In my life as a wife and mother, I'm always conscious of my desire to be present.

I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.