Like a barrel going over Niagara Falls

Like a hopeless romantic, head over heels

Like the old woman on the commercial who can’t get up

Like the crusty old leaves that can no longer cling to that oak tree

Like one of those polar vortex bomb cyclones over the middle of the continent

Like April 15 when you owe money to the IRS

Like paratrooper whose plane has been shot down by friendly fire

Like a storm of fire and brimstone hailing down on someone’s head as they kneeled to pray

Like a heat-seeking missile manufactured in a munitions plant in Texas on an elementary school full of little girls

Like raindrops when the sky is crying

Day breaks

Like a wineglass left in the sink

Like a molar on a stale sourdough roll

Like a record stuck on the same groove, over and over

Like a cell phone thrown off the roof of a tall building

Like a cheap lightbulb made in China

Like the skier’s tibia bone

Like a smashed pinata full with candy

Like our belief in justice and due process

Like a snarl of mangled concrete and rebar

Like our hearts every time we watch the video

Artists: berza.rh, ruizseth, abdielraymundo

If all else fails, today I’m here to rise before the sun and catch a glimpse of the waning crescent moon before it sets.

And if not that, I’m here to feel the hot water pouring down over my face, rinsing me clean and paving the way for something new.

And if not that, I’m here to wait patiently for the water to get hot, watching the machine sputtering and fuming, trusting that it’s all part of the process.

And if not that, I’m here to connect with the people I love and demonstrate that I’m still thinking about them, even though I’m 2,000 miles aways.

And if not that, I’m here to eat papaya and pineapple by the truckload.

And if not that, I’m here to feel the sunlight on my face and to say yes to what’s coming.

And if not that, I’m here to take in the stories on these walls, told through murals and graffiti and the layers of time.

And if not that, I’m here to learn a few new vocabulary words and dance steps.

And if not that, I’m here to answer a steady stream of questions from my son about how to plan a trip to Europe.

And if not that, I’m here to breathe through both sides of my nose.

And if not that, I’m here to process the magic of this place through all my other senses, with this human body I live in.

And if not that, I’m here to write – just keep my pen moving at all times and let the words flow right through me.

And if not that, I’m here to listen to the voices of other writers as they tell their own true stories.

And if not that, I’m here to get to gratitude, even if only for a second. I’m here to hunt for joy and to embody it every day.

My life is no longer the early-stage garden of hope, with its rich black loamy soil and precious little seedlings, all carefully watered and weeded and fertilized on a daily basis in rapturous anticipation of the bounty they would one day produce.

Nor is it a mid-stage garden with dropped buds turned to fruit, when the harvest is too much to keep up with. Pounds of ripe cherry tomatoes weighing down the vines, peppers of all shapes and sizes, a perfectly shaped eggplant just waiting to be plucked and consumed.

No, mine is a late-stage garden, in the blistering heat and harsh light of late August -- parched and rangy, neglected for weeks and ready to bolt. However, if I look closely enough, I’ll find many surprises (some pleasant, some not): a zucchini the size of a baseball bat; an assortment of lemon cucumbers I don’t remember planting; an artichoke, over 6 feet tall topped with a fuchsia thistle; some kind of leafy green thing teeming with aphids; and over there, a tiny pumpkin holding on for dear life to a brown and brittle vine that can’t possibly be supplying any water. Bees and slugs and Bluejays and quail hide among the refuse.

My choice is clear. I can either focus on what has gone wrong or on what has gone right. Life is an all-you-can-eat buffet, and you don’t necessarily get to choose what’s on your plate. At this point, my task is to savor the abundance, even if it comes in ways I didn’t expect. So, let me learn to make zucchini bread. Cut up the cucumbers and put them in a pitcher of water. Place the thistle in a vase. Admire it.

I remember that last day of school, the anticipation of the bell, riding home on the bus with oversized folders stuffed with all my drawings and various assignments from the year, feeling the abundance and promise of the summer ahead of me.

One week into the summer, I had settled into a routine of watching reruns of “I Love Lucy” back-to-back every morning until my mother told me to turn off the TV and go outside. The driveway had been repaved with fresh tar. I watched the steam rise from it picked sticky little cinders off the bottoms of my shoes. I remember hitting a tennis ball again the garage door again over and over and over and over. Bored, bored, bored, bored.

The rock garden in the backyard was filled with pansies and snapdragons and real spearmint. You could put it in your mouth, but it didn’t taste the same as the gum. I remember trying to balance our terrier on the tire swing hanging from a tree limb, but she wouldn’t stay.

