Under the Banyan Tree

I was going to blog about social constructs today because these constructs shape our behavior and determine much of who we are or who we think we should be, but I need, instead, to write about psychics. You know, fortune tellers. Without the fake accents and the scarves and the crystal balls but