Hello World, an enormous sign reads in my Swiss neighborhood. This big blue board marks the birth of a new baby boy born down the street from my home where I’m still thinking too much about death. Nicolas is stroked across the backdrop of powdery grey-blue, silver and white flocked mountains. It is the same name as my child, and it makes me gasp while I pant up the cliff of my sunset jog. …

A hawk flies by our window, and though my son’s heart is shattered, he stands, looks out, lets me hold him. I cook broken noodles that taste okay, pull a wrinkled sheet up over another bed and it feels soft. We cry a little more and our faces look lighter…

An every day to-do list I want to remember Lately I’ve felt an urgency that comes with the sense of seeing the sky shift from light pink morning to deep blue darkness as fast as one of my breaths. There is importance right here, I think. In my house, out…

Admit that everyone is born foreign. It’s normal to be a foreigner. I try to say this to myself every time I wake in Switzerland, hearing the rooster crow from the farmer’s house across the way, watching a dinosaur-sized stork whiz by, listening to the church bells over the lake…

I don’t think kindness is something that you just learn one day. It has to be planted. Kindness emerges and blossoms like a seed, a heart, and then it gets stronger every year. It comes from the grandmother who let you watch TV late with her while eating Doritos. Or…

Feeling lost is normal. Here are a few ways we can find ourselves again in 2021. 2020 made most of us feel lost, but not like Dorothy. We didn’t find Oz— anywhere. Behind our fear of COVID, behind masks and news stories that told us how lost the world was becoming— we didn’t feel like ourselves. We were buried in wildfires, race wars and lockdowns. …

Christmas, how will I ever come to grips with your expectations, with my guilt, my sense of wonder, inadequacy and longing all nestled together like misfit emotions under a tree, during a pandemic? …

“I feel lonely” I hear too many friends and relatives say in anticipation of this holiday season. Me too. I bet the Pilgrims would relate on that symbolic first Thanksgiving. They mourned the deceased who had fallen ill from pneumonia and scurvy. They also missed their long lost relatives back…

I hope it’s not too late to change. “Mom, the problem isn’t Trump anymore. It’s what’s happened to all of us, on both sides,” my 13-year-old son said today. Earlier, I’d sifted through social media. All I could see in other people’s posts (and in my own thoughts) was a chasm growing exponentially between “them” and us. It…