The rusty metal swing set made a creaking sound, and you had to be careful on the swing at the end because it would start swinging a bit sideways and you would eventually hit the pole on the end.

I set up grocery store inside a gray playhouse with white trim, painted in the exact same colors as our real house. I carefully arranged the plastic food and paper money in a box, but no one came to shop.

I rode my purple bicycle around the cul de sac with a basket full of rocks and feathers.

I would go back inside at around at 2:00 pm to find my mom on the couch, watching General Hospital, with her coffee and cigarettes on the table in front of her.

The floor of my bedroom was strewn with Barbie Dolls and their assorted accessories, coloring books, LightBrite, Etch-a-Sketch, and an EZ Bake Oven. I lined up dozens of stuffed animals up on the bed to play school and I got to be the teacher.

On week 2, I was signed up for day camp at the local park, making God’s Eyes and leather bracelets and a ceramic owl until mom picked me up around noon. We would usually stop at the A&P on the way home, and I would beg for a quarter so that I could put it in one of those machines that dispensed troll dolls in little plastic bubbles.

By week 3, my parents had reactivated their swimming pool membership. I remember long afternoons there, eating banana popsicles and jumping off the diving board, until we heard thunder in the distance and had to leave. The sound of the baseball game was always playing in the background on the radio.

My mom would start making dinner every afternoon at 4:00. I remember the smell of ground beef and onion powder and how it would always turn my stomach.

If the rain cooled it down enough, we would eat dinner on the brick patio, under the green awning that was torn at the corners. We had an enormous white serving platter, and little plastic knobs shaped like ears of corn with sharp spikes on the end, and I would use them to hold on to the corn while I rolled it back and forth through a cube of butter. I was much harder to eat when I was missing my front teeth.

I remember biting down on cherry tomatoes that tasted as sweet as candy, and how they would pop and squirt in your mouth when bit down on them. I would spit watermelon seeds onto the ground and wonder if they would become a watermelon tree.

Sometimes we would make homemade ice cream in a wooden contraption that had to be cranked by hand for hours. Once I got impatient and reached in to taste the rock salt around it.

The lightning bugs started to appear at dusk, sparking up, then disappearing in the darkness. I remember catching a few and putting them in the Mason Jar with some grass to make a bed and asked my father to poke some holes in the lid. By morning, they were dead.

I remember the sound of the air conditioner humming and the air thick with bugs, thousands of them under the street light, and thinking, “I must be breathing that.”

I remember that feeling of deep grief that would sink in at bedtime every night, crying silently in bed because I didn’t want the day to end, didn’t want summer to be over. But there were still 7 more weeks to go….

I wished I could be a veterinarian, to hold sick animals in my arms and make them well again.

I wished I could go home to my Barbie Townhouse with the elevator that went up and down on a string and the camper van with the pop-up roof parked out in front, and has limitless wardrobe choices and fun.

I wished I could be the smart one, who could write quicker than anyone else, type furiously, and save the day.

I wished I could be Marlo Thomas one That Girl and go to cocktail parties with my boyfriend Donald wearing a fabulous silver lamé dress with matching high-heeled sandals and oversized hoop earrings.

I wished I could be the one who didn’t need anyone else in my life to be okay.

I wished I could be a star – a highly sought-after singer, dancer, actress, model, glamour goddess who stole the show wherever she went and made all the other girls jealous.

I wished I could be the boss of a company and sit in meetings all day and make big decisions and tell people what to do, and have them fear me a little bit.

I wished I could be Mary Tyler Moore, tossing my hat up into the air and spinning, spinning, spinning, knowing that it would all come back to me like a boomerang. I wanted to be the competent one in the company of quirky-but-loving co-workers -- a family of sorts, accepting on another’s idiosyncrasies, except I didn’t want to have any.

I wished I could be the girlfriend of a famous rock star and wear funky Bohemian hats and blouses from Morocco and feather boas and tight jeans with tall boots and travel in the back of a private bus.

I wished I could be someone’s wife and have his babies, and have them all need me so badly that I would be like the sun in the center of their universe, the source of gravity that held everything together.

I wished I could be an artist like Georgia O’Keefe and take all my paints and my books and my ceramic pots and go live by myself someplace in the middle of and the desert where no one could bother me, and they would only appreciate me after I died, and then they would all feel guilty.

