Three years ago, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I recorded a video of myself singing I Will Survive. In the video, I’m wearing a gold lamé jumpsuit, long dark wig, and copious amounts of 70’s-inspired makeup, all of which I acquired for the purpose of the recording. I posted it on various social media with the following caption:

Aaaaah, Valentine’s Day. This sugary day on which singles feel alienated and coupled folks gaze at their significant others and secretly find them wanting. A day so laden with gooey expectation that the chance of getting through it without experiencing burning flashes of envy or disappointment is .3 percent (margin of error plus or minus 2)—whether or not you happen to be in menopause. This day on which everyone else seems to be getting fresher flowers, more thoughtful handmade cards, tastier food, and more passionate sex than you will ever have. This day on which, while arguing fiercely under your breath with your significant other at a restaurant, you’re acutely aware of other couples holding hands across the table and gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. I, for one, have had some of the worst dates of my life on Valentine’s Day. I remember one such occasion, more than a quarter-century ago, in which I stomped out of an Italian restaurant, nearly knocking over the candle and setting fire to the checkered tablecloth, and started trudging home in the rain before my then-boyfriend and I had even had a chance to order, the stares of waitstaff and patrons burning holes in my indignant back as I made my dramatic exit. It is in honor of all this and more that I give you this Valentine’s offering, with mad respect to Gloria Gaynor for her timeless anthem, which has helped more of us get through breakups and heartaches of every stripe than any survey can possibly calculate. Because Yes, Yes, and again Yes! If we survived four years of Donald The Rump, we can definitely survive this day of white-tinged chocolate and brown-edged rose petals. So sing it loud and clear with me, friends—get up and dance, too, if the spirit moves you. Whoever you are, whether your couplehood or singledom strikes you today as blissful, miserable, or somewhere in the vast realm of the in-between: YOU. WILL. SURVIVE!

This was February 2021, high pandemic times, when we were all confined to our homes. I had more time then, which allowed me to make 50+ takes of this video before settling for good enough. (And yes, I do hear that wobbly “hey, hey….” You don’t have to rub it in.)

At the time, I’d been separated from my husband for about a year and a half, and I was wildly in love with an old friend, conducting a passionate long-distance affair via phone, Zoom, text, Facebook Messenger, and all the other means of remote communication available to us in this bewildering century. The romance eventually fizzled, but it lofted me through the pandemic months with a downright shameful amount of joy. It also saved me, for a time, from fully contending with my grief about my marriage.

Last week, when V-Day reared its spangled head once again, I found myself in full-on Scrooge mode, eager to snark and slash my way through the thorny rosebushes of Hallmark’s favorite holiday. I took some haughty selfies with glasses pushed down on my nose, grafted one onto the body of Scrooge McDuck, ran it through a cartoon filter, and scrawled “Valentine’s Day?! Bah! Humbug!” onto the background. I sent this around to a few friends, who sent back cry-laughing emojis, tilted at various angles.

“I see you in there,” one friend texted, asserting that my loving heart was still visible beneath my Scroogeian aspect.

As I sit here, reflecting on my friend’s comment, I’m alarmed to feel a cloud of tears taking shape within my chest. It’s not close to the surface, not yet, but I feel it moving up. It’s maybe an inch behind my eyes now, where it hardens into a tight little knot, verging on a headache. Fuck you tears, I whisper, holding them back. Fuck you, youthful fantasies. Fuck you, Hollywood-fueled dreams. Valentine’s Day is the original fake news.

Do I sound bitter? I suppose I am, a bit.  And I suppose my bitterness is in direct proportion to the degree to which my youthful self bought into the dream. Because despite the fact that my parents split when I was seven, I did buy into it. Not the fairytale version, of course. I knew it wasn’t as simple as meet prince, ride into sunset, dwell in eternal bliss. From an early age—before I’d even had a romantic relationship of my own—I claimed to understand that long-term love had its ups and downs and required work.  Yet in spite of this savvy posture, I believed that at some point in my twenties or thirties I’d fall wildly in love with someone I’d then marry—someone with whom, over time, that extravagant early love would settle into a deep and abiding friendship-based affection that, coupled with ongoing physical attraction, would withstand whatever challenges life threw at us. In short, I believed in the concept of monogamous life partnership, even though it had taken both of my parents several marriages to find it.

Perhaps the key element here is that my parents did find it, eventually. My mom spent 35 years with her third husband, Erich—whom she’d left my father for—until Erich’s death in 2009. To this day, she describes their time together as “heaven.” And ten years after my mom left, my dad found lasting love with his fourth wife, Betty, with whom he spent the rest of his life. I have no idea about my mom’s sex life—she’s not the type to discuss it—but though my dad and Betty met fairly late in life, they made no secret of the fact that things stayed spicy right up to the end. They were downright proud of that.

Given my parents’ track records, I had reason to be both cynical and hopeful, depending on how you turn the prism.

So yes, I believed in all that. And now I fucking don’t. Or at least, I think I don’t. Maybe I still do, sometimes. Or maybe I do and don’t at the same time.

Does my attitude have something to do with the demise of my marriage, that devastating unraveling of something I held sacred? Why yes, I suppose it does. I won’t go into details on that, because my wasband and I are now dear friends (and technically still married), but it’s safe to say I did not walk out of matrimony’s flaming edifice unscathed

Last week, on Valentine’s Day evening, I spoke on the phone with my friend H. He’d been hanging around in downtown Ann Arbor that night. He said he’d never seen so many people out on dates.

“I bet most of them were bad dates,” my Scroogey self opined.

He laughed, “Some people were definitely not having a good time.”

I soon realized, though, that he’d responded this way to accommodate my cynicism, but he didn’t really share my perspective. He’d enjoyed seeing couples of all ages out and about, feeling that heady buzz in the air.

“I mean, it’s love, right?” he said. “Love is a good thing.”

“So some of them were having fun?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “A lot of them were.”

This got me thinking about what Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield calls the “small sense of self”—the part that’s tethered to our human egos—versus the “larger sense of self,” the part that sees the vastness and interconnectedness of all things. When I’m in my Scrooge persona, I’m operating from my smallest sense of self. That persona, born of my wounds, is protective rather than expansive. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—that wry, humorous character protects my tender parts, giving them time and space to heal. But it’s important not to mistake her limited story for the whole story.

To be clear, my inner Scrooge is not down on love. She’s down on romance. There’s a difference. Love is everywhere and infinite. Love is what I have for my children, my dogs, my friends, my wasband, even the trees outside my window, stripped down to their bark in the winter sun. In those moments when I’m able to access my largest sense of self, that love extends outward to all beings, sentient and non-sentient, every quark of this earth and beyond

Romance is something else. What even is romantic love? If you strip it of its illusions, what’s left?

Obviously this is an area of life about which I’m pretty confused right now. I often feel I’m happier without the distraction. Yet whenever I decide to write it off entirely, something emerges. I recently declared I would not go on any more dates. Before that, I kept meeting people, taking a step towards them, then rapidly backing away. I felt like I was hurting people, something I hate to do. Yet no sooner did I make this declaration, than someone asked me to hang out, and I said yes. I offered lots of caveats (not ready for…not looking for…no time for…), but still I went.

When I was younger, I thought romantic love was everything. It isn’t. In the three years since I donned the gold lamé jumpsuit and insisted on my heart’s survival, I’ve cultivated a life rich in family, friends, creativity, and spiritual investigation. I wonder now whether I have the space or even the desire for romantic love at all. Much of the time, I’m too busy to think of it.

Except, of course, on Valentine’s Day.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy What Comes Between Mother and Crone?, The Silver Revolution, and Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story.

They come to me sometimes.

First, the solo traveler. The one who continues to wander the roads and beaches and forests of this world with pen, notebook and solitude her steadiest companions. Sand between her toes, dirt under her nails, sun-browned arms, wind-tangled hair, and the exquisite ache of loneliness forever pulsing beneath her skin. She rattles along in sweltering buses, trains and vans, closing her eyes against motion sickness, her sweaty body pressed against others whose names she’ll never know. She never marries or has kids. She connects deeply with people in each place she visits—shares food and laughter and stories and friendship and occasionally love and then moves on.

- What’s with the pen and notebook? Wouldn’t she need a laptop? If she’s a writer, how does she file her stories?

- Look, this is how she comes to me. I see her as I left her. No doubt she has a laptop and cell phone these days. But this is her essence, so will you please hush?

Next is the one who chooses NYU or Carnegie Mellon for college, instead of Oberlin. She does the BFA thing, cultivates the holy trinity—acting, singing, dance—rising early, rehearsing late. She moves to NYC after graduation to pursue a stage career, If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere, playing in her head. And yes, she’s just a girl from Kansas, but she’s got gumption, dammit, and she’s ready to do what it takes. She puts herself out there every day: auditioning, chatting breezily with the folks behind the table, volunteering as a reader for casting agents, attending all the right events (and a few of the wrong ones), walking right up and introducing herself, handing out cards and headshots, saying yes to every gig, temping to pay the bills.  And yes, there are days when she stuffs a pillow over her face so her roommates won’t hear her sobbing, mouth stretched wide in a silent howl because she lost the role she thought would be her break. Still, she gets up the next day and does it again and again until something pops. Then she gets a better agent, the work becomes regular, and though she’s no superstar, she’s a working actor. She’s got health insurance. She’s leading the life she chooses, and most of the time, that’s enough.

Then there’s the one who does all this in LA instead of New York.

- Come off it. You were never gonna go to LA. You’re a hippy chick! You didn’t shave your legs between the ages of 19 and 27. You hate the gym. And you still can’t walk in heels.

- Okay, first of all, if I hadn’t gone to Oberlin, I might never have stopped shaving my legs. And secondly, shut the fuck up! She exists somewhere. She knows what the game is, and she makes a choice to put on that mask and give it a shot. And if there’s a place where she gives up and heads back to the Bay Area, somewhere else she sticks it out. See her? There she is now, polishing her Oscars.

There’s the one who, when she leaves for West Africa, tells Richard to wait for her, instead of saying she wants to be free to do as she pleases and he should do the same. This one decides he’s the love of her life and returns to him when she comes back to the States a year later; they marry and have children. And though their relationship isn’t perfect—what relationship is?—their love is tender and strong and deep enough to carry them through the craggy peaks of her anger, the freezing lakes of his withdrawal, and the sloggy switchbacks of childcare and groceries and dishes and laundry and car and cashflow troubles and day-to-night-to-day-again life.

The one who inseminates with anonymous donor sperm and raises a child with her bestie Elena in the sweet collective house in Bernal Heights, their children growing up as siblings, a year apart in age.

The one who goes to journalism school, pushes past her fear of cold-calling and becomes a foreign correspondent, using her language skills in countries where Spanish, French, and German are spoken, picking up a few other languages along the way.

The one who teaches English in China after college, then goes on to get a PhD in East Asian studies and becomes an academic.

The one who gets run over by a train in Spain on her way to Morocco. She misses the stop for Figueres, where she planned to visit the Dalí Museum, and gets off at the next station in a tiny town beside a barley field. She walks across the tracks in her sandals, carrying her heavy backpack, and heads toward the road, thinking to hitchhike. She hears a train and, turning, sees it speeding toward the station in the direction she wants to go. She starts running back over the tracks towards the platform. But this train isn’t stopping. In fact, it’s approaching much faster than she thought. She trips and falls, and the train, unable to stop in time, splits her body into three pieces—blood and organs sticking to the tracks. The train grinds to a halt, delaying the passengers for several hours. Some are distraught. All are profoundly inconvenienced. Her parents, back in the US, never recover from the grief.

- This one visits you?

- Sometimes. In dreams, I relive the moment when I stepped onto the platform and the train sped by not two seconds later later, its hot breath plastering my sundress to my body. One false step and this would’ve been me.

The one who becomes a wilderness guide, leading young people into woods, up mountains and down rivers.

The one who becomes a grassroots organizer, eventually running for local office.

The one who takes vows at Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in France, and becomes a Buddhist nun. Most days she still thinks she’s a terrible meditator, even many years later. But once in a while there’s a moment or an hour or even a day when her mind is still and clear as a mountain lake, and she is at peace.

- Hmmm...I feel like these all have something in common, though I can’t quite name what it is.

- Of course they do. They’re my splinter lives. What they have in common is me. Yours will be different, because they grow out of you—your personality, desires, genetic makeup, the circumstances you come into. Think of it this way: When you’re born, you’re like a train running along a track. As an infant, all you can do is roll in the direction you’re facing. As you get older, the track begins to fork. You arrive, over and over, at places where you get to make choices. So you begin to splinter. One of you goes this way, another that way. A third may go off the rails. These splinter selves take on lives of their own, and the splinters have splinters, so the longer you live, the more of you there are.

- Then doesn’t each splintering make you smaller?

- Only if you let it.

This one sits on the couch in her family room in Michigan, in a cozy house beneath a pearlescent sky with snow piled up outside, three dogs snoring at her feet, a fire in the fireplace and colorful lights strung up against the winter gloom. Her computer sits on her lap, while her fingers dance across the keys. She has two sons. She’s separated from her husband but feels fortunate that they still love each other dearly and remain close friends. She thinks, sometimes, of a Native American proverb that Becca Anderson, a girl she grew up with, shared at their ninth grade graduation from South Junior High School in Lawrence, Kansas: Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail. She tries to live this way, carving her own path, step by step, and when she takes the time to notice this, her heart beats against her ribs and she remembers she loves her life.

- And when the others come to her?

- She welcomes them. She’s glad they’re out there, doing their thing.

- Is she you?

- Not quite. But I’m working on it.

***

I remember when I first heard that it took the Buddha 100,000 lifetimes to achieve enlightenment. It was such a relief. Well then, I thought, I’ve got time. For all I know, this could be my very first life.

I remember Molly and me grooving to the Indigo Girls’ song Galileo on the way home from the California Shakespeare Festival, where we worked as actors. All summer long, we played that song over and over in my car as we careened through the Caldecott Tunnel and over the Bay Bridge, singing How long till my soul gets it right? at the top of our lungs, laughing most of the time, but crying sometimes, too. I loved Molly more than she loved me, but no matter. Somewhere she loves me back.

Let’s return for a moment to the Buddhist community of Plum Village. I remember a meditation session there, in which I understood in my body for the first time the idea of no separation. I didn’t just understand, but actually became the notion that although we move through the world in separate bodies, with separate story lines, underneath that relative reality is an absolute reality in which we are all connected, offshoots of a single life force. In that moment, any trace of jealousy, of wanting to do what someone else was doing or have what someone else had, evaporated. All biases and dislikes evaporated too, and I thought, I have been that. I have done that.

In that moment, I knew something so large it cannot be contained in words. I knew it, and then it was gone.

