Field Guides
Essays, reflections, and dispatches from the edge of rupture and return.
Field Guides explores trauma, inheritance, culture, womanhood, memory, and the quiet work of returning to yourself.
When the Ground Breaks Beneath Us
A field guide to staying
human while white knuckling it.
“There is a difference between bearing witness to your times and being devoured by them.”
We are living through something, and we are living through it together. Same headlines. Same tension. Same quiet dread, just in different rooms, at the same hour, in different time zones.
Love is Sufficient unto Love
A field guide to the simplicity of what is sacred.
I had spent years searching distant shores for something I felt was missing. I was trying to find my
way back to something I couldn’t quite remember. Home to the source of love I knew, before life gave me fear.
Between Maps
A field guide on the space between no longer and not yet.
There are times in a life when the familiar roads stop leading home.
The roles you once inhabited feel ill-fitted. The rules that once informed your decisions lose their authority. What once felt true begins to feel foreign, as if the map you were given no longer matches the terrain beneath your feet.
Sacred Attention
A field guide to the simplicity of what is sacred.
The sacred is waiting for you beneath the noise.
We do not have to earn our way back to it. We only
have to become still long enough to let it find us.
The Tide Always Turns
A field guide to holding yourself through change.
As a young Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated plaid skirt and green kneesocks, something in me always knew the story they were telling about Mary Magdalene was all wrong.
When the Ground Beneath Us Breaks
A field guide to staying human while white knuckling it.
We are all white knuckling it.
The grip doesn’t have to be graceful.
It just has to hold.
You’re not alone in the holding.
Mary Magdalene
A field guide to what was taken.
As a young Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated plaid skirt and green kneesocks, something in me always knew the story they were telling about Mary Magdalene was all wrong.
A Diminished Inheritance
A field guide to what was passed down and what we’re still healing.
Your nervous system remembers what your grandmothers survived.
The Ocean Doesn’t Argue with the Sky
A field guide on faith, discernment, and remaining as vast as the ocean.
There will be moments when pressure builds and the atmosphere darkens and you feel the old reflex to brace, to argue, to control what cannot be controlled.
Sacred Rage
A field guide to what rage is actually telling you.
There are things happening right now that should enrage you.
The danger isn’t the rage. It’s what
happens when you’re taught not to trust it.
All the Women in Me Are Tired
A field guide on vigilance, exhaustion, and grounding.
There is a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from trying to make sense of too much.
The Cost of Seeing Clearly
A field guide to living honestly in systems that aren’t.
Most people think revolution looks like collapse.
They don’t see the part that is build quietly,
choice by choice, person by person.
Mary Magdalene
A field guide to what was taken.
As a young Catholic schoolgirl in a pleated plaid skirt and green kneesocks, something in me always knew the story they were telling about Mary Magdalene was all wrong.
A Diminished Inheritance
A field guide to what was passed down and what we’re still healing.
My grandmother was a rebel. As a teenager in the 1920s, she was the first woman in her community to wear jeans in public (she stole them from her brother). That was not a small thing then.
Sacred Attention
A field guide to the simplicity of what is sacred.
I think I have reached a point where I no longer want to abandon myself in pursuit of a life that never arrives.
The Tide Always Turns
A field guide to holding yourself through change.
Island life teaches you to pay attention to the tides. Every day moves through four of them, two low and two high. During low tide the shoreline stretches wide and the beach feels endless. Nothing here stays exactly the same for long.
Love is Sufficient Unto Love
A Field Guide to finding the way home.
I was fifteen and just about to start high school when my parents enrolled my sister and I in a “school”, run by the Christian cult they belonged to. I resisted in all the ways an aspiring teenage artist knows how; through music and colorful self-expression that wanted to be heard. The not so quiet language of becoming hard to contain.
The Woman in the Mirror
A field guide to holding yourself through change.
When did we decide that looking our age had become a problem? At what point did the ordinary evidence of a life being lived become something that required correction?
The Myth of the Healer
A Field Guide to finding the way home.
For years I thought becoming whole meant becoming better at healing.
Perhaps for the first time in a very long time, I am beginning to learn what love feels like with empty hands.
The Return
A Field Guide to Life After Trying to Save Everyone.
For the first time in a very long time, I am beginning to understand what becomes possible when my life is no longer organized around being needed.
When Curiosity Knocks
A Field Guide to Wonder
My home has slowly become a living shrine to all that has been lost, and all that I have found.
The Self Edit
A Field Guide to Being Too Much.
When I first left my husband, I thought I would finally be free of his coercive control. I didn’t realize how deeply his voice had become ingrained in my own psyche.
The Perimeter
A Field Guide to Who Gets to Know.
I have three different birth certificates and three different passports.
If you laid all of my paperwork across a table, you might reasonably wonder whether I worked for government intelligence.
The Architecture of a Life
A Field Guide to Being Too Much.
Who teaches a girl that someone else’s disappointment is survivable? Or that sometimes letting someone down is the cost of not abandoning yourself?