MEANINGMAKER

love

  • everything beautiful

    This morning, on the first day of Pride, I stood on the corner of a busy downtown street with a throng of staff, watching the flags be raised for Pride Month and Indigenous History Month. And I had a brief… Continue reading

  • they were always golden

    I got to hold babies and pet all the dogs. I got to fold warm laundry. Blow out birthday candles. Take naps. I got to walk down ordinary streets and notice beautiful things. Flower gardens. A child drawing galaxies in… Continue reading

  • dear sugar

    Some of you know Cheryl Strayed as the writer behind Wild, but before that she wrote an anonymous advice column called Dear Sugar — a place where people brought their hardest, most tangled truths, and Sugar met them with a… Continue reading

  • this too shall pass

    A small poem. A simple one. This too shall pass: we say it like a spell — like it will hurry hard things along. But the good things pass too. The ease. The sweetness. The precious small things we’ve pressed… Continue reading

  • all the days we did not live

    I decided to walk to work this morning. Unusual for me in the winter. On my way, I happened to see an unhoused woman curled up on the cold sidewalk on the other side of the street, surrounded by the… Continue reading

  • heaven is a campfire

    I like to thinkthat before any of us had bodieswe sat around a campfirein heaven,leaning into its warmthletting the light touch our faces,our knees tucked up to our chests.The flames crackledlike tiny miracles,sending up sparksas if the stars were being… Continue reading

  • lift what you can

    My mother taught me to shovel snowthe way I imaginesome mothers teach prayer –patient, shoulder to shoulder. She’d come home from a long day,and say: Come on, let’s go.Out into the dark we went,into the hush of the world,the night itself… Continue reading

  • new year’s eve 1975

    She slipped the deep blue coat from the hanger.The fur collar brushed her cheek,a brief vanishing softness. I watched from my doorway,a child awake when I shouldn’t have been,drawn by the thin slice of light— a path to my mother.… Continue reading

  • a gift in the cold

    Can we just talk about how the rain froze on the windshield this morning for a minute? Like a tiny murmuration of starlings – that breathtaking, swirling ballet you sometimes see those delicate birds perform by the hundreds in the… Continue reading

  • we are so lightly here

    Today, my phone’s photo app offered me a montage it called Looking Back. I usually ignore those compilations, but this morning I opened it as the downtown blurred past outside the train’s window, on my way to work. There, among… Continue reading