Somewhere, somehow, I know it still

All photos in this post were taken during my present life, in the following places: 1. Dogon Country, Mali, West Africa (yes, that’s me). 2. Performing in “Scotland Road” at The Old Globe Theatre, San Diego. 3. Southern Taiwan, as part of a storytelling bike tour sponsored by the Yunlin Story House. 4. Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, near Bordeaux, France. 5. On the back of a truck in the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua. `

Writing is my best friend. I tell people my fingers are the smartest part of me, because when they’re moving across the keyboard or the page, they tell me what I think, what I feel and what I didn’t know I knew. My Off-Leash Writing Workshops and Memoir, Fiction, and Personal Essay Workshops are designed to help you discover yourself on the page. Stay tuned for new sessions starting in March. I also work with people privately. Email tanya@offleashwriting.com for more info.

BEACH CLOSED, said the sign. HAZARDOUS.

And yet the people walked toward the sea.

When my boys were in elementary school, their principal sent out a weekly email containing parenting tips and anecdotes. In one such message, she told the story of a mother and child she’d seen at the natural grocery. The child reached for something marked off-limits. The principal overheard the mother say, We’re not supposed to touch those, but let’s do it anyway.

I hope that child doesn’t go to my school, our principal wrote. I’m a rule follower.

The rules keep us all safe, she went on to explain. They keep our community running smoothly.

Of all the emails I received from her during our years at that school, this is the only one I remember.

I was raised to be a rule challenger, bender, and, in some cases, breaker. I was a young child when Timothy Leary popularized the phrase Question authority, but its guiding principle was baked into my DNA. My parents were anti-war and civil rights activists. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was three years old. My dad was a leader in a movement to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, a movement that eventually led to the creation of a public pool that all could enjoy. My mom, though reserved and soft-spoken, wore jeans in college as part of a coordinated effort to overturn the college’s dress code for women. She marched on civil rights picket lines. Much later, as a faculty member in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, she mentored women in math and science and pushed back against attempts to favor American PhD candidates over more qualified international students.

Of course these are very different kinds of rules from the ones my boys’ school principal was talking about. These were matters of principle, not safety or courtesy.

Even so, when I read the words, I’m a rule follower, my gut registered it as if she’d written, I’m a sheep.

Yet though I would never say, I’m a rule follower, I would also never say, The rules don’t apply to me.

The former calls to my mind the sickening phrase just following orders—also known as the Nuremberg defense—while the latter evokes a certain orange braggart who deems himself above the law.

So what’s the difference between a rule breaker and one who thinks the rules don’t apply to them?

From my perspective, the first seems to challenge the validity of the rules themselves, while the second says, “those rules are fine for others, just not for me.” Rebelliousness versus elitism.

In art and science, as well as activism, it’s always the rule breakers—the ones who refuse to accept conventional wisdom at face value—who move humanity forward. Think of Copernicus, bucking church doctrine with his model of a sun-centered universe. Of Cervantes, breaking the fourth wall to create a new kind of novel. Of Georgia O’Keeffe, shaking up the male-dominated art world with her unique blend of representation and abstraction.

But maybe I’m just making excuses.

A friend of mine recently took an online quiz that asked if she identified as a rule follower. She checked yes. It then asked whether she ever exceeded the speed limit, jaywalked, or rolled through a stop sign. Umm… Her answers to those follow-up questions caused her to rethink her answer to question number one.

Principled action aside, my boundary-pushing behavior these days is along the lines of moving to a better theatre seat at intermission or taking my dogs someplace they’re not supposed to go. My compass for evaluating such things is to ask myself whether my actions are hurting anyone. If the answer is no, I’m likely to proceed, perhaps with a shred of guilt (Is the “no dogs” rule intended to protect wildlife? But surely if I keep them on leash and pick up their poop…).

The term cognitive dissonance refers to the way our brains freak out when faced with contradictions. Many studies have shown that when we behave in ways that contradict our core values, our minds perform all kinds of contortions to justify our actions. I’m an honest person, but I had to tell this lie because of the all-important x, y, or z.

My dad was among the most honest people I’ve ever known. I don’t recall him ever telling a lie. But he was always willing to bend the rules for my sake.

Forty years ago, while attending Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas, I took voice and acting classes at the University of Kansas. Officially, this made me a KU student, so I was able to audition for shows in the Department of Theatre and Dance. This led to me being cast as Fredrika in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music on the KU mainstage during my junior year of high school.

Someone must have complained about this, because the next year—my senior year of high school—the university made a rule that you had to be enrolled in a certain number of academic hours to be eligible to perform in department shows.

That semester there was a production called The Oedipus Project that I was desperate to be a part of. The director, Dr. Robert Findlay, had worked with the legendary Polish experimental theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. The Oedipus Project was to be a five-month journey in which the cast, under Bob’s direction, would collectively create a performance based on the Oedipus myth.

I wasn’t enrolled in the full-time class schedule the new rule required. My dad and I put our heads together and came up with a plan to enable me to audition: we’d register me for the requisite number of hours and drop some of the classes once casting was complete. It worked, and I was cast.

The Oedipus Project changed my life. We developed the piece through daily “paratheatrical events”—ritualistic multi-hour sound and movement improvs. During those rehearsals, I entered a kind of altered state, in which I learned to get my brain out of the way and think with my body, allowing myself to be absorbed in the collective motion and rhythm of the group. I learned things about the creative impulse that continue to impact my work to this day. The director, Bob Findlay, became a long-time friend and mentor.

Looking back all these years later, I see my dad’s and my action as at best morally gray and at worst profoundly self-serving at the expense of other students, some of whom may have come to KU specifically for opportunities such as this.

Yet though I feel guilty sharing this story, I’d be lying if I said I regret it.

I’m a Libra. I’m always spinning the prism round and round, looking at things from different angles. On the one hand, by scoring that role, I may have deprived another student of a life-changing experience. On the other hand, to another student The Oedipus Project might have been just another show.

And though I fudged my enrollment status to get in the door, I won the role through an open audition process, in which I had the opportunity to communicate my passion for the project as well as my skills.

As a young actor, many people in positions of power told me that to do this thing, you had to want it more than anything in the world. During a college semester spent studying acting in London, one of my teachers told a story about an actor putting a headshot under a casting director’s door every day for eight months in an attempt to land an audition for a particular role. This actor didn’t have the right agent or the right resumé, but she had the grit. She got her audition, and she got the part. This was framed as an inspirational tale. The message? Do whatever it takes.

This makes me wonder—does how much you want something change your relationship to the rules? Should it? Should rules bend to accommodate overriding passion? Is all fair in love and art? Or is that just another excuse?

We Americans love our renegades, our mavericks, even our outlaws. After all, we’re a nation born of revolution. Even as we acknowledge the painful truth that we’re also a nation born of mass bloodshed and bondage, most Americans still cherish the iconoclastic, freethinking aspect of our national character.

Questioning unjust rules is the positive side of this American coin. Taking what we want for ourselves and our families and everyone else be damned is the negative side—one that’s leading us down a path of humanitarian and environmental disaster. I hope as a nation we can melt that coin down and refashion it in a way that combines the righteous impulse to question authority with true caring for the safety and well-being of the community before it’s too late.

The sign I photographed on Carmel Beach on December 30, 2023, had originally read, BEACH CLOSED. HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS. Over the previous two days, towns along California’s central coast had been evacuated and at least eight people hospitalized as 30-foot waves pounded the shores.

On that day, someone had covered the word CONDITIONS with silver paint and drawn a slim line through the center of the word HAZARDOUS. Who covered it, I wondered, and what did it mean? Were the conditions now only semi-hazardous?

Sitting in my Michigan living room as the snow piles up outside, I search online for information about the conditions on Carmel Beach that day. It seems the wave size had diminished somewhat that afternoon, and the warning had been downgraded to an advisory. Semi-hazardous indeed.

Did the people on the beach know the warning had been downgraded? I certainly did not. I’m guessing a few did, and the rest, witnessing others passing the yellow caution tape without apparent consequence, followed suit. That’s another thing about us humans. We’re a lot more likely to break rules if we see others doing it. For better or for worse.

As I watched a man play catch with his son, the child standing below the tide line, and others throwing balls into the surf for their dogs to retrieve, my judgmental brain clamored in my ear, How can they put their children and dogs at risk that way?

And yet, how beautiful the ocean looked, how soft the sand.

And so I stood with my son halfway down the dune, past the yellow caution tape but well above the beach, my Libra self ambivalent as always, trying to have it both ways.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” wrote Joan Didion. If you feel called to explore your life in words, I invite you to join my Off-Leash Writing Workshops or Memoir, Fiction, & Personal Essay Workshops. I also work with people privately on their writing and editing needs. Email tanya@offleashwriting.com to inquire.

My dear friend M recently told me she needs an unselfish reason to write her story. Without it, telling the story feels yucky to her, like some big ego trip. A voice comes into her head saying, “You’re just trying to get attention,” and that stops her words from flowing.

I get it. I’ve got those voices myself, the ones that say things like, Who the hell are you to think you’ve got something valuable to say? Everything worth saying has been said a million times over.

There’s no arguing with that choir. Those internal carpers will out-reason me every time. Which is why I try to put aside reason when it comes to making stuff. The reasons for our actions that our brains come up with are rarely the real ones anyway. Mostly, we follow our mysterious longings and invent rationales afterwards.

I told M that, from my perspective, you don’t need a reason to write. If you have the impulse to make something—whether with words, paint, clay, or anything else—you should do it—the impulse itself is divine.  

Really, Tanya? I thought you were agnostic.

I am agnostic. I know nothing with absolute certainty. But what I think—what I feel—is that we’re all conduits for a life force that expresses itself through each of us in a slightly different way. Our work here as incarnated beings is to foster that expression as best we can. We’ll know we’re on the right track when a vital, propulsive energy courses through us, pushing us forward.

This didn’t work for M, so we kept talking. At some point in the conversation, she realized there was wisdom that had been given to her by a loved one who had since left this earth plane. This person had entrusted this wisdom to her, and she wanted to share it. The image of herself as a link in a chain, passing these teachings from her hand to the next, was what she needed to free her voice.

When the naysayers in my own head won’t pipe down, and my brain demands an explanation for me sitting here with fingers to keys, I remind myself of the words of beloved children’s book author E. B. White. Like him, I’m on a daily quest to say I love the world. On crisp fall days, when I’ve rolled in a pile of crunchy brown leaves, giggling wildly with friends ranging in age from eleven to sixty-seven, it’s easy. On other days, when I’ve woken up to news of children trapped in a war zone without adequate food, water, or medical supplies and lost my temper with my teenage son before getting out the door, it’s a whole lot harder. But my practice, this practice, is to keep looking for the words, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Because when it’s hard to love the world, finding the words to say I do connects me back to that fundamental life force which, I believe, is made of love.

I know my words are not water. They are not food. They are not medicine. Putting them forward anyway is my act of devotion. Perhaps it’s even a kind of faith.

Maiden, Mother, Crone. I encounter this trinity everywhere I turn these days: books, t-shirts, tarot decks, figurines. Each facet represents a stage of a woman’s life. Maiden, the bud of spring, is nascent, emerging, vibrant with potential. Mother, the fertile creator of life, shows up in full flower, lush and abundant, nurturing and resilient. Crone represents craggy wisdom, hard-earned. She’s mysterious to others, turning within. Or something like that.

According to learnreligions.com, the Triple Goddess—a being who embodies these three archetypes—was first popularized by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess and brought to a much wider audience by neopagan feminist authors Starhawk and Margot Adler in the late 1970s. The dramatic rise of paganism over the last five to ten years has made her ubiquitous. 

This got me thinking. Obviously, not every woman becomes a mother. Those who don’t may reject the whole notion of this triptych or view the symbolism more abstractly. Likewise, as a fifty-seven-year-old woman moving away from the stage of life when motherhood was front and center, I sense a missing link.

My boys are 15 and 20. I’ll always be their mother, but they need less of me now. Still, I’m not yet crone. My energy burns brighter than ever. What, then, to call this moment?

I’m aware in a way I wasn’t when I was younger that my time on earth is finite. I’ve lost many I held dear, including my father, stepfather, and one of my three brothers. My mother, at 91, is fading. I belong now to the rising generation of elders.

Though there is at times an undercurrent of sorrow, this bone-deep sense of mortality does not depress me. It focuses me. It’s like a giant leaf blower blasting away the detritus of shit-that-doesn’t matter, clearing the deck so I can see what does. For me, that’s caring for friends, family, and community, and doing my best to be in right relationship with the wider family of humanity, the planet, and all non-human beings. And my creative work, which is, for me, both source and fulfillment.

I know I’m not alone in this fierce refocusing of energy. I see it again and again in my classes—women of a certain age with far fewer fucks to give. They’re done living to please others. Done putting everyone else’s needs before their own. Done fitting themselves into a template created by parents, spouses, or even children. Done being the perfect mothers and wives. Done being perfect, period. There’s no time for perfection. They’ve got things to do. Life to live.

Some time ago I read an interview with author Margaret Atwood. When asked what the main obstacle to her writing was, she said, “Interruptions.” When I read that, I envied her. My biggest obstacles were internal. Trouble getting myself to the table. Trouble concentrating. I longed to have such profound concentration that interruptions would be my primary obstacle.  

These days I relate to Margaret. I never seem to have enough uninterrupted hours to write. I’m perpetually surprised by the figure of my teenage son appearing in the doorway of my sunroom cum office, requesting food. Even the arrival of my own hunger—that nervy DM from stomach to brain, feels like an intrusion.

It’s exciting. I love the trance-like state I enter when I’m so deeply absorbed in the spinning of words that I don’t want to stop. And while I don’t love the feeling of annoyance that arises when I have to stop, I’ll take it over the alternative.

(Don’t worry. I do feed my teenager. I don’t even get mad about it. Honestly, officer, he’s just naturally thin

I recently went on a date with a cool, creative, attractive person. We kissed a little, and I experienced a small frisson of connection. But the next morning, I woke up with a clear NO rising within me. The voice wasn’t whispering, it was shouting, I can’t do this. Finally it calmed down and the tone changed. Please, it said, don’t make me do this any more.

I thought of a story my wasband1 once told me about a profound meditation experience he had when he was young. He’d been meditating for hours when the Hindu sage Ramakrishna came to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, You don’t have to go to parties any more.

He told me about this experience early in our relationship, and I never forgot it. I asked him what he thought it meant. He thought it meant that he didn’t have to try to impress people, to put on a show for the sake of their good opinions. He didn’t have to look for fulfillment outside himself.

Reflecting on this, I heard a wise woman whisper, You don’t have to go on dates any more. Relief flooded through me.

I don’t think this means I’m done with romantic intimacy forever. Part of me still longs for that kind of human connection. But what it tells me, with absolute clarity, is that this is the time for me to dance with the muse.

The day before, I’d told my date that my wasband and I were very close but no longer a romantic couple.

“I am in an intense long-term relationship with my writing, though,” I said.

 “Well,” he laughed, “if you decide to be poly, at least you know who your primary is.”