I wished I could start over from scratch and just take off my enormous backpack and my heavy boots and just lay there in the dirt for a few minutes, feeling the sun on my face without worrying about sunburn or tick bites or whether I could get cell reception

I wished I could just want to be where I was for a second.

There are only a few places precious enough to have terrible Wifi these days. Most of these places feel like the literal end of the Earth, and evidently that is where we have to go these days just to get a little peace and quiet, put down these digital bricks that we carry around with us everywhere we go, even to the bathroom. If we want to step away from the constant stream of alerts, pings, texts, headlines and other garbage that pours relentlessly through the pipe, we need to find a place with terrible WiFi.

Iceland is one of these places. The weather conditions are so harsh in Iceland that it takes thousands of years for moss to take hold on the rocks. There’s a shocking abundance of water everywhere you look, but few trees will take root, and even fewer land mammals can thrive there. Everything they eat needs to be flown in from someplace else, making it astronomically expensive. Nevertheless, visitors continue to arrive in droves, braving the hail and the freezing rain to snap a few selfies by the waterfalls.

The island doesn’t care about any of this – it’s still a work in progress. An island that sill exists in geologic time, the product of billions of years of fire and ice at war with one another, carving out a landscape that looks like it belongs on another planet. It’s a bleak landscape of lava rock vomited up by Mother Earth, and she is not about to stop any time soon. There are still more than 30 active volcanoes on Iceland belching gas and oozing molten rock. And all it would take is just one big purge to make history of all of us.

If we could visit the Museum of Natural History 200,000 years in the future, we would see that our current mass extinction isn’t such a big deal after all. Scientists are concerned about the rapid rate of receding glaciers, melting under the scalding sun. But the island knows that this has happened dozens of times throughout the course of history, and it intends to continue melting and refreezing, melting and refreezing, for billions of years to come. Looking through the lens of geologic time, it may even seem like a deep freeze is exactly what we need, and that it’s long overdue. Once everything freezes, we’ll be able to walk straight across a land bridge from the UK to the North Pole, and then right on down to Canada – no boat or airplane necessary.

Except we won’t be here anymore. We’ll be replaced by deep-sea creatures that we don’t know the names of yet because they don’t yet exist. Once the oceans become more acidic and all the shallow water sea creatures start to die off, the planet will once again be populated by fierce, cold-blooded monsters who are better suited to evolution than we ever were, and who will probably be better guests on the planet. If we could just hit “fast forward,” for a few hundred thousand years, we would see what an insignificant species we were. If the entire 4 billion years of geologic time were compressed into one day, we existed for less than one second of that day. Mother Earth will continue throwing up obsidian boulders for millions of years to come, with or without us.

They say that happiness is a day at the spa, but a few weeks ago, I found myself at one of the strangest spas on Earth. Billed by Conde Nast Traveler as one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World, The Blue Lagoon is located at the base of an enormous geothermal power plant in the middle of a fresh lava field. Getting there requires driving for 45 minutes through a desolate landscape filled with black basalt boulders that were vomited up by one volcano or another over the years, leaving huge rifts under the earth’s crust that allowed heat to warm the sea water above it. Eventually, people decided to utilize this heat to make electricity, and the power plant was built. A few years after that, someone had the nifty idea to route the effluent run-off into a pool, like a gigantic hot tub, and The Blue Lagoon was born.

It's impossible to estimate how many people they process through this place on a daily basis, but I would wager a guess that nearly everyone who visits this island considers making a stop here. “It looks just like heaven,” someone next to me commented, as we hung our robes on hooks and descended through a strange portal to an artificial world filled with milky aquamarine water and steam. And yes, I thought to myself, maybe heaven is slightly like this but without the constant din of what sounded like a pile driver breaking through hard rocks at the neighboring power plant, in combination with the whirring and humming of multiple motors and pumps struggling to bring the water up to the surface.

On the day I visited, my phone reported that the outdoor temperature was 45 degrees, but with the wind it felt like twenty, so I tried to keep my body submerged as much as possible. Unfortunately, at 8:00 am, the water was not always that warm – currents moved through it, creating a wide variance in temperature, sometimes only slightly warmer than my body. Pretending to be a seal, I floated on my back for a while in the murky saline water, seeking the warmest spot. I eventually heard a loud sound, and realized that I had drifted toward a suction drain in the corner.

