Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.

Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories

When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.