Last night, while searching “the significance of 38,” I landed on a Yahoo! Answers page. It was not the first time I’ve sought comfort in strangers’ answers to other strangers’ questions.

In fact, the most useful information I’ve obtained since the internet was usefully searchable has been from message boards, from people with questions professionals couldn’t answer or from people with questions for which there are no designated professionals. (This practice is so common now that, as I write this, there are 837 million search results for “My medical degree is from Google University.”)

The question I had last night…

If you have ever quit an addictive habit, substance, or relationship, you know what happens at some point: the fog starts to clear. Suddenly, and in only small ways at first, you see or experience the world differently.

In the case of removing chemical substances like cigarettes or sugar, there are often sensory indicators that you’ve changed. Maybe your clothes smell different, or the physical signs of cravings lessen or stop.

I quit something 19 days ago: journaling.

Nineteen days later, I’m not free or clear of withdrawal symptoms — I find myself bending the rules here and there, scribbling…

(after Painted from Memory after Cherry Hill after Hannaton)

This is how you find your way home:

1. Get curious.
2. Drop assumptions.
3. Explore her hidden trails. Notice your surprise she has them and that they are lush. Sometimes, in winter, they are stark. This is beauty, too.
4. Honor her for what she offers rather than what she lacks. Notice your surprise at how easy this is, especially when you listen west to the city and smell east to the shore.
5. Tell everyone you know you were wrong about her, or at least not as right as you were once certain you…

The other day I was in a lively conversation with a close friend of mine about her growing business. She recalled a time when a coach she was working with shared with her in a one-on-one a dream he had. She was the subject of the dream.

“I see you standing inside a metal doorway. You’re stuck.”

My stomach turned a little as I listened to my friend tell the story. On the one hand, I could feel myself internally agreeing with the advice the coach ended up giving my friend. …

For years I’ve been trying to find a reliable site for dream interpretation or symbolism. This is one. I can’t even think of another one.

What exists, however, is a lot of SEO-focused or AI-generated dream content. While some of it may be based on, let’s say, Freudian dream analysis or Jungian archetypes — something legit — it’s still never satisfying for offering perspective into anything but my most basic dream questions. You know: What does yellow in a dream represent? Or…why am I dreaming about giraffes?

I don’t have a degree or certification in dream analysis. But I’ve been…

For about a decade, I’ve been intentionally working on my dream life. Which is to say that for the last ten years I’ve given my attention to my dreams the way I would a project, a startup venture, or a potential future field I may one day be an expert in.

Through this, I’ve come to believe what many mystics, philosophers, and indigenous cultures have claimed in one way or another: that life itself is but a dream.

A recent lucid dream — one in which the dreamer becomes aware inside the dream she is dreaming — offered me a…

For Joni for Laura for song

In the same way there is no such thing as a tendaberry
There may not be a song called Invitation

It may never have existed despite the lyrics I wrote
in my diary to memorialize them and You.

I had the notion then you were a forgettable thing.
Like a playground, I hid my eyes from every summer

walking the boards in Wildwood, NJ thinking a
blindfold could keep out the vision of a boy who

ate too much spun around too much too much too much so much he was sick every summer…