Perhaps the NO was the muse demanding monogamy, in a voice that brooked no argument. I don’t know about the next moment, but in this one, it’s to her I turn my face.

So what to call this moment, with its laser focus and ferocious lucidity, poised as it is between Mother and Crone?

I’m going with Warrior.

Dear Friends,

For years I’ve been planning to write a book about my extraordinary dad, who survived displacement and incalculable loss and yet remained the sunniest, most open-hearted person I ever knew. My previous book Somebody’s Heart is Burning, about my travels in West Africa, grew out of more than a dozen individual stories I wrote for Salon.com’s now-defunct Wanderlust section. It occurred to me recently that I could develop this new book in the same way—that instead of waiting until I have an entire manuscript, I can share these stories with you as they arise.

I therefore invite you to meet Harry G. Shaffer, the exuberant professor.

THE EXUBERANT PROFESSOR

Introducing Harry

There he is—Professor Harry G. Shaffer. See him tearing around the campus of the University of Kansas like a man hellbent on jotting down an idea before he forgets it. See his white hair flying, papers spilling from his old-style leather briefcase, his jacket and suspenders and lightly scuffed Florsheim shoes. See him adjusting the microphone for his intro economics class, where he lectures to some 300 students at a time in his scratchy, heavily accented voice. See how these students adore him, how they laugh at his jokes, repurpose his sayings, draw hearts on their end-of-term evaluations and write comments like, “I want to sit him down by the fire and feed him warm cookies” and “I wish he were my Grandpa!” Behold the Facebook group Harry Shaffer is the Man, made up of current and formers students, which at the time of his death in 2009 boasted 800+ members. Read tribute after tribute to “the man who never left home without his toothbrush.” See how they celebrate his daily greeting, “Good afternoon!,” sometimes transcribed phonetically as “Gut ahftanun!”

His students called him Professor Shaffer. I called him Vati, pronounced FAH-tee—German for daddy.

My Vati loved his students. Even after 54 years of teaching, he particularly relished that gigantic undergraduate intro class. He was a performer—he liked a big stage. He enjoyed turning young adults on to the fun of economics, bucking their assumptions that it would be dry or boring. He demanded their attention, pausing abruptly and saying, “We will wait,” if anyone engaged in side chatter. He taught them the origins of money through a story involving bartering and fish hooks, and how the difficulty of carrying fish hooks in your pocket without cutting yourself led to the development of coins.

Harry made sure his students understood the difference between political systems and economic ones. He disabused them of the notion that socialism and democracy were incompatible. An unapologetic Marxist, his proudest moments came when he received letters from former students telling him he’d changed their career trajectories and, thanks to his teaching, they’d decided to dedicate their work lives to social justice rather than profit.

My dad reveled in his local fame. He loved when students came up to him and told him they’d taken his class, or that their father or mother had taken it. He crowed with delight when he called me to tell me that, for the first time, a student had come up to tell him their grandfather had taken it.

He found that story hilarious. It reminded me of other tales he gleefully related, of people asking whether my mother was his daughter. “Only once,” he said, “did someone ask me if she was my granddaughter!”

My dad was fourteen years older than my mom, Juliet Popper Shaffer, but with his thick glasses, receding hairline and early gray, he looked old for his age, while my mother looked young for hers. They were both professors at KU when they met through the Lawrence League for the Practice of Democracy, a group dedicated to combating racism in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas.  My dad was immediately smitten with the raven-haired beauty who listened so attentively to the debates. She rarely spoke at meetings, but according to my dad, when she did, everyone in the room held their breath and leaned forward to catch every word. Her remarks were pithy and incisive, succinctly synthesizing complex ideas, putting the bloviating men to shame. He always thought she was too good for him—too beautiful, too smart. He was perpetually afraid she would leave him. Eventually, she did.

Harry George Shaffer was born Hans Georg Schaffer in Vienna, Austria, in 1919. When he immigrated to the United States in 1940, he tried to excise every whiff of German-ness from his name. He even dropped the “c” from his surname, little knowing he was dooming his children to a lifetime of repeating “Shaffer, no ‘c’.”

As a child, he had a mass of curly white-blond hair. One of his nicknames was Flocki—little cloud. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. As unusual as it was in Kansas for my parents to separate when I was seven, it was even more unusual in 1920’s Vienna.

A few years later, my dad’s mother remarried. Her new husband did not want the burden of a young child, so Hansi was sent to live with his mother’s parents, his Oma Rosa and Opa David. They were Orthodox Jews—my father recalled his grandfather binding the tefillin every morning, affixing the little black box containing Hebrew scrolls to his forehead and crossing the cords on his arm before he prayed.

Many years later in New York City, my Vati’s Grandma Rosa—having lost two of her three children, one to the camps and one to cancer—would put her head in an oven and end her own life. But we’re not there yet. We’re talking about my dad’s childhood, which despite his parents’ divorce and his relocation to his grandparents’ home, he remembered as a happy time.

I’m named for my dad’s mother Teofilia, who went by the nickname Tosca. We Ashkenazi Jews are liberal in our naming conventions—to honor an ancestor, only the first letter has to be shared. That, and they have to be dead. I could not have been named after Tosca if she had lived to see my birth. She made it out of Austria and all the way to New York, where she ran a bridge club, but cancer took her, far too young.

My father adored his mother. He told me she visited often, perhaps two or three times a week, and he looked forward to her visits with unbridled delight.

Photos of Tosca show a strikingly beautiful woman with an hourglass figure, softly curling golden hair and a gentle, flirtatious smile. She looks like a movie star in her stylish hats and satin flapper gowns. I imagine that tiny tow-headed boy flinging himself into his mother’s arms every time she opened the door. I imagine her soft cheek pressed to his, her kisses leaving lipstick impressions all over his face as he squeals with delight, her smell of powder and perfume. For surely she was affectionate like this, or how could my dad have become the huge-hearted person he was?

If my Vati felt any resentment towards his mother for submitting to her husband’s demand to live separately from her child, he never expressed it. Neither do I judge, for who knows what options were available to a divorced woman in 1920s Vienna? Years later, my dad would make a similar choice involving my mom and one of my older brothers, who was fourteen at the time—a choice he would rehash with sorrow and guilt for the rest of his life. But that too is a story for another time.

He always told me Tosca would have been crazy about me. I’m sure I would have been crazy about her too.

Can you see him, the ninety-year-old man that little Flocki grew into, the one who was still teaching economics at the University of Kansas six months before he died?

Of course, there was a world of experiences in between. So many losses: his home; his country; his beloved uncle to the camps; his mother to cancer; his grandmother to suicide; his beloved first wife to a surgery gone wrong; his second wife, a fellow survivor, to mental illness; his third wife—my mother—to another man. There was exile in Italy, then Cuba, on the way to the U.S. There was his time in the U.S. military during World War II, cut short by a jeep accident that left him with multiple broken bones. His education at NYU, where in four years under the GI Bill he managed to complete his bachelor’s, master’s, and two courses towards his PhD. There was his first teaching job at the University of Alabama, where he was one of a group of faculty members who resigned over the university’s failure to protect Autherine Lucy, the first Black woman admitted to the university following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. There was his activism in the anti-war and civil rights movements. There was his happy fourth marriage to my stepmother Betty, with whom he spent the last 25 years of his life. And there was the role he valued most, as father to his four children from his first three marriages, a role he often carried out on his own.

And of course, this is only a tiny fraction of a life’s journey. There’s so much more to tell.

I was with my Vati in Lawrence on his ninetieth birthday. At some point during that visit, he sat beside me on the light brown velvet couch in the living room of the two-story house I grew up in and said to me, in his still-strong Austrian accent, his voice roughened by years of repeated surgery on his vocal cords for nodes that just kept growing back, “Pippi, if I should die, I want you to know I’ve had a good a life, and one of the greatest joys of my life was raising you.” Pippi was one of his nicknames for me. It evolved out of the German word Puppe, meaning doll.

My dad had struggled with asthma throughout his life. For the past two years he’d been wheeling around an oxygen tank to assist his weakening lungs. But because I’m a doofus, and because we live in a culture that steadfastly refuses to acknowledge mortality, I replied, “C’mon, Vati, you’re not going to die!”

Yes, that’s how I responded when my father told me, in so many words, that he was getting ready for what came next. I refused to listen, but I heard.

Two months later, he was gone.

For as long as I could remember, I’d feared my father’s death. If you look at my diaries, which I kept daily from the time I was nine years old, every day’s entry ends with repeated prayers for my Vati to live a “very very very infinity very long time.” He was substantially older than all the other dads, he spent half of every year coughing, and he was always going into the hospital for surgeries while I stayed at the homes of various friends. On top of that, he was a bit of a hypochondriac. A year after my mom left, my youngest brother went to live with her. My two oldest brothers were already living independently, so my Vati and I became an inseparable duo for many years. It’s no wonder I was constantly pleading with the powers that be for his survival.

I was sitting on the floor of my older son’s room, in El Cerrito, California, building towers out of cardboard bricks, when I got the call. My younger son, just one year old at the time, was strapped to my body in a sling while my older guy stood to add another block to our teetering creation. My husband was typing at his computer in the next room. Moments before the phone rang, a thought had come to me. I’d thought, “I’m settled now. I have my own family. If I were to lose my Vati, I would survive it. I’d be okay.”

While I was having that thought, my father and his beloved wife of 25 years, my stepmother Betty, had returned from shopping and were climbing the back stairs to the kitchen in the house I’d grown up in. Halfway up the stairs, my Vati had to sit down and rest, because he was out of breath. Betty sat on the step beside him.

“Betty,” he said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Harry, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” said she.

My Vati sighed, leaned into the arms of his beloved, and lost consciousness. A moment later Betty was panicking, shouting, calling 911. An ambulance came, but my Vati never regained consciousness.

Betty told me later that was the first time she’d given him permission like that. At other times when he’d tired of the effort of pulling in air, she’d encouraged him to buck up, telling him that once he’d rested he would feel better.

Betty and my father had been deeply in love for 25 years. Like me, she was terrified of losing him. It was an enormous comfort to her that he went so peacefully, without pain, without fear. Though she missed him awfully, the ease of his passage helped to soften her own transition to life on her own.

Fourteen years later, I still think of him every day. Even now, there are moments when I can’t believe I’m living in a world without his light. But then I wonder…am I truly without him, if I’m still warmed by his love after all these years?

My father believed in God. My mother emphatically does not. All my life I’ve struggled to stay open to the possibility that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (to paraphrase Hamlet), in the face of deeply ingrained skepticism inherited from my mom. I will never know whether the thought that came to me—his youngest child and only daughter—on November 3, 2009, somehow reached my Vati and joined forces with Betty’s permission to help release him from his earthly bonds.

I remember sitting with him on that same tan couch a few years before he died, telling him about the Buddhist notion of nirvana: that when you become enlightened, you’re freed from the pain of individuality and absorbed, finally, into a oneness with all beings. At that point I’d been studying Buddhism for twenty-plus years.

I remember the way he looked at me, his gray-green eyes aglow with hope, when I said, “If we get there, we’ll never be separated again.”

*a husband from whom one is amicably separated

If you missed, Japan Journals 1: Tokyo, you can find it here.

And you can find Japan Journals 2: A Night in Asakusa here.

My fifteen-year-old son E likes cats. Since keeping him engaged is one of my priorities and challenges on this trip, and twenty-year-old C is generally up for anything, we do a lot of cat stuff in Japan.

Which isn’t hard, because Japan has a national obsession with felines.  

In our first week, we visit a cat temple, a rescue cat café, and a cat museum. Later we stay in a guesthouse with three resident felines that seem to run the place. Small ceramic maneki-nekos—beckoning cats, also known as lucky cats—crowd the shelves of souvenir shops and dwell behind registers at convenience stores. Most are made of white ceramic with red inner ears and a red collar, their right front paw raised in greeting, though some are gold, black, or red. The arms on the larger ones are sometimes mechanized, the raised paw perpetually bobbing up and down. There are even cat islands here—eleven of them— where untold numbers of cats roam free.

I love all non-human animals, but when it comes to the cat v. dog loyalty oath, I’m a card-carrying dog person.

Dogs’ emotions are right on the surface. Most will love you the moment they meet you, unless you give them a good reason not to. They show that love by wagging, licking, and even jumping on you if given the chance. (They’re also likely to smell your crotch, but that’s another matter.)

Cats, on the other hand, can be quite picky. They take a while to trust you, if they decide to at all. Even if they’ve shown you favor by rubbing against your leg or sitting on your lap, they might not do it again tomorrow. A cat can enter and leave a room you’re in without ever acknowledging you at all.

And yes, I’ve met doglike cats and catlike dogs. We’re talking averages here.

I tend to be doglike in my affections, minus the wagging, licking, jumping and crotch-smelling. If you’re nice to me, I’ll greet you warmly and answer your questions candidly. If I don’t like you, you’ll probably know that too—I’m told my face is utterly transparent. And I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets—even my own—though I can do so under duress.

I sometimes think the fact that I’m a dog person and my wasband D is a cat person is one of the reasons we’re no longer a couple in the traditional sense. The personalities of our boys reflect this dichotomy, with C exhibiting more doglike traits and E catlike ones, though they are young yet, and this may change. Still, this may explain why D has an easier time drawing teenage E out than I do.

On our third day in Tokyo, while D meets with colleagues, my two sons and I make our way to Gotoku-ji Temple of Lucky Cats, the purported birthplace of the maneki-neko.

According to legend, in the early part of the 17th century, a poor monk and his cat lived in the Gotokuji temple, which had fallen into disrepair . One day a powerful Lord was passing by the temple, when it started to rain. The Lord took shelter under a nearby tree. Looking up, he saw a cat at the temple gate, beckoning him with its paw. Curious, the Lord left the tree and approached the cat. A moment later, the tree was struck by lightning. The Lord was so grateful to the cat for saving his life that he became the temple’s patron. When the cat died, the first maneki-neko statue was built in its honor.

At the entrance to Gotokuji temple, we find, not a cute little maneki-neko, but a terrifying fanged creature known as a komainu. The komainu is a protector, there to safeguard the temple and its visitors. Komainu translates as lion-dog, which makes me think that here, perhaps, is a place where dog and cat people can come together in peace.

This particular komainu is also an incense holder, where visitors can make offerings.

We stroll through the temple’s spacious grounds. The 74-foot Sanju-no-to (three-tiered pagoda) has several adorable maneki-nekos tucked between carvings of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac.

This one is flanked by two rats, who seem unconcerned about the possibility of being eaten.

We’re most impressed by Shofuku-den, an area near the pagoda where thousands of maneki-nekos of various sizes crowd together on wooden platforms. It reminds me of the meerkat island in the movie version of The Life of Pi, in which, when the sun’s up, meerkats crowd every fragment of space. Unlike the meerkats, these maneki-nekos remain motionless—at least during the day.

