Dangerous Questions

Grace finds you where you are

Jun 28, 2026

Dear Starlight,

Dread. Yearn. Break your fucking heart in two.

Somewhere this spring I started writing about “what is real?” which was about longing. It became so long it became chapters, now backlogged and impatiently waiting my return. This past week I started writing about dread and found myself writing down a long well of silt and stickiness, now stuck and in the waiting room with yearning.

And so, I have nothing complete today because these two thought-feeling figure eights: dread, yearn, demand more of me still.

Instead of sharing something complete I want to invite you to join me in my two current crushing questions:

What is real?

Who are you? You can ask: Who am I?

Two dangerous questions.

—

A few weeks ago I grabbed a handful of books from a used bookstore. One of the random $1 picks was a short novel by Clarice Lispector titled An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures. I had never heard of or read any of her work before, but the title and cover grabbed me.

I finished it last night. It was one of those rare occurrences where I felt the book was written for me and even could (ideally!) be by me (not a humble statement—an ideal statement). More pages than not are folded down to return to again and again.

The love story is a story of yearning for life itself—for the maddening pain of beauty, desire, freedom, relationship. The story is mostly in the mind, but always coupled with the body’s experience of sensuousness—apples, perfume, red sweaters, salty sea, lust for another, not knowing how to survive the magnificence of living.

—

The other day during my bodywork session the practitioner asked me to imagine myself sprawled.

The word sprawl immediately generated the image of the color copper, liquid, pooling across the table. My body began to sprawl.

She asked again: “What more can you imagine that allows you to soften even more?”

I pictured my face buried in the wings of a flamingo, and the more I nuzzled into the big soft pink feathers the softer I became. Then the feathers became pink lotus petals and I inhaled the cotton sweet scent floating around me—a scent from the lands of Isis. A scent I’ve come to associate with grace.

—

The other day I walked to a new neighborhood coffee shop and passed the dog park—a glorified pen with a chain-link fence.

Beyond the pen I noticed a pond.

I saw the pond dappled with pink.

As I walked closer, I breathed in cotton candy as pink lotus opened to the morning sun.

Enchanted.

This flower of the gods grows here beside the receptacle for dog shit?

Grace.

—

What is real?

—

Today I went to Robert Frost’s museum to see a collection of found objects from another person’s walks. I left with a book of poems titled Yearn.

Because maybe that’s why I walked in there.

To find more expressions of yearning.

—

I’m going to share a few favorite passages from Clarice below. There are so many speaking directly to the questions I’ve been carrying. Here are just three pulled from the pages.

“Understanding was always a mistake—she preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding... Yet sometimes she’d guess right. There were cosmic streaks that substituted understanding.”
“You’re waking up through curiosity... But don’t be afraid of the dislocation that will come... Whoever can suffer intensely, can also feel intense joy.”
“Suddenly Lori could no longer take it and called Ulisses: What am I doing, it’s night and I’m alive. Being alive is killing me slowly, and I’m wide awake in the dark. There followed a pause, she started to think Ulisses hadn’t heard her. Then he said in a calm and soothing voice: –Stand firm. When she hung up, the night was humid and the darkness soft, and living meant having a veil covering your hair. So with tenderness she accepted that she was within the mystery of living. Before going to bed she went onto the balcony: a full moon was sinister in the sky. So she bathed all over in it’s lunar rays and felt profoundly clean and calm. She slowly started falling asleep in gentleness, and the night was deep inside. When the night matured the fuller veil of the dawn breeze would come.“

—

That last one!

My NAME!

This is the second time I have found my name in a piece of writing I adore—the first in my favorite Rumi poem, and now this passage by a new favorite writer.

—

Towards the end of the book Clarice writes of grace as something given freely, like a short soft breath, between the contractions of living.

—

This past winter I started working on a perfume about Grace.

At the beginning of my studies I started by imagining grace, and my mind filled with colors. Those colors led to a place, which led me to the history of Grace as a governing principle in Greece, and from there to Aphrodite, to the amoretti, to Eros, to fields of hay, thyme squashed between children’s bare toes, skies of stars, and the scent of soft pink clouds at sunset or sunrise, pink lotus blossom.

I ordered pink lotus essential oil for a top note—so costly—so precious!