
The other day I sat in a hotel breakfast nook eating oatmeal with walnuts, drinking coffee with a little bit of sweetener and a whole bunch of oat milk, watching fellow travelers leave their rooms to exit the hotel.
An extended family streamed by—uncles, cousins, aunts. All were dressed up, all were dressed in black.
All were somber.
One exception? A little person, dressed in a flower top, lavender-colored pants and (likely) a chubby diaper underneath. That little spark of humanity trundled by with her hand nearly overhead to hold the hand of the adult who was guiding her quickly to the lobby with the family.
She kept up with their steps (barely).
She also beamed.
She caught my eye as she passed, and I twinkled my eyes back at her. She smiled more, and so did I.
I snuck in a tiny wave, questioning my gesture as I did it (was this respect?).
Onward this procession of grief, peppered with one little soul so there she kept her smiling eyes on mine as she and her family moved briskly out of view.