The maneki-nekos in Shofuku-den continue to multiply as visitors from all over the world nest more of them there every day in hopes of bringing good fortune to their families, homes, and businesses. You can buy them at the temple shop, to leave or take with you. You can also buy a wooden charm on which to write a wish, or a paper fortune called omikuji, found at many Buddhist temples and Shinto Shrines in Japan. If you like what’s written on your omikuji, you take it with you. If you don’t, you tie it to a tree and leave it behind. I like this take-it-or-leave-it approach to prophecy, in which—unlike in, say, in ancient Greece—you have the option of saying no, thank you to an unpleasant fate. Imagine how differently things would’ve turned out for Oedipus if he could’ve tied a piece of paper inscribed with the words kill-father-marry-mother to a nearby tree and walked away.

E buys a small maneki-neko to bring home.

The next day, our last in Tokyo, we ascend to the observation deck of Tokyo Skytree. At 2080 feet, it’s the tallest structure in Japan and the third tallest in the world.

While marveling at the shape and size of this beautiful city with its population of 37 million, we overhear that we’re within walking distance of Café Capyba, where you can enjoy a tea or cappuccino in the company of the world’s largest and arguably friendliest rodents—capybaras. Both boys are excited about this idea, so after we descend, we head over to check it out.

When we arrive, we discover that the day’s slots are all taken. Fortunately, the capybaras are right in front of us, hanging out with some young Japanese women in what looks like a small living room, behind a low chain-link fence. We lean over and stroke their wiry heads a few times before we’re politely invited to scram.

If you missed Japan Journals 1: Tokyo, you can find it here.

*a husband from whom one is amicably separated

Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood is hopping, and unlike Takeshita Street (which I wrote about in Japan Journals 1), the crowd of humans enjoying its alleys, restaurants, and covered outdoor market appears to contain more locals than tourists.

Here I encounter dogs for the first time in Japan. Small dogs, well-groomed, on-leash, many wearing glowing neon collars, trot obediently alongside their owners. They pass each other with nary a bark or a yank. My incorrigibly exuberant pups would probably get me arrested here.

D is meeting with colleagues tonight, and E has gone off in search of more clothes. Within the first 48 hours in Tokyo, fifteen-year-old E has absorbed the Metro system, and with the help of Google Maps and Google Translate he’s off to peruse a giant mall. Though well-versed in the city buses of Ann Arbor, Michigan, this is his first time traversing a foreign metropolis on his own. Fortun,ately Tokyo is not only the most populous city in the world, but also the safest. Although E maintains a perfect deadpan at all times, I sense his elation. Or perhaps I’m just projecting onto him the sense of wild liberation that comes to me, even now, when I find myself alone in the great wide world, ditching the expectations of ordinary life and following my senses the way a gull or a squirrel or an off-leash dog might, answerable to no one, if only for a week, or a day, or even an hour.

Now it’s just C and me and the Tokyo afternoon, and this too feels like liberation from my perpetual efforts to please two very different young men. Twenty-year-old C is always game for an adventure, and unlike E, he has no aversion to hanging out with his mom. Perhaps it’s because C is on the autism spectrum and therefore atypical in his development, but he has never exhibited that peculiar adolescent scorn for all things parental that’s been E’s default for the past year.

First we hit the famous Sensoji temple, where the ratio of tourists to locals increases dramatically. I tilt my camera upwards in an attempt to crop the ravening hordes out of my shot, but I can’t make it work. So annoying to have all these tourists intruding on my tourism.

We circle the striking crimson temple and the five-story pagoda with appropriate reverence, then gape at the fourteen-and-a-half-foot, 1100-pound owaraji affixed to the sides of the Hozomon Gate. These traditional straw sandals, reputed to ward off evil, were a gift to the temple from the city of Murayama. It took 800 citizens a year and a half to make them, and they replace them every ten years.

When C and I are templed out, we go in search of food.

I’ve noticed that Japanese people tend to keep quiet in public settings. Consideration for the experience of others is paramount. On the subway, people look at their phones, listen to music through earbuds, or converse in hushed tones. But on this Friday in Asakusa, as day fades into dusk and dusk into night, the volume rises, and groups of people—older men in particular—cluster at outdoor café tables, talking, drinking, and laughing. It’s as though the week has shed its suit and tie, opened a few buttons, loosened its belt, and let its belly relax.

C and I wander aimlessly, clutching each other’s hand, reveling in the unfamiliar sounds and smells. We pass through smokey clouds of grilled meat scent, steam redolent boiled rice, and the occasional whiff of dashi—the mushroom and fish base of most Japanese soups—that carries us, for a moment, to the sea.

We want to eat someplace popular with locals. We settle on a crowded spot where every table has a flat metal griddle at its center, and the waitstaff and customers are pushing the food around on the griddles with what look like small metal squeegees.  

The host who seats us speaks no English, and I can’t read the menu. I open Google translate and point my phone at it, but it’s not much help.

A young woman who speaks a bit of English arrives to take our order. I ask her if they have anything vegetarian.

She says yes, but only cabbage.

I tell her fish is also okay.

“Fish,” she says. “Seafood?”

I nod.

C and I pick two dishes to share from the seafood portion of the menu, with no real concept of what we’re ordering. We place ourselves in the hands of the universe.

The young woman returns, coats the griddle with garlicky butter, then places what appear to be octopus tentacles on the buttery metal. She sets a bowl laden with seafood and cabbage on the edge of the table. She adjusts the heat and sets a timer. She points at the timer, then at the octopus, and gestures not to eat it yet.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy Tell Me A Story, about my experiences at the Yunlin Storyhouse in Taiwan, and From Nudism to Buddhism, about my journey from the naturist resort Cap d’Agde in Southern France to Plum Village, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s community near Bordeaux.

Are you longing to explore your life in words? Join me for Off-Leash Writing Workshops and the Memoir/Fiction/Personal Essay Workshop and write your way home.

After Annelyse Gelman, “How to Pray”

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?

-       Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”

Bless the missteps, the stumbles, the chances lost

Bless the heaviness

The memory of those things brings

Bless friendship abandoned

Love unrequited or forsaken

Opportunity squandered

Bless the gentle Spaniard

With eyes of softest brown

Whose lips you kissed

and hand you held

On a Peace March

In Nicaragua, 1990

Then lost at a rally

And never found again

Bless the dear Dutch friend you made in Ghana

So funny, so quirky, so kind,

Who said if you don’t write back this time

She wouldn’t write to you again

And why, oh why, did you not?

Bless the friend who,

In your solo performance days,

Gave you the phone number

Of a major producer

He was sure would like your work,

And bless that younger you,

Pre-caller ID you,

Who sat with that number

Hot in her hand

Dialing and hanging up

And dialing

And hanging up again

Bless regret

Oh bless regret

Bless envy too

Bless the moments your heart feels wrung out

Bless every smooth road you bypassed

And every bumpy one you chose to walk

Or skip

Or dance down

Bless each land where you roamed

Each stage where you performed

Each word you wrote

Person loved

Baby birthed

Bless friends gathered around your table

And those whose circles you join

Bless the moment when your heart

Aches with the fullness of a bright autumn day

The painful love

For the children growing

Family and friends

coming and going

Leaves changing color

Dogs licking and wagging

The very air

Now cool, now warm

Bless the wide purple splotch

You put in your hair

the day before your birthday

You meant it to be a semi-subtle streak

Subtle, it is not

Bless the Miley Cyrus song Flowers,

That filled you with joy

When it entered your mind

at the Farmers’ Market

on your birthday.

You’d just texted D, your wasband,

Asking him to get you flowers (knowing

As you do, that if you ask

For what you want

With great precision,

You won’t be disappointed)

But then the song came to you—

…I can buy myself flowers…

—And you saw the dahlias,

Fresh, ebullient, variegated,

And texted back, never mind,

And bought yourself

Two bouquets

One for the kitchen

One for the sunroom

(Bless how happy those flowers made you, and how that joy was undercut when you showed D the video and he walked away halfway through because he didn’t like watching Miley “humping” herself, and how the joy came back full force when GV played the song for you on the phone later while you were out walking the dogs, and GV danced to it at her house, and you sang and danced down the sidewalk, leashes in hand, never mind the looks from the passing cars, just as you’ve done since you were a child, and as you will continue to do into old age and beyond, if there is a beyond, because if there is a beyond, you sure hope you can sing and dance there, because if you couldn’t, what would be the point?)

Bless the photos

Of the lopsided purple splotch

You posted to social media

Referencing the children’s book
“The Beautiful Oops,”

Using it as metaphor

For the way life

Doesn’t always go as planned

And bless you deleting the post

Five minutes later

Having decided you hated the photos

But somehow people kept liking

And commenting on it

For another two hours

Until you finally decided the universe

Must be sending you a message about acceptance

And maybe the photos were okay after all

And then

all at once

The post disappeared

And you couldn’t find it anywhere

Not even in the trash

Bless the dinner at Aventura

with the beloved wasband

And the beleaguered waiter

Who messed up the order

And kept apologizing

over and over

Throughout the night

Bless the churros

With hot caramel and chocolate sauce

Which D called an elevated version of churro

The perfection of the form

So you brought some home

For fifteen-year-old E

Bless the look on E’s face

As he savored each bite,

Saying mmmmm and where did you get these?

Bless his sweet enjoyment

Bless that he got just how amazing

Those churros truly were

Oh bless it all,

The sweet and the bitter of it

The clumsy and graceful

The foolish and the wise

Bless it

Today and always

Oh

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy The Woman Beneath My Skin; Somewhere in the Universe, All of This Is True; and The Breath of Love.

This is the first of a series of posts about a 3 ½-week trip I took to Japan this summer with my wasband* and two sons, ages 15 and 19.

*a husband from whom one is amicably separated

Why Japan?

The wasband and I are big on international travel. Before becoming a parent, my travels were deeply intertwined with my writing. I wrote several plays based on my travels, and a memoir about a year spent volunteering and traveling in West Africa. I believe exploring other cultures builds flexibility, humility, and the understanding that just about every aspect of human life can be approached in a variety of ways. Because of this, I try to take my boys out of the country when possible. It’s also immensely fun.

The wasband, whom I’ll call D, works in international health care. He develops large-scale blindness prevention programs, as well as other medical programs, and helps set up manufacturing to make medical technology affordable for developing country economies. (Yes, it’s true, he’s out there saving the world while I’m here expressing myself—I try not to compare.) We both love wandering the wide, wide world.

My younger son, whom I’ll call E, was very keen to go to Japan, a place he found eminently cool.

D had been there many times for work and had even been featured in a national magazine. (D is big in Japan!) He had plenty of reasons to go back and could even hook us up with a free house in a beach town for part of our stay. So even though I’d been studying Korean on Duolingo for 278 days and would’ve loved to get some real-time practice (so close and yet so far), we decided to head to Nippon* (*Japan, in Japanese) for our summer adventure.

The elephant in this STORY

You may wonder, as many do, how it is that the wasband and I travel together.

It’s like this: We’ve been separated four years. We live five minutes apart, and he keeps an office in the house we once shared, where E, our three dogs and I still dwell. (Our older son, whom I’ll call C, is living separately.) We see each other almost every day. We’re co-parents to these two young men, and though we’re no longer a couple in the traditional sense, we’re still family. We care deeply. We have each other’s backs. And though travel can put even the smoothest of relationships to the test, most of the time we still like each other.

And so it came to pass that the four of us found ourselves at the Detroit airport one warm Monday in July, 2023, setting out for Japan.

FOOD AND GIRLS

Arriving at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, three of us get photographed and fingerprinted. E, fifteen, does not.

 “Little do they know,” I murmur. E flashes me a wicked smirk.

Our taxi driver’s name is Yang Bo. He’s from China and has lived in Tokyo twenty years. He loves it.

“What do you like best?” I ask.

“Food and girls!”

“Oh?”

He nods. “Kawaii.”

I’m not sure what the Hawaiian islands have to do with anything, but with the help of Google translate, I discover that kawaii is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “cute” or “adorable.”

“Okay! Food and girls!” I say. “Anything else?”

“Ramen, tempura, sushi…”

“Any tourist sites you recommend?” E pipes up from the back seat.

“Disneyland!” says Yang Bo.

“There’s a Disneyland here?” asks C.

“Don’t even think about it,” I say.

ginza

Our hotel is called remm plus Ginza (with that precise capitalization pattern). It’s smack in the heart of the Ginza shopping district, surrounded by blocks and blocks of upscale boutiques and department stores.

If you know me, you know I’m more of a neighborhood-Airbnb type gal. However, when I ran the cozy places I was considering by D’s Tokyo colleague, she said the neighborhoods were “funky” and suggested we stay in Aoyama, Roppongi or Ginza. I’m not sure what a funky neighborhood looks like in the safest city in the world, but when I complained to my family that D’s colleague didn’t understand the way I like to travel, E rolled his eyes with scorn. Why did I think I knew better than a local, he asked—touché—and what was wrong with staying at a nice hotel if it wasn’t too pricey? (I’d mentioned that the hotels were surprisingly reasonable, the dollar being strong in relation to the yen.)

I caved, telling myself our time in Tokyo was my nod to E’s urban preferences. We’d do things my way later in the trip.

Hospitality 

Our hotel is lovely. Shadow leaves swirl and dance across the subtly mottled beige walls of the lobby. I look around but can’t find the projector.

Entering the room I share with C after eighteen hours in transit, I’m delighted by two pairs of crisp white pajamas laid out on the twin beds, as well as a massage chair in the corner of the room.

Welcome to Tokyo!

toilets and showers and tubs, oh my!

No one does bathrooms like the Japanese.

A Japanese toilet is a lavatory, a bidet, and an air dryer all in one. A gentle spray of warm water cleanses your nether regions from the front or the back at your preferred level of intensity and, on the fancier models, a temperate breeze dries you when your mission is complete. It’s tempting to sit there all day.

After a peaceful night’s rest in my clean pajamas (alas, on loan only), I decide to bathe.

The enclosure features a deep tub on one side (my photo does not capture the depth) and a showerhead propped in a wall sconce alongside it.

I submerge myself in steaming water. Surfacing, I make use of three pump bottles with Japanese writing on them lined up along the tub’s rim. Their contents smell of lavender. I float on my back and watch ripples of light flicker across the ceiling. I’m good, I think. I can die now.

I don’t. Reluctantly, I exit the tub and grab the showerhead from the wall. Thinking to do a final rinse, I flip the knob to redirect the water.

And…AVALANCHE! Suddenly I’m caught in a torrential downpour. I’d failed to notice the holes in the ceiling that turn the entire room into a shower.

“Oh my God!” I shriek.

 “What?” C calls from the other room.

I don’t respond. Instead, I shriek “Oh my God!” again, and then I’m laughing and dancing in this spectacular tropical rainstorm, thanking the universe for small miracles and the fact that, after more than half a century on earth, I can still be mightily surprised.

Dress code

In my pre-trip research, I learned that Japanese women, for the most part, dress modestly, typically covering shoulders and knees. “Cleavage,” I read, “is frowned upon.”