I looked down and noticed that I couldn’t see my hands or the rest of my body in the cloudy water, which was filled with something they assured us was not toxic. It was not seagull guano, but silica, a mineral from deep within the Earth that humans now sue to keep their shoes and other leather goods from molding – and here I was soaking in it. The steam was so thick, I had completely lost sight of my friends, and at some point, my glasses had fallen off my head and been sacrificed to the bottom of the lagoon.

I inched my way along the edge until I bumped into into the swim -up bar, where they poured me the first of two free glasses of champagne that came with my entry package, then found myself a spot on the slimy, algae-covered rocks. I noticed a small army of guards wearing florescent orange vests patrolling the perimeter of the pool. They didn’t appear to be armed, but looked as though they should be, with their grave expressions. As I sipped my champagne, a story started to set up in my brain about a strange island prison where they served mind-erasing elixir to the prisoners while they soaked them in hot water like teabags to steal their essence….

Jopie Huisman, De eerste en da laatse schoenen, 1974

I would like to invite you to a very sad museum in the Northern Netherlands. Known as The Museum of Broken Things, it features the life’s work of a Frisian artist named Jopie Huisman, who was born in 1922 in a town called Workum, known as a long-established center for craftspeople – ceramicists, wood workers, metals smiths and more.

Jopie was a painter, with a strong passion for the farmland that surrounded his city, and he loved to take his small boat out at night and fish for eels in the canals. He lived a relatively happy, simple existence for a while until World War II came along and he was arrested by the Nazi police. He found himself imprisoned in a labor camp in Kassel Germany, which was traumatizing in and of itself, but his horror was compounded by the fact that Kassel was being bombarded. He saw bombs falling from the sky like an enormous flock of geese and soon the city and the surrounding countryside were engulfed in flames.

Jopie somehow managed to escape the work camp alive and returned home to Friesland, but he was not the same. Traumatized and broken, he started to develop an affinity for discarded things, and eventually started a business as a rag-and-bone man, buying and selling used clothing and scrap metal. The objects spoke to him – they had stories to tell. One time, he went to purchase the contents of a house in which a very old woman had recently passed away. Inside her armoire, he found two pairs of shoes, one for a baby and one for an adult woman. He realized that these were the very first and very last pairs of shoes she had ever owned – and that together, they summed up her entire life. At that point, he turned his attention from landscape painting to objects: dented buckets and ripped fishing nets, used overalls splattered with paint, broken toys and scorched cookware. These things became his subjects because he felt he could relate to them deeply.

His wife was less enamored than he was with old junk, and was frustrated by her husband’s inability to put food on the table for their children. She eventually left him, which made him throw himself into his work more, but mostly in solitude. After years of painting, he finally managed to land an exhibit in a neighboring city, but some of his paintings went missing from the walls, so he resolved to never loan his work out again. After that he turned his own home into a museum of broken things.

There was once a time before clocks, when humans had to rely on the movement of the sun and stars in order to track the progress of time. Each place had its own unique time, defined by the season, the weather, the length of the day. In the darkness, we drew close to one another and to fire, which kept the light going even when the days were short and cold. We turned to stone and wood for refuge against the frigid wind. We slowed our heart rates and our pace, conserving our energy like bears in hibernation, trusting that this moment in the cycle would pass, and gradually the days would become longer. Eventually the Earth reawakened, and so did we, to hunt and gather and make ourselves busy outside.

At some point, humans placed themselves at the center of time, rather than nature. We constructed railroads to connect our villages together, and the trains needed to run on time, so we built clocks in each town to replace the church bells, and invented time zones to keep them in sync. And the time tables of the trains determined when we had to plant and harvest, because the markets in the connected towns also had to run on time. And soon the schedule for the markets dictated when the animals should have their babies and in turn, that dictated when the humans had theirs, and that dictated who and when the humans got married and where they lived.

The trains also carried letters from town to town, but people thought that was too slow and unpredictable, so they invented automobiles and planes to carry messages. But even planes weren’t fast enough for us, and telephones took up too much time, with all that talking.

As this happened, we began to lose faith in ourselves – in our memories, the accuracy of the facts we retained, the books we had read, the names and faces of acquaintances and friends and love ones, our ability to make choices about how we spent our time. We didn’t trust ourselves anymore, so invented machines that could think better and faster to supplement our brains. The machines could retain all of the names and dates and facts that we struggled to pull to the surface in our conversations, and they kept track of every detail.

But we weren’t just looking for something that would crunch numbers and store data. We wanted something we could play chess with! We wanted a revolution! So, we invented machines that could communicate for us. So, we learned to build neural networks that allowed computers to talk to one another, just like our brains used to do through our mouths.

