This experience of intentionally making space to visit an important place from my past reminded me of the power of remembering the love at the beginning of a journey that ended in loss.

…But I am all seaweed and feathers and shells,

…A resting place for weary wings and battered things.

I am in mid-sentence when I see the old woman slip and fall out of the corner of my eye. Softly, silently sliding down the steps, her body crumpling into the pool. She bobs gently with her face in the water, her curled back lifting above the surface, her limbs unmoving.

A Colorado mindfulness teacher responds to gun violence in Boulder: Like many Coloradoans this morning, I am experiencing a tremendous outpouring of anger, grief, and confusion after learning that ten people were murdered in a shooting spree at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder.

Welcome the Children home from school. Invite them into the kitchen, to plunge their hands into soapy water and to wash the forks.

Let them break eggshells into the batter and pick out the pieces. Let them poke the muffins with a toothpick. Let them lick the spoon. The bowl. Let them walk around for hours with a chocolate mustache, and teach them how to wet a washcloth and to clean their face in a mirror…

It is the middle of the night and—as it often does here at the mouth of the St. Vrain Canyon—the wind is shifting and whirling through the trees in fat bursts and sudden gusts, keeping me awake. The sounds of wild movement are at once playful and frightening, one moment tossing the neighbor’s wind chimes in metallic song, and the next flinging construction debris and trash can lids against garage doors with clangs and scrapes.

The morning is crisp and purple-blue, and stars twinkle in the still-dark western sky. My breath curls up away from me, and the rat-a-tat-tat-tat of a woodpecker echoes through the woods from across Prindle Pond.

It is dawn in January, and the New England air is biting cold…

Last night, I had a striking dream of trees.

A black panther appears before me on a path I am walking in the woods. She pauses to gaze at me with piercing yellow eyes, a beacon of aliveness, and then crosses the trail and ventures off into the darkness of the deep forest….

The threat in Denver that closed down schools across the state today, is one that affects us all. It touches into a very real and present danger — the fear itself.

Today, as worried parents across the state scramble to make plans for their kids and to explain the situation in a way that could make any sense, their hearts are pounding and their minds are racing. What am I going to do? Is my kid safe? How can this be happening again?…