When you’re constructed the way I am, it’s almost impossible not to show cleavage unless you’re wearing a turtleneck. (Thank you, zaftige ancesors.) Not wanting to be frowned upon in the soaring summer temperatures, I sewed a little “modesty triangle” into one of my favorite sundresses. I’m not the craftiest, so I was pretty proud of this accomplishment.

On our first morning walk in the Ginza neighborhood, we witness a sea of people in white button-down shirts, the men wearing dark pants and the women dark or beige skirts. Not unlike a weekday morning in San Francisco’s financial district, perhaps, minus the homeless people. C asks if they are in uniform.

I hadn’t thought it possible for me to stand out more than I did in West Africa, where I spent the better part of a year, but Ginza proves me wrong. At least in Ghana, I had the right clothes.

Clearly, I cannot look the part of a tourist any more than I do in this photo. And yes, my shoulders are bare. In my defense, all my research told me that, while Japanese women usually cover their shoulders, foreigners are generally given a pass. Furthermore, bare shoulders are not considered offensive per se except in temples. I keep a light cotton wrap rolled up in my purse for temple coverage. I always aim to be respectful.

OUT AND ABOUT

D goes off to meet some colleagues. The boys and I head to Takeshita Street in Shibuya, a neighborhood known for youth fashion. E is the fashionable one in the family. Things are a lot more colorful here. I even see some young Japanese women rocking bare shoulders and knees. And a whole lot of kitschy souvenirs.

Perusing the clothing stores, I notice the Star of David liberally applied here and there as a design element, with no apparent connection to Judaism. I also notice English feel-good aphorisms generously sprinkled across a wide array of garments. The sayings are sometimes taken apart and put back together in unusual ways, which leads me to think that they too, are there more for design than meaning, not unlike certain garments in my own closet that bear characters whose meanings may or may not make sense.

E admires a pair of white pants adorned with zippers and chains. I warn him of the inevitable fate of all white garments. He buys them anyway. What can I do but sigh in the face of such unsullied optimism? White pants are apparently one of those mistakes we all must make for ourselves.

Despite the humid, 93-degree weather, we roam Harajuku and environs, seeking out a hall-of-mirrors type mall entrance I’d seen pictured in a magazine.

After cruising a few art galleries (one out of two young men is bored), we pass through the iconic gateway into the forest surrounding the Meiji shrine, a Shinto shrine built in 1920 that honors the late Emperor Meiji. Emperor Meiji ruled from 1867 to 1912 and is widely credited with transforming Japan from an isolated feudal society into an industrial world power. Despite the dense crowd of tourists, the equally dense foliage has a marvelous cooling effect. Along the path we encounter a display of 200 colorful sake barrels, donated from breweries around the country as a tribute to the emperor. Opposite them is a wall of Burgundy wine barrels donated by French wineries, a custom that began in 2006. Apparently the Emperor had a special fondness for French wine. Not exactly what I was expecting at a Shinto shrine!

Back at the hotel that night, my phone says I’ve taken almost 20,000 steps.

Not bad for Day 1.

I don the white pajamas and slip into my freshly made bed. I’ve barely begun counting sake barrels when I fall into a deep sleep.

Thanks for reading Japan Journals 1! Check out the next installment, Japan Journals 2, on my new Substack, Tanya Shaffer’s Off-Leash Chronicles.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy Tell Me A Story and After the Giddy Plunge.

Let no one keep you from your journey.

-Mark Nepo

There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.

That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.
 
So here I am, forty years later: still searching, still singing. I’ve come to realize that finding one’s song is not finite—find song, sing song, done. The journey is ongoing. The search is in the singing, and the singing leads to more searching. The process is infinite, but oh, how glorious it is. At fifty-six, I'm singing some of the most powerful songs of my life and finding more joy in it than ever.

How about you? Are you in search of your song?

This is what Off-Leash Writing Workshops are about: blowing past all forces, internal or external, that stand in the way of you finding your voice and using it. Every week in our circles, we find our voices, and we sing. Join us.

My journey with The Fourth Messenger began in the year 2000, on a nine-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.

It was my first retreat, and to me it felt hardcore. Meditating all day, alternating fifty-minute periods of sitting and walking, stopping only for food, kitchen duties, sleep, and to listen to a dharma talk each afternoon. Every couple of days we had a one-on-one meeting with a teacher. We weren’t supposed to bring reading or writing materials, but I secretly bucked that rule, feeling both sheepish and defiant. In the evenings I sometimes hiked instead of sitting. Once an owl swooped close to my head, beneath a half-moon so clear I could see every contour. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, how the silence entered me.

But oh, how hard it was for me to sit so long. One of the hardest things I’d ever done. I was perpetually restless. When the retreat ended, a woman told me she’d made working with the frustration she felt about my fidgeting part of her practice.

Still, I learned things on that retreat I’ve never forgotten. I’d been meditating for several years already at that point, but the retreat helped me understand in a new way the purpose of meditation. I experienced viscerally what one of the teachers spoke about: that by sitting quietly in the face of everything our minds throw at us, we’re building a container of awareness large enough to hold everything in our lives, so no matter what we’re dealing with, there’s always a part of us that’s larger. That which is aware of the sadness isn’t sad. That which is aware of the fear isn’t afraid. It remains one of the most important teachings of my life, a teaching I would later incorporate into the song The Human Experience.

I saw too how challenging it was to inhabit the moment as I lived it, how my mind kept rabbiting away from my breath into the past or the future. How I became so absorbed in memory or imagination that for long stretches I completely forgot where I was.

In one such period, the idea for the musical arose. I was sitting in the meditation hall, thinking about the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As legend has it, after years of pursuing one spiritual path after another, the Buddha sat down under a fig tree and vowed not to get up until he’d attained enlightenment. While he sat, the forces of Mara—illusion—came to him in an array of disguises—some seductive, some terrifying—trying to divert him from his quest. He resisted, and after 49 days and nights, he touched the earth and said, “As the earth bears witness to the work I’ve done over 100,000 lifetimes, I have the right to be free,” and—BOOM!—he was enlightened.

To this day, that story gives me chills.

Sitting in meditation, I suddenly saw the Buddha’s enlightenment playing out in the language of musical theatre. Temptations came to the seated Buddha as a shimmying loaf of bread, a crooning glass of water, a tango-dancing ex-lover, and more.

It occurred to me that the Buddha’s whole story was profoundly theatrical. Here was this prince, Siddhartha Gautama. At the time of his birth, a seer predicted that if he encountered Four Messengers—earthly manifestations of sickness, aging, death, and enlightenment—he would forsake wealth and position and wander the earth, spreading teachings of spiritual liberation. If he didn’t see those messengers, he’d stay and rule the kingdom. Obviously, his father the king didn’t want him seeing them. The king built walls around the palace and sequestered the old and sick. But when Prince Siddhartha was 29 years old, he stepped outside those walls for the first time. Immediately, one by one, the messengers appeared. His fate sealed, the prince set off to pursue enlightenment.

It’s epic, I thought. It has drama, pathos, wisdom and heart. It MUST be a musical.

My mind galloped. My heart raced. I completely forgot my breath. I saw myself in the audience on opening night while all around me, people laughed, gasped, and cried. I saw myself accepting my Tony Award, using my platform to spread the message of interconnectedness and compassion. I saw myself—

Oh yeah. Breath. In, out, in, out.

Five years later I started writing.

Why so long?, you might ask. Well, I was stumped. I didn’t know how to tell the story. I knew I wouldn’t write a historical drama set 2500 years ago in the Shakya Kingdom, now Nepal. I had to find my own way in, and I sensed that way would be contemporary.

Even so, in 2001, I traveled to Nepal and India to visit the sites of the Buddha’s life and legend. I walked through the ruins of Kapilvastu, the palace where Prince Siddhartha grew up, and I stood on the very spot where he first stepped outside the palace grounds. Gazing at the flat, dry fields and skeletal cows, I imagined it looking similar 2500 years ago. I pictured the Buddha taking his first steps away from the luxurious life he’d known into a completely unfamiliar world.

But when I got back home, I wasn’t yet ready to write that story. I had tremendous emotion around it; I had indelible images. But I still didn’t know how to tell it. Instead, I wrote Baby Taj, a romantic comedy about an American travel writer who travels to India while pondering whether to become a single mother by choice.

I got engaged, had a child, got married (yes, in that order). Beneath the rapidly moving surface of everyday life, the Buddha story continued to tug at me. What could I bring to it, I wondered, that hadn’t been brought before?

One day, reflecting on the Buddha’s biography, it struck me that some elements of his life and choices would be viewed very differently if he were a woman. That thought opened a door, and Mama Sid was born. Her choices and their unintended consequences became my way into the story.*

It’s hard to write dialogue for an enlightened being when you’re not one yourself (sorry to disappoint!). To get my hand moving, I had to release any notion of getting it “right.” I couldn’t know how Mama Sid would behave; I could only imagine it. Obvious, perhaps, but it took me a while to get there. The stories about the Buddha show only his wisdom, but I wanted to show Mama Sid’s humanity, to explore whether and how it was possible to be both enlightened and flawed.

A year later, I had a draft. The first public reading took place in 2006. directed by Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller, who helped me whip it into shape. I’d written lyrics, but I didn’t have a composer yet, so the actors read them as text. The enlightenment scene was epic. A piece of cheese purred seductively, “Havarti with dill/isn’t it swell?” Dinosaurs growled, “I will haul you back to cretaceous times/drown you in primordial brine.” Mara tried with all his might to lure Mama Sid into getting up from where she sat in meditation beneath a freeway overpass, without success.

The reading was three hours long. People loved it, but I needed a composer. Those fabulous lyrics were meant to be sung.

I flirted briefly with a few potential collaborators. Nothing quite gelled. I put out the word that I was looking.

“How about Vienna Teng?” asked Noel, an actor friend who’d been roommates with her then-boyfriend.

I loved Vienna Teng. I’d used one of her songs in my wedding.

“Set us up,” I said.

We met at a café in San Francisco. Vienna was humble and, in that first meeting, slightly shy.

“What makes you think I can do this?” she asked with genuine curiosity.

I told her I felt she had a storytelling instinct. Her songs had theatrical shapes. She was flexible and adept in her command of genre and style. Besides all that, her music was flat-out gorgeous. And my friend Noel, who knew her, said she was brilliant and could do anything. She laughed.

If you’ve ever met Vienna, you know it’s more or less impossible not to like her. She’s one of the nicest people on the planet.

We did a weeklong residency at TheatreWorks, a major regional theatre in Silicon Valley, along with several other musical theatre-writing teams. They gave us resources—piano, rehearsal room, copying, even a stipend, and at the end of the week actor-singers for a showcase. We wrote our first songs together that week. One of them—What About Me?—remains at the heart of the show today.

As many songs as there are in the show—and there are a lot—we wrote twice as many. Throwing out good material is brutal for all writers, but I think it was particularly hard on Vienna, coming as she did from the singer-songwriter world. In that world, if a song works on its own terms, it goes into the repertoire, unlike in theater, where chucking a perfectly good scene because it no longer serves the dramatic arc is an everyday occurrence.

I was living in Berkeley then. Vienna had moved to New York and was often on tour, so we worked in bursts when she was in town. Our writing process looked something like this: I’d give her my draft of the lyrics, and we’d discuss what we wanted the song to convey in terms of meaning and feel. Then she’d go in the other room and return a while later with a piece of melody, having changed several lyrics in the process.

I struggled with this at first. Why was she changing my lyrics? I sometimes changed them back, which she good-naturedly accepted. She was just playing around with things, trying to make them work. Her ego was completely unattached. I was ashamed of my own egocentric responses—not that that meant I could control them.

The truth is, Vienna knew a lot more about songwriting than I did. For her to move a song forward, a structure had to emerge organically from the wisps of melody arising in her head. Sometimes my lyrics didn’t fit that structure, so she changed them. Gradually my attachment to the words I’d written loosened, and we settled into a give and take. This benefitted both us and the work.

Over the next six years, while my first child started school and I gave birth to my second, Vienna and I had several more readings, plus a two-week workshop. I was a resident playwright at Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco at the time, and they provided developmental support. While other resident playwrights produced several scripts during our four-year residencies, I continued to develop this one. I worked internally not to envy how prolific they were and to embrace my own path. Many wonderful directors and actors contributed to the process. After each reading or workshop, audience members asked Vienna and me what came next.

“More rewrites,” we’d say and dive back into the piece, cutting and changing, filling holes and trimming excess.

About five years after we started working together, I started to shop the script around to theatres.

Over the years, some of my plays have found their way swiftly and organically to their first production. There have been times when I sent a play to a single theater that knew my work, and they gave it a home. This was not one of those times.

For better or worse, I don’t have a lot of patience for the long-haul submission process. Maybe it’s because I first produced a musical when I was twelve. With my dad’s help, my best friend and I obtained production rights to Harnick, Bock and Coopersmith’s The Apple Tree, went door-to-door asking local businesses for sponsorships, and rented out the Lawrence Arts Center in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, for a performance we directed and acted in, alongside a handful of our peers.

That early demystification of the process means I know how to do it myself, and that knowledge means I’m not willing to wait around forever for someone else’s seal of approval. I don’t write plays to look pretty on the page. Once I feel a piece is ready, I’m anxious to see it brought to life by a team of artists.

I gave myself a deadline, maybe six months out. I vowed that if I hadn’t found a producer by that date, I’d start the process of producing it myself. I hadn’t, so I did.

Most of my producing up to that point had been done on a shoestring. I wanted this to be different. I wanted to pay actors decently and give union members their health insurance weeks.** I also wanted to bring my friend Matt August from Los Angeles to direct. Matt had Broadway credits and was steeped in musicals. He’d directed my play Baby Taj at TheatreWorks, and I knew that he would demand the best of me. He’d push me for rewrites until the script was the strongest version of itself.

All this meant fundraising. My target was $110k. Vienna and I launched an Indiegogo campaign that ultimately raised $40k. It was profoundly affirming to feel the support of so many flooding toward us from across the globe. We followed that up with two fundraising events and several grants.

I zeroed in on the Ashby Stage, home of the Shotgun Players, as the ideal venue. At just over 200 seats, it was big enough to draw a crowd and small enough to still feel intimate. And as the home of a very popular theatre company, it had a built-in audience. Plus they had a marquee! I couldn’t wait to see our show’s name in lights.

Shotgun Players’ Artistic Director, Patrick Dooley, was an old friend, who I knew would be both righteous and supportive. They had very few windows for rentals, but Patrick agreed to give us one of those precious spots for our premiere. 

To say the process of producing the premiere was hard for me is an understatement. Between managing logistics and humans, I felt like I’d implode. With over thirty people involved in the production, that $110k we’d raised suddenly didn’t feel like much at all. Not to mention the fact that we were still doing rewrites. We wrote Mama Sid’s tour de force anthem, “Force of Nature,” about a week into the rehearsal process.