The internet connected the world instantly, and that gave way to electronic mail and calendars. Soon, we were able to do away with most of the talking and just typed all day – clickety, clickety, click – whenever we had a new thought or idea that we wanted to share with someone. Type once, distribute everywhere!

All of this made time more important because everything had to happen faster, and as the messages sped up, so did the volume of them coming in. Soon, we were spending our lives chained to our keyboards, typing and digesting what others had types, and reacting to it all. We needed to be able to take it with us, these computer brains that we’d come to rely on, so that we could continue using them when we weren’t sitting at our desks. And the next thing you know, someone invented a computer that you could put in your pocket. And they called it … a phone! Soon, we found that couldn’t stop texting and clicking and typing and pinging, even to use the bathroom, so we started taking our phones with us.

But instead of freeing us up from the keyboard, these phones just made the volume increase even more, so, we had to start utilizing multiple screens at once to keep up with everything. Before long, it took too much time away from the keyboard to find food or buy trash bags, so we started using our phones to order them to be delivered to us. That way we could spend more time on our screens. But some people were concerned that we might not be productive enough, so they invented Slack and Zoom and Notion and Loom, and suddenly everything had to happen right now, in “real time.” And when the winter came, instead of huddling together around the fire, we sat in front of our screens, typing furiously, as though our lives depended upon it.

We soon became slaves to our machines and couldn’t do without them. We needed them to shop, travel, and do practically everything we needed to do to survive. So, the guy who delivered all of our stuff to us wrapped in layers of cardboard and bubble wrap came up with a better idea – why not just implant computer chips in our palms, and that way we would always have them with us when we needed them? Why not just put them directly into our brains, so that they could help us to be more productive all the time?

When I see a child eating soft serve ice cream, I’m transported into the back of my father’s Chevy Malibu, speeding down the windy roads of suburban Pennsylvania on a humid night, thick with bugs in the headlights and the sound of cicadas competing with “Kodachrome” on the A.M. radio. I’m humming along, trying to keep pace with the ice cream, which is now melting down my wrist and dripping onto the vinyl upholstered back seat. I sense that we are quickly approaching the danger point where the bottom of the cone will become too soggy to hold their molten contents, and will burst apart, leaving me covered with sticky, milky goo. And then there will be my mother huffing and grunting as she tries to wipe me off with an old wad of Kleenex from the bottom of her enormous purse, smelling vaguely of perfume and Dentyne. And I will sit there in shame, utterly confused about how something so good and quickly turned so bad. My father would shake his head at the mess and threaten to never buy me soft serve ice cream again, but I knew that he would.

I am from the lake in the middle of Friesland, in the Northern Netherlands, and from the farmland that surrounded it and the sheep that grazed there.

I am from a great-great grandmother who left that land to board a ship bound for a place she’d never been, with six children under the age of ten clinging to her skirts.

I am from a long line of Scottish seafaring men who sailed the Great Lakes on ships loaded down with coal and iron ore.

I am from the women who waited for those ships to return and who had to figure out how to keep the fires burning and put food on the table in the meantime.

I am from the back seat of a borrowed car parked on a hill above the rover, overlooking the scrap metal yard and the gravel plant.

I’m from two strands of DNA that were twisted together by accident to form a new set of genes and chromosomes.

I’m from the Motor City --Motown! – The Paris of the Midwest. A city known for its rich history of manufacturing, music and social inequity.

I’m from a hospital in the inner city with a special wing form unwed mothers, and from a social services agency that handled all the paperwork.

I’m from a typical suburban town filled with houses in varying shades of beige, tan and ecru, otherwise completely identical to one another.

I’m from a family in which the men turned up the volume on the football game when my mother asked them if they were ready to sit down for Thanksgiving Dinner.

I’m from a cul-de-sac filled with kids riding their bikes in circles, while I hit a tennis ball against the garage as hard as I could, over and over and over.

I’m from paper and ink and paint and music, and food and yarn and clay.

I’m from California, the land of plenty, full of swimming pools and movie stars, where the men dress like children and the children dress like superheroes, and the women worry about their weight.

I’m from San Francisco, the land of misfit toys.

I’m from a 30-year career that I never wanted to have, in which I helped make a lot of rich men richer.

I’m from a long string of 1s and 0s that somehow get transmitted over invisible airwaves and reform themselves into an image that looks like my face, then streamed through a bunch of cords and wires until they end up on a screen in front of somebody else.

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