I had trouble sleeping and often felt short of breath. But in the spaces between crises, joy occasionally slipped in. Joy that this long-held dream was becoming a reality. Gratitude when the actors gave the words depth and nuance beyond what I could’ve imagined. Joy in seeing the production elements come together—choreography, set, costumes and lighting making the piece richer and more complete.

We had a phenomenal run. We sold out all of our twenty-five scheduled performances, plus two extension shows. I would have extended further, but the space wasn’t available. Perhaps another producer could’ve moved the show, but I was too burned out by then to wrap my head around finding a new space and replacing cast members who had other commitments. We closed.

“Where will it go next?” people asked. I’d come to dread the question. I told them I didn’t know.

Over the next few years, there were concert performances in various places, including Spirit Rock Meditation Center— where the idea was born—the San Francisco Zen Center, and others. A planned production in LA was already cast when the building it was to take place in was sold, and it was canceled. Meanwhile, we recorded an album, with Vienna singing the role of Sid.

In 2016, James Radant, a professor at Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Yunlin Province, Taiwan, produced The Fourth Messenger with his English language students. He was a Vienna fan who’d heard about the show through her emails. They performed one musical every year, and it was a Big Deal. Since there were many students who wanted to participate, the leads were double-cast.

Vienna and I were invited to attend. By this point she was in grad school, studying sustainable business, so I went on my own. The production was heartfelt and imaginative, with a large dance chorus performing the group numbers. They rehearsed for six months, and each cast got a single performance in a 500-seat theater. Both shows sold out. The experience was a lifetime highlight. (Read more about my experiences in Taiwan here.) No one asked me where it would go next.

In 2017, The Fourth Messenger was selected to be part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. It was a “Next Link” selection, which meant we got extra support from festival staff.

I asked a few people who’d taken shows to the festival what their experiences were like. They said they’d worked their asses off and poured their hearts and souls into their productions but ultimately couldn’t get enough producers in to see the shows to make it worth their while.

I heard them, and I didn’t. I thought we’d be different. Kind of like when you’re smitten with someone, and a friend warns you the person’s a player. That was before I came along, you tell yourself, sure you’re gonna be the Annette Bening to their Warren Beatty. I decided to do the festival.

I raised the money from a handful of angel investors. We put together a great cast. We drew full houses who jumped to their feet at the end of each performance. I got one of the most affirming reviews of my career from Suzanna Bowling of the Times Square Chronicles, who wrote, “This show helped heal a piece of me … We need more shows like this to heal our world.” I try not to put too much stock in reviews, but when despair threatens to overwhelm me, I take solace from her words.

Hard as I tried, we couldn’t get producers in to see it. I was so anxious I couldn’t sit still. The irony of being unable to meditate while producing a musical about the Buddha was not lost on me. I got a prescription for Xanax.

After every performance, at least one person asked where the show was going next. I told them, with a polite smile, that I didn’t know.

A year later, a playwright who was considering doing the festival called and asked me what our experience was like. I told her we’d worked our asses off, poured our hearts and souls into the production, and we were proud of it, but we couldn’t get enough producers into the house for it to gain traction. She decided to do it anyway, just as I had. Apparently there are some things in life you just have to try out for yourself, and for us theatre folk, taking your show to New York is one of them.

A month after the New York Musical Theatre Festival ended, my family and I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shortly after I arrived, my old friend Rick Sperling, a highly respected director who lives in Ann Arbor, told me he wanted to work with me on The Fourth Messenger. He had some ideas for rewrites.

I told him no. I’d given my life’s blood to this musical for the past ten years. I needed a break.

Life went on. I worked on other projects. Started teaching. Started a blog.

In 2019 I reached out to Rick, finally ready to hear his ideas. I liked them, and I did some rewrites. We gathered a cast and planned a concert performance at The Ark for March 14, 2020.

March 14, 2020. I’ll give you three guesses what happened, and the first two don’t count.

In 2022, we regrouped and set a new date for our concert: March 18, 2023—three years and four days after it was originally planned. At this point, Rick was playing a leadership role in many other projects. He no longer had the bandwidth to direct and co-produce this event.

Given the crushing anxiety producing always causes me, I considered dropping the idea. I decided to go forward for two reasons: to show my work in the place I live and to not let anxiety win. I gave myself a spiritual challenge: to produce the concert and enjoy the process.

Last weekend, we met at my house for our first rehearsals. Vienna, now a mom herself and living in DC, Zoomed in to meet the cast and wish them well. I went upstairs while Rebecca Biber, the music director, started teaching the songs. The voices of our twelve-person company floated up through the ceiling. They sounded like a chorus of angels.

The concert takes place in three weeks. My dear friend Anna Ishida, who’s been involved with the show since 2008, is coming from the Bay Area to play Mama Sid. She’ll stay in my house, as will another close friend, Giovanni Rodriguez, who’s producing a four-camera livestream. I’ll direct the performers—my first time stepping into that role for this piece—and he’ll direct the camera crew. It’s going to be Camp Fourth Messenger around here. I can’t wait.

I’ve been in relationship with this project for 23 years and counting. Longer than my relationship with my children or any romantic partner I’ve ever had. Like any relationship, it continues to evolve.

After the concert, people will inevitably ask what’s next for the show. I know the question is born of their enthusiasm. I’ll tell them I don’t know.

After a lifetime in theatre and half a lifetime of Buddhist practice, I’ve learned the importance of seeing each performance as an end in itself. If it sparks another iteration, that’s icing. This performance is the cake. I know now that doing today’s work with your gaze fixed on tomorrow robs you of what’s most essential—the experience itself. Do that too often, and your whole life can pass without your ever having inhabited it.

And so I remind myself at every step that this moment—rehearsing, taping up a flyer, typing these words—this too is the event, as much as the day the cast steps onstage and forms an indelible bond with the audience, both those in the theater and those watching from afar. This step, this breath, this moment. This, this, this.

And then?

(Sigh, laugh.)

I don’t know.

A Concert Performance of The Fourth Messenger will take place at The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on March 18, 2023.

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*To go more deeply into the details of Mama Sid’s choices and their consequences would be to give away the secret at the heart of the piece. I won’t do that, so if you want more details, you’ll have to see the concert!

**Union actors have to work a certain number of weeks each year on a contract at a certain level to secure their health insurance for the following year.

**NOTE: This is a slightly expanded version of a story I wrote in 1998. It first appeared on Salon.com in September of that year.**

 When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.

Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.

I'd intentionally left the next few months free of commitments, since the now ex-boyfriend and I had been planning a trip to Mexico, so I bought an open-ended ticket to Paris. I figured I'd stay at the nudist colony for a while to recuperate in the bosom of my family, and then travel in France and Spain till my money ran out.

Cap d'Agde is an enormous resort community divided into two sections: the "naturist" section and the "textile" section. In the summer the naturist section swells to a whopping 40,000 people. It's an international clothing-optional city, with its own produce shops, bakeries, restaurants and nightclubs, where people in every possible state of dress and undress roam freely. Waiting to pay for your grocery purchase, you might easily find yourself standing behind a French woman with a full shopping cart, naked except for her high-heeled sandals and pale blue nail polish, while behind you a portly German man wearing only a tight-fitting American T-shirt and broad straw sun hat waits impatiently to buy a bottle of ketchup. Only on the white sand beach do you find signs reading Nudité Obligatoire -- ostensibly to discourage voyeurism. In the evenings, however, when it cools off, people dress for dinner -- this is still France, after all!

My Dad, whom I call Vati (pronounced Fah-tee, German for Daddy), is 78 years old, a Vienna-born Jew who fled Austria with his parents shortly after the Nazi occupation. Five-foot-five and deeply suntanned, with flying, Einstein-like white hair, he beams with an exuberant, infectious joie de vivre. Betty, at 65, is a wonderful example of a sexy and confident older woman, at peace in her body, with or without its elegant draping of clothes. A diagonal scar between her breasts marks the place where she had heart surgery last year. They are into the philosophy of naturism, how it breaks down notions of the body beautiful. They see nudity as a kind of equalizer, like school uniforms for kids.

Vati and Betty love the freedom of the wind and sun on their bodies. I appreciate that on the beach, but walking around town I feel self-conscious, perhaps because I am a young woman and used to being looked at and appraised. The discomfort is particularly acute when my father proudly introduces me to the fully clothed young men working in the shops ("This is my daughter"). Somehow it's hard to discuss Asian travels with the handsome French butcher's assistant, he in his blood-stained apron, me in my birthday suit.

I notice, as well, that the women here are smooth as mannequins. Gone are the days when European women were symbols of vital, hairy femininity. Even their pubes are shaved into neat little triangles. I'm a shock of wild dark grass in a world of pruned hedges. I take to wearing an extra-large T-shirt that reaches to my knees, providing Vati and Betty with much hilarity about the prudishness of the younger generation.

In the end, the whole effect is profoundly desexualizing, and the presence of so much flesh begins to repulse me. Even before I am propositioned by a pasty Pillsbury Doughboy of an Englishman who tells me his wife won't mind as long as she can watch, I decide it's time to move on. Besides, I'm not crying enough. I decide this means that I'm not actually dealing with the loss of my relationship, and I need to spend time alone and "work through things."

I set off for Spain. On the train I run into a group of six young Americans. They're all about 18 years old, wearing loose cotton clothes and dangly earrings. Back in San Francisco I have friends in comparable positions, but here I feel like an impostor: a 30-year-old who looks like a 20-year-old; someone out of college almost 10 years who can afford to take two months off and travel but not to stay in hotels. The young travelers assume I'm their age, and I play along, talking about my major, where I go to school.

Over the next month I travel madly through Spain, keeping off the beaten track, staying with Servas hosts in suburbs and villages. (Servas is an international friendship organization that hooks up hosts and travelers who have a mutual interest in peace and social justice.) I do, however, spend a night each in the more touristed spots of Granada and Cordoba, where I meet a very young Portuguese painter and make out with him on the floor of the Alhambra's elaborately carved chambers and amid the columns of the famous Cordoban mosque. Parting from him, I decide I'm definitely not dealing with my break-up in a healthy way, and I need solitude.

Sometime during the bus journey out of Cordoba, I casually tell the woman sitting beside me that I'm I’d like to spend time in a remote village.

"Get out right here! Right here!" she exclaims, and hails the driver to stop.

"Here?" I look doubtfully at the olive trees and looming gray rocks. We're on a winding road through the mountains in Andalucia, about an hour from Ronda.

"Walk two kilometers down that road and you will come to Benalauria, where my grandmother comes from. Ask at the Meson la Molienda. They have rooms. Tell the proprietor I sent you!" she calls as the bus pulls away. Only then do I realize I never asked her name.

Sweating in the beating sun, coughing in the dust my feet stir up on the dirt road, I think, "Whose bright idea was this?" But when I see the tiny whitewashed houses nestled against the wooded hillside, my spirits lift.

The proprietor of Meson la Molienda looks surprised to see me, but giggles shyly and shows me to a tiny room, with rough plaster walls painted a dusky rose and a handmade quilt on the bed. A small window shows wooded mountains and the red tile roof and whitewashed walls of the next house. The price, about $30 a night, is a splurge for my budget, but at this point there's no turning back.

I venture forth into Benalauria, population 350, and doors close as I approach. Eyes peer from behind shutters. Children scurry around corners.

Panicked, I hurry back to my room. This is what you wanted, I tell myself miserably. I lie on the bed and cry, loudly and indulgently, as the sun dips in the sky. No one knocks at my door. Eventually, several shuddering hours later, I fall asleep.

The next morning a horde of children descends on me. "Cómo te llamas? De dónde vienes?" Apparently they had conferred and decided to approach the stranger en masse. I am carrying a notebook and a plastic bag filled with colored pens. They grab the notebook and fill it with doodles and messages in Spanish: "Please come and visit our town again, American friend. Con cariño, Paula."

Later that afternoon as I sit on the steps of La Molienda with my watercolors, Juan, the maintenance man at the inn, beckons to me.

"You are an artist," he says, indicating my notebook, in which I was feebly attempting to draw the view.

"Just for fun," I say. “Mainly, I write.”

"Come," he says. "I will show you my paintings."

I follow Juan to his little house, where he introduces me to Maria, his wife.

"Come," he says.

We go up a narrow ladder to a small attic, crammed with canvases. They are mostly domestic scenes: fruit on the table, a woman stirring soup, a man playing guitar. They are wonderfully vivid: many of the shapes evoke Picasso.

"Where did you study?" I ask.

"Here," he says, pointing to his forehead. "Only here."

Eating tortillas de patata with them that night, while a competition of child singers blares on the television set, I feel a deep contentment. They seem truly moved by the gift of a plastic San Francisco key chain with a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge on it that I present to them when I leave.

"I'll keep it always," Juan says reverently, tucking it in a drawer.

Concerned that all this camaraderie is distracting me from my grief, I decide to move on. Flipping through my address book, I come across a phone number my roommate gave me of a place called Plum Village, a Buddhist community near Bordeaux, run by the venerated Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. What better environment for seeking inner peace?

Breathing in, breathing out

Breathing in, breathing out

I am blooming like a flower

I am fresh as the dew

I am solid as a mountain

I am firm as the earth

I am free.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I arrive at the Upper Hamlet tired and cranky from a long night on the train, looking forward to a shower. When I go in to register, I find there is no record of my coming, though I'd telephoned from Benalauria to set it up.

"We'll see if we have something," says the placid nun at the desk.

"See if you have something!" I am alarmed.

They place me in the New Hamlet, a 35-minute van ride through the placid French countryside. About 90 monks and nuns are full-time residents here, but I've arrived during the summer retreat, which 500 people attend. There are four hamlets, grouped by languages. New Hamlet has a sprinkling of Americans, and large groups of Dutch, French and Vietnamese.

I've missed the van to the New Hamlet, and I wait outside for four hours until the next one arrives. When I finally get there, I'm told there are no available beds.

"Now look," I say to Sister Ving-yip, the sweet-faced Vietnamese nun signing me in. "I'm very tired. I was on the train all night, I sat in the Bordeaux station for five hours, and now I've been waiting all day for the van. I need a place to shower and lie down."

Putting out aggression, I expect aggression back. But Sister Ving-yip smiles and takes my hand. "Yes, Sister," she says, holding my hand. "Yes."

Completely disarmed, I watch my irritation slip away, like dirt washing off in a cool stream.

Welcome to Plum Village.

Everyone here calls Thich Nhat Hanh “Thay,” meaning “teacher.”  He is soft-spoken and slight, with golden skin, sculpted cheekbones and penetrating eyes.  Though he speaks often of the benefits of smiling, telling us that the gentle upward curve of the mouth sends signals to the brain, he appears serious most of the time.  His own smile, when it comes, is temperate—no wild rush of joy. He has seen great suffering in his life. In 1966 he was exiled from his home in South Vietnam because of his opposition to the war. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Now, in 1997, he is 71 years old: a serious man, seriously going about the business of teaching people to be happy.  

When Thay walks into the meditation hall, a hush falls on the room. Then suddenly there’s buzz and brilliance as cameras click and flashbulbs pop, his international fans behaving like paparazzi.  I wonder how it feels to him, this celebrity treatment.  He walks quietly through it, as though inhabiting another plane.  He speaks first to the children, telling them to sit beautifully like lotus flowers. Then he turns to the rest of us, instructing us on the practice of meditation in clear, simple terms, as if we too were children. His gentle voice is like a hand placed over my heart, and at once I am calmed, soothed. Awakening is possible in every moment, he tells us. He quotes the Buddha: If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. It is possible, therefore I ask you to do it. For a moment, sitting in the meditation hall, bathed in the sound of his voice, I believe him.

Bells bells bells, morning till night. The bell is the voice of the Buddha, reminding you to be present, and every time it rings you stop whatever you're doing and watch your breath until the last echo dies away. This is no small challenge with a clock chiming every 15 minutes.  This goes for the phone, too: You breathe through the first three rings before mindfully picking it up. Imagine my surprise when I was registering and the phone rang to see the nun freeze with her pen in mid-air. I thought she was having some kind of attack! This was all the more bizarre when it happened about four times in quick succession. Once I figured out what was going on, a comic sketch popped into my mind where Inspector Clousseau is desperately trying to get some information from a slow-talking nun, and whenever she gets close to the crucial piece, the phone rings and she freezes. Then I thought of a scenario in which someone goes home, dials Plum Village, and sets her phone on automatic redial, immobilizing the place.

Mealtimes are a system of torture designed especially for me. We stand silently in line to serve ourselves, then sit at the long wooden tables with our plates of food in front of us, breathing in their savory aromas while every single person in the hamlet serves him or herself. When everyone is served, a prayer is spoken: "This food is a gift of the whole universe—the sun, the rain and a lot of hard work ..." As the prayer nears its end, I begin to salivate, but no, it is repeated, first in Dutch, then in Vietnamese, sometimes in French or German for good measure. Then we have to wait for the bell to ring three times. Yesterday I swear they waited a solid minute and a half between the second and third ring.

Another thing about the food: there isn't enough. Whoever's at the end of the line misses out on the good stuff, and ends up with a plateful of lettuce and rice. So while we're supposed to be walking mindfully across the courtyard upon hearing the lunch or dinner bell, I find myself surreptitiously hurrying to get to the front of the line. You'd think with all us wannabe Buddhists cultivating compassion and generosity, we'd take moderate portions, but much to my surprise, all the people at the front of the line—including me—load up their plates. During the second week the line "let me not act with greed or gluttony" is added to the mealtime prayer.

On my fourth day in Plum Village, after continuously finding fault, brainstorming comic torture scenarios and bonding with others through eye-rolling and sighing when the clock chimes, I go for a walk and give myself a stern talking to.

"Look, Tanya," I say, "did you come here to learn about this stuff or to mock it? All the rest of your life you can go around in a big rush, never having to stop for bells, not chewing your food 30 times. You came here because something is missing in your life. The least you can do is commit while you're here."

After that I find, much to my surprise, that if, when the bell rings, I truly stop what I'm doing and focus on my breath, rather than waiting impatiently to continue whatever trajectory I'm on, the moment of stillness becomes a kind of refreshment and regrounding, a reminder of the silence beneath the words. Which I suppose is the point.

A week later, as I sit in the morning meditation, I begin to think of moving on.

"Where should I go?" I muse. "It's almost September. If I could make it to Italy, I could pick olives in Tuscany for a while and make some money. And after that maybe grapes ... Then I'd have a chance to really process my break-up. I could find a place by myself, away from all these people ..."

Just stop it, Tanya. You've done the naked city, the mad dash through Spain, the passionate affair, the remote village and now this. Just stop. Sit down. Right here. Stay.

So I do. I sit. I sit for many weeks. And when I can't sit anymore, I get up and go home to my newly single life.

Note: Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh died in January, 2022, at his “root temple,” Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam. He’d moved back there in 2018, following a stroke, and was greeted with reverence and joy by the community there. It was his wish to spend the last years of his life in the place he was first ordained.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy Tell Me A Story (about my travels in Taiwan) and Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story (about my circuitious path to motherhood).

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(After “Compulsively Allergic to the Truth,” by Jeffrey McDaniel)

I’m sorry.

I was late because I overslept.

I was late because I was dissolving in tears.

I was late to protest the tyranny of time.

I was late because I was sucked into a Black Hole. Fortunately, it didn’t like the taste of my deodorant, so it spit me back out.

I was late because I was smelling every flower and petting every dog

I was late because I fell asleep on the couch by the fire, covered in a plaid wool blanket, one dog snuggled against me and two more on the rug beside me, and when the alarm went off—I’d set it because I had to meet you—I thought I hit snooze, but I accidentally hit stop. That’s why I’m still asleep, and what you see here is not me but a holographic projection. The real me is still asleep on the couch by the fire and will sleep there for a hundred years until awakened by True Love’s Kiss.

I was late because I was deciding whether to jump from a bridge into the choppy silver waves and let the fish feast on my flesh.

I was late because I was frolicking in the autumn leaves.

I was late because I’m genetically coded for lateness.

I was late because of the rain.

Because of the traffic.                                        

Because of the traffic caused by the rain.

Because a woman with a walker was crossing the street, and I had to wait for her to pass.

Because I was standing at the tippy-top of the world, wondering what would happen if there were no gravity and I were lifted off into space to float around the universe. Would I find another planet with life on it? Would they accept me? Love me? Would I finally feel at home?

Actually, that was yesterday. Today I was late because my dogs were barking, and I went to see what it was about, and one of them had brought a baby rabbit into the house, and I had to wrestle it away from him, and I wanted to save it, but unfortunately it was dead. I buried it in the backyard with a tiny stone marking its tiny grave.

I was late because I was cleaning the toilet. Someone threw up in it last night.

I was late because I was sick. (It was me who threw up.)

I was late because my teenager was rude to me, so I went on strike to protest him and all teenagers who have ever been rude to their parents and all parents who are rude to their kids. I went on a hunger strike against inter-familial rudeness, and no one met my demands, so I got hungrier and hungrier until I was too weak to be on time. If I pass out, you’ll know why.

I was late because I was smashing the capitalist patriarchy, and I was sent directly to jail, without passing go or collecting $200. I had to wait for a friend to bail me out.

I was late because I was meticulously washing my hands while singing “Happy Birthday,” to protect myself from Covid and other infectious diseases.

I was late because I was getting my Covid vaccine and my flu shot and my shingles vaccine, all at the same time. Also a mammogram, which was way overdue.

I was late because I was reading Chekhov, which got me kind of depressed, so then I started reading the Compleat Works of William Shake-spear (original spelling edition). I had just finished the sonnets when I looked up and saw that I was late, so I stopped and now I can’t find the book.

I was late because the pug took my sock and his sharp bottom teeth made a hole in it, and I had to darn it, and I did a terrible job so there was a bump in it, so I had to stop at Target for a new pair of socks.

I was late because I was saying a prayer for the broken world.

I was late because I read the world was at peace, and I was celebrating. Then I realized I was reading The Onion.

It was my birthday. I was trying to blow out my candles. One wouldn’t go out. I had to keep blowing until it burned all the way down, leaving a small circle of ash in my vanilla cream frosting.

The sun was late rising, so how could I possibly be on time?

I was late because I was doing a séance to bring Shakespeare back and clear up once and for all this issue of who wrote the plays.

I was tickling the Mona Lisa to get her to laugh.

I was reading a mystery and had to find out whodunnit.

I was standing on the corner with a sign that said “Just Say No to Climate Change.”

It’s my son’s fault.

My husband’s fault.

My ex-husband’s fault.

My lover’s fault.

My parents’ fault. They were too permissive—it made me irresponsible.

I forgot about daylight savings. So sue me.

My Wifi was down.

I lost my keys.

I had a flat tire.

I was having sex with the milkman.

I was getting an abortion.

I was giving birth.

There were complications. I died.

I was writing a check to Planned Parenthood.

I was waiting out an active shooter.

I had jury duty, but I was disqualified because of my bumper sticker that says, “Live Simply, That Others May Simply Live.”

I was Saving the Planet.

I was giving up hope.

Fuck you, I wasn’t late.

You were early.

I am right on time.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy The Woman Beneath My Skin, The Breath of Love, Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks, and Your Inner Dog.

Are you longing to explore your life through words? Off-Leash Writing Workshops provide a nurturing creative environment for your stories to emerge. And if you’ve got some drafts lying around that you’re looking to polish, the Memoir/Fiction/Personal Essay Workshop provides vigorous, constructive feedback to help you take them to the next level. Join us!

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©Tanya Shaffer 2022, photos and text

I’ve dreamed you for so long, I can hardly believe you’re with me now.  Yet here you are: a tiny human voyager, sleeping off the shock of migration. I want to gather up joy and lay it at your feet, to banish grief to an island so remote that it can never find you.  Instead I give you this world in all its glorious, startling detail.  One day you’ll ask me how you got here.  When you do, I’ll tell you this story.

- Prologue of my play, Baby Taj

On May 10, 2001, I sat on a mountaintop near Dharamsala, India, watching the last rosy gleam of the sunset reflect off the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, and made a decision.  Throughout my adult life I’d boldly proclaimed to anyone who would listen that if I found myself 35 years old and single, I would have a child on my own.  Yet for all my bravado, I’d never imagined that day would come.  Now my 35th birthday loomed large, and I was, in fact, unpartnered.  Blame it on the writer-slash-actor’s peripatetic lifestyle, excessive pickiness, a volatile emotional temperament, or just plain bad luck: my intimate relationships had not panned out as I had hoped.

In the wake of a recent string of disastrous romances, I’d fled to India in early March for some serious soul-searching.  After two months of packed trains, magnificent temples, guru-seeking travelers, and sweltering meditation halls, my mind was no closer to finding peace.  Then, in a single glorious day, I shook hands with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, climbed six hours up a stony trail, watched the sunset reflected off the Himalayas, and reached a decision.  Perhaps it was the simple clarity of His Holiness’ gaze that led me to it, or the thin, pure mountain air.  Or perhaps it was just my time.  Whatever the trigger, as the moon rose cold and bright over the Himalayas, the choice before me became breathtakingly clear.  I could continue pining after the life I’d always imagined I would have—the one in which I was happily married by now—or I could embrace the circumstances of my actual life  and get on with things.  I chose to embrace.

My home base back in the States was a close-knit community of three other women and a dog, with whom I’d shared a house for the past seven years. One of my roommates—a dear friend— was close to my age and longed for a child with as much fervor as I did.  She was a lesbian and I was mostly straight, but we were both in the same position: single and aching with mamalust.  We had often discussed the idea of both getting pregnant through artificial insemination, coordinating our schedules around shared childcare, and raising our children in the loving environment of our San Francisco home.  When I returned home from India in June, I told her I was ready to commit to our plan.

Friends and family urged me to reconsider—after all, women are having first children well into their forties these days— but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I was making the right choice.  I felt as though everything else in my life was filler, using up time until I could move forward with the one thing I really wanted: raising a child. This wasn’t a permanent goodbye to romantic life, I assured them.  If anything, I’d be able to date in a more relaxed way when the subtext of my every sentence wasn’t “want baby now.”  Rather than acting out of desperation, I was taking a powerful step toward defining my own life.

Valentine’s Day, 2002, was my target date.  If my cycle followed its usual course, I would inject myself with the first vial of anonymous donor sperm on the day dedicated to Cupid, the mischievous vixen of love.  It seemed a fitting date to begin what I hoped would be a life-long love affair with my child.

In January, I purchased four vials of sperm belonging to two separate donors.  Although choosing a person I’d never met to donate half of my child’s genetic material was nerve-racking, the selection process was no shot in the dark.  The thick donor catalog provided more information about these men than most people know about their spouse on their wedding night.

My criteria were fairly simple.  The first thing I looked for was intelligence.  Though I knew it wasn’t a fool-proof indicator, I looked for a GPA of 3.5 or higher, coupled with good spelling, grammar, and vocabulary throughout the application.   Beyond that, I wanted creativity and well-roundedness: foreign languages, musical instruments, and other artistic pursuits were a plus. Things like warmth and compassion were important too, of course, but those were harder to spot, and who knew if they were genetic anyway?  Still, I spent hours poring over the documents, trying to glean personality traits from handwriting, word choice, and the answers to questions like “Why do you want to become a donor?” My first-choice donor was tall, dark and—according to the clinician who interviewed him—handsome, the oldest son of a Spanish mother and Italian father.  He was a medical internist in his twenties for whom the extra $60-120 a week (depending on whether he came in once or twice) was a quick and easy way to help defray the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He played piano, guitar, and drums, and spoke fluent Spanish, English, and French.  His GPA was 3.8 and his family medical history showed no cause for alarm.  He described himself as genial and even-tempered, though slightly shy when getting to know someone.  I wished I could get a date with him instead of just a shot of his DNA.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only would-be mama who’d noticed this guy’s assets.  When I called to purchase his sperm, only two vials remained.  I’d hoped to get four, in case it didn’t take right away, but alas, he had left the program and would make no further donations.  I snapped up his last two vials and set about finding an alternate candidate.

There was an amiable Portuguese screenwriter whose parents were both dancers.  There was an undergraduate Eastern European physicist with a penchant for classical music whose response to the question of why he became a donor—“I’ve got nothing better to do with my semen at the moment; I’m in a long-distance relationship”— endeared him to me immediately.  And then there was a Korean-American computer programmer whose heart’s desire was to travel to Greece, “to follow in the footsteps of Odysseus.”  This last one stood out for the originality of his responses.  In tiny, controlled handwriting, he made his droll, faintly ironic disposition felt in every line of the application.  I felt I would have had a crush on him had he been sitting next to me in class.  I dubbed him Odysseus and ordered two vials of his sperm.

Three weeks before my planned insemination, I received an e-mail from a man named David. David and I had been in sporadic contact for about three years, since he’d attended a performance of mine with a mutual friend.  I’d met him for about thirty seconds backstage, and I vaguely remembered a bespectacled intellectual type with a shy, lopsided grin.  He’d e-mailed me that same night to tell me how much he enjoyed the show, and as I do whenever I receive correspondence of that kind, I’d promptly placed him on my mailing list for the duration of his (or my) natural life. 

Over the next three years, whenever I sent out a performance announcement, I got an e-mail back from David. He lived in Washington, D.C., and traveled constantly, organizing eye care programs in developing countries and setting up manufacturing to make medical products affordable for developing country economies.  His e-mails invariably came from some far-flung corner of the globe and said something to the effect of: “Wish I could see the show, but I’m in Malawi setting up an eye camp to treat 2,000 people with cataracts.” I was intrigued, and after a few years of this sporadic correspondence, I suggested to David that the next time he was in California, perhaps we could meet for tea.

I was performing in San Diego when I received his e-mail telling me he was in the state.  It turned out he was going to be in San Diego for a single day the following week.  Since his daytime schedule was full, we decided to meet for dinner.

Let the record show that I had absolutely no ulterior motive for dining with this man.  I could barely remember what he looked like!  Furthermore, I was absolutely determined that nothing should stand in the way of my planned insemination.  In the eight months since I’d made the decision to have a baby, I’d already been sidetracked by no less than three short-term dalliances with men.  In each case I’d plummeted headlong into an apparently promising relationship and postponed my insemination, only to have it crash and burn a few weeks later.  I wasn’t going to let it happen again..

At seven p.m. I opened the door of my apartment to a disheveled dark-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses and a sweet, self-effacing grin.  We walked through the lively downtown streets of San Diego chatting about the joys and challenges of developing world travel, until our growling bellies propelled us into a dimly lit Italian restaurant with red-and-white checked tablecloths and Coke-bottle candleholders covered in melted wax..  When I suggested wine, he asked me the difference between white wine and chardonnay.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No,” said he.

I cocked an eyebrow skeptically.

“It’s a type of white wine.  You can share my glass if you’re not ready to commit to your own.”

We each had a glass of chardonnay, split a salad and a couple of dishes of pasta, and followed it up with a whopping slab of tiramisu that we couldn’t half finish between the two of us.  At some point in our far-ranging conversation, I mentioned that I planned to curtail my travel for the next couple of years because of a personal project I was working on that would keep me close to home.  When he asked what the project was, I coyly responded that I wasn’t at liberty to say.

My favorite moment of the night occurred while David was removing his sweater—a bulky black wool number with orange snowflakes, which he’d purchased in Norway.  It was half-on half-off, his shirt rising with it and exposing a slice of furry abs, when the waitress came by and asked if we were ready to order.  He froze that way, sweater mid-air, one arm above his head, and gave her that sheepish, caught-in-the-act grin.  It was, I’m afraid, almost unbearably cute.

Do you think any carnal activity took place that night?  Well, you’re wrong.  I stuck to my resolve, and we parted without so much as a butterfly kiss.  We did, however, hug goodbye and then stand in the lobby of my apartment building gabbing for a while before parting with a second hug.  It was the second hug, David says, that gave me away.  With that second hug, he says, he knew.

The next morning I received an e-mail from David saying that he’d had a great time and I was a wonderful being.  I wrote back saying I’d had a good time too, and too bad he didn’t live in San Francisco.  The next morning I got another, longer e-mail, saying he loved the Bay Area and had often felt it was the part of the country in which he felt most at home, and by the way he had some vacation time coming up.  I wrote back saying, great, you’re welcome to visit, but given your transient lifestyle I don’t see this turning into a deeper, shall we say, involvement. 

The next day I received a long response saying that he knew that his constant travel had contributed to the demise of his marriage the previous year, and that since he deeply desired a committed relationship, he was eager to change his lifestyle.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I was enough of a veteran of the dating wars to know that the words “I want to change” uttered in the courtship phase of a relationship were the romantic equivalent of a deed to a bridge in Bora-Bora.  And yet there was a sincerity to this David that I couldn’t ignore. Furthermore, he was just the sort of person I’d always imagined myself with.  In addition to being smart, cute, sweetly nerdy, and quirkily funny, David was committed to the world.  He had a passion for helping others that manifested in large-scale, meaningful ways.  And then there was that sweater moment.

I rolled around in my queen-sized bed, flipping the pillows this way and that.  How do I always manage to conjure up this particular brand of self-torture? I wondered.  I have a plan; why can’t I stick to it? 

At 5:30 a.m.—8:30 East Coast time—I called.  David was in New York City attending the World Economic Forum, and I wanted to reach him before he left for the morning session.  I got his voicemail and left a terse message:  “We have to talk.”

Half an hour later my phone rang.  We talked for four hours, while his sessions and meetings slipped by.  He confided that he’d thought of me often since the time we’d first met.  When his marriage dissolved the previous year, he’d wanted to get in touch, but until this week he hadn’t had the nerve.  When I told him the nature of my “personal project,” his response was immediate. "I’m a walking sperm bank,” he said.  “I’m practically swimming in sperm.” David’s ex-wife had been unable to have children, and he had accepted the prospect of a childless life.  Since their separation, however, the idea of having children had opened up for him.  For the first time, he’d felt a tug, as though somewhere out there a voice was calling.

We determined that day that we would have children together. A week and countless phone hours later, he asked me how I felt about marriage as a general concept.  I told him I didn’t really care that much one way or the other, and he said he didn’t either.  Then a few minutes later I said that, if I were honest, I probably would prefer to be married, and he said so would he. 

For a while we reminded each other that our plans were only a fantasy until we’d spent more time together.  But as the days passed, it became harder and harder to keep that in mind.  With each conversation our connection felt more real.  Though I wasn’t trashing my vials of sperm just yet, I decided to postpone the insemination once again.

When I returned to San Francisco and told my roommates I was engaged, they looked at me as if I’d joined the Moonies.  What’s amazing to me is not that David and I made these decisions so quickly— God knows I’d made rash pronouncements before while under the narcotic influence of my romantic imagination— but that we actually turned out to have the right combination of chemistry, compatibility and commitment for the relationship to endure.  David explains that he went about our relationship the same way he goes about his work: He began with intuition, created an assumption, then gathered data to test the assumption.  On the night of our third meeting, a month after that fateful San Diego dinner, we greeted each other at the airport with an awkward hug and couldn’t figure out what to do with our hands.  That night, we split the better part of a bottle of merlot (“a type of red wine,” I explained), and tested our chemistry on a futon couch of his D.C. apartment. Fortunately, the data was good.

Last month I was walking on the beach in Carmel with David and Tavi, our four-month-old son.  David and I walked a few feet apart, absorbed in our thoughts, less like newlyweds than two people who have grown easy with each other.  He carried the sleeping baby around his neck in a sling.  The pale sun glanced brightly off the corrugated ocean and the flat expanse of near-white sand.  My body remembered the countless hours I had walked alone on the beaches, roads, and pathways of this world.  For a moment I had the distinct sensation that I had slipped sideways out of my life and into someone else’s—that I had somehow eluded the storyline that should have been mine.  It was a bittersweet sensation, and I took a moment to salute my phantom double: that solo traveler who shadows me still. 

Had David not come into my life, I would have become a parent in a less traditional way.  Had that come to pass, I’m sure my delight at the miracle of motherhood would be equally profound.  My life would have been harder, no question, but I would have made it work.  My former roommate has a one-year-old boy, and mother and child move through the world in a bubble of radiant love.  Although being a single mother is challenging, she enjoys the strong support of a tight-knit community of friends, of whom I am proud to be one.

And so the moral of this story, as I see it, is not so much buy the sperm, and the man will come, as it is take a stand for your own happiness, and you can’t lose.  As I lie in bed at night, nestled against the warm curve of my husband’s back, I marvel at how, once I made my choice, the universe seemed to rise up and meet me in mysterious ways.  What I feel then is gratitude—tremendous gratitude—that I was able to muster the courage to take a step toward my deepest dream while still staying light enough on my feet to follow the path when it took a most unexpected turn. 

If you enjoyed this story, you might also enjoy The Silver Revolution (in which I use the decision to stop coloring my hair as a window into reflections on aging, mortality, and cultural pressures on women’s appearance), Paint Your Scars With Gold (in which I reflect on the challenges of a long-term marriage), and The Me Who Stayed (about my journey with depression).

Are you longing to explore your life through words? Off-Leash Writing Workshops provide a nurturing creative environment for your stories to emerge. And if you’ve got some drafts lying around that you’re looking to polish, the Memoir/Fiction/Personal Essay Workshop provides vigorous, constructive feedback to help you take them to the next level. Join us!

This piece first appeared in the anthology The May Queen: Women on Life, Love, Work and Pulling it All Together in Your Thirties (Tarcher, 2006)

All photos and text © Tanya Shaffer, except the photo of the Himalayas, which is a stock photo, used with permission.

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I say my

house but

it’s not

I say my

yard my

trees but

they’re not my

dogs I say my

children but

they’re not my

body no maybe

my mind no not

even these

memories these

thoughts these

words this

life?

No.

Not mine.

Just this

flickering

moment

to hold no

but to

inhabit

yes

Thank you

If you enjoyed this poem, you might also enjoy "Doing Yoga with the Buddha, Get Lost, and The Breath of Love.

GET LOST
 
Get lost, you say
to an unwanted caller.
I dare you to

say it to me.
 
Exile me

to a place

where I'm drawn
out of self's cage
into ochre and rust,
spices, exhaust,
blaring horns, thrumming

strings, blazing

color so pure

tears rise
like dust
to my eyes.
 
There’s a world out there,
though I don’t understand it,
a world, and all
I want is to know it:
crumbling walls,
layered paint,
exuberant weeds
thrusting through asphalt,
despite all efforts
to keep them contained.
 
The challenge a gift

To find myself lost.

*In Off-Leash Writing Workshops, I often use poetry to inspire our writing. This poem of mine was inspired by the poem Gratitude List, by Laura Foley.

Praise be to cold water, sliding down my throat

Praise be to the moments when my younger son smiles at me, no device in hand

Eyes meeting each other across clear thin air

Praise be to the moments when I see my older son fully

in all his sweetness, bravado, and vulnerability, unobscured by his fears or mine

Praise be to the hot tub that holds me so gently in its liquid embrace

Praise be to friendship and the laughter it brings

Praise be to the changing seasons, the buds peeking out

The luxurious greens of summer

The riotous red-gold carnival of fall                                                             

The bare filigree of winter

When the world turns black and white

Praise be to the sky that’s gray all day, then suddenly bursts out blue

Praise be to the dogs who are always up for a romp or a cuddle

Praise be to the heart that loves

Praise be to the ways we keep trying, in the face of all things

Praise be to hope or the absence of hope

To facing whatever is true

And keeping on

With or without hope

To waking and whispering, You got this

To waking and thinking, Let me embody love today

Let me not lose my temper or my will or my way

Let me do the next right thing

And then the next

Let me love this world

Imperfect as it is

Imperfect as I am

Let me love these people

These dogs

This home

This corner of the earth

This life

Not some other, imagined life

but this life, the one I have.

Praise be to those moments

Of embodying love completely

If only for half a breath

Praise be to those moments of peace

Wherever they occur

In a quiet meadow

On a busy corner

In a concert hall

A restaurant

A forest

A home

Praise be to peace

Within a single heart

The heart of all beings

Beating together

If only we could awaken to love

If only wars would end

If only the earth could rejuvenate

If only we could quell our greed

Our hatred, our ignorance, our fear

If only

If only

If only

Praise be to the trying

To the waking, the facing, the doing

Praise be to the breath of love

Wherever, whenever, however

It breathes

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my poem, Doing Yoga with the Buddha

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Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I yearned for every baby and toddler I saw. I had only to pass someone pushing a stroller or toting an infant to experience a sensation in my chest that felt simultaneously like a constriction and an expansion. I loved those tiny beings, every one of them, and by love I mean I ached for them with a ferocity that bordered on frightening. I wanted to grab them and make a run for it, to pour my vast untapped reservoirs of maternal affection into their little selves.

Now, with my own two baby boys grown into towering teenagers, I no longer feel that craving when I encounter the three and under set. I still think they’re cute and all, but I’m perfectly content to smile and walk on by. But even though I’m also the mother of three charming canines, a huge and painful tenderness still wells up within me every time I pass a dog.   

I think a lot about why I love my dogs so much; why, when I travel, I miss them first, before my children (sorry, but it’s true), my home, or my friends. Twenty-four hours away and I’m already longing for their warm weight against my leg, the comforting thrum of their perpetually wagging tails, the fluff of their fur beneath my fingers as I rub their bellies or scratch behind their silken ears.  

The answer, of course, is love—pure and simple. My dogs provide me with an endless opportunity to both give and receive it, as much as I want, without self-consciousness, ambivalence, or complexity on either side. 

What about your kids? you might ask. Don’t you love them?

Well, of course. I adore my children. Like most parents I know, I can say, unequivocally, that I would die for them. But here’s the thing: the contract between me and my Three Muttsketeers* is as straightforward as they come. I give them food and water and walks and snuggles, and in return, they love me. The relationship between me and my kids is a lot more complicated.

When it comes to human parents and their offspring, there’s no escaping the weight of hope and expectation. Even if you’re the kind of parent who fluently quotes Kahlil Gibran—Your children are not your children, they are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself—who claims to want nothing more than to see them flower into the fullest expression of their unique selves, it’s impossible to disentangle your identity from theirs. Their dreams and ideals, achievements and setbacks, happiness or lack thereof, feel inextricably bound to your own. When they rejoice, so do you. But when they’re suffering, you marinate in an excruciating brew of misery, guilt and helplessness, stewing over the questions of whether or not you can help, and if you can, whether or not you should.

Intricate dynamics play out across other human relationships as well—with romantic partners, siblings, co-workers, friends… As great as our capacity is to fascinate, delight and support each other, we have an equal or greater capacity to confuse, wound and disappoint each other in ways that could never happen with a dog, no matter how many times it grabbed food off the table or peed on the rug.

Which brings me to the heart of the matter. Our dogs don’t care what we look like or what we’ve achieved. They don’t care about prizes, publications, promotions or income. They don’t care how much we weigh. They don’t care what we are and are not doing every day to save the planet and combat sexism, racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, poverty, injustice, or war. They don’t care whether we threw that can into the trash instead of the recycling, said something stupid and offended that coworker, spaced out during that meeting, slept through that appointment and lied about it, forgot our best friend’s birthday, failed to sign our kids up for camp on time,  accidentally sent that snarky email to the person it was written about, posted that embarrassing selfie on social media, or any of the ten million other things we do that fall short of the hopes and expectations of that harshest of all possible critics: ourselves. 

Instead, they wag their tails, lick our faces, rub up against us, and present us their bellies to scratch. In other words, they give us the kind of all-embracing, all-forgiving love and acceptance that we are unable to give ourselves. In an overwhelmingly uncertain world, the love of a dog is one small, sure thing. 

Maybe that’s why, when we adopted Hobie—our first and largest—he immediately became the locus of joy in our home, the glowing center around which we’d converge, delighted; the catalyst that brought forward our most lighthearted, affectionate selves.

So when I pass a dog and feel that aching sensation in my chest? Perhaps it doesn’t mean that I need to add a fourth pup to my already chaotic household. Perhaps, instead, it’s a reminder of how much love is available to all of us at all times, if only we can access our inner dog. 

*Thanks to Kate Verhoef for giving my furry trio this excellent nickname. 

Feel free to share your own furry love story in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy Get Out Into It, about how my dogs help me push past resistance and get outside every day.

Are you drawn to write the stories of your heart? In Off-Leash Writing Workshops, we allow our words to run free, exploring all the hidden corners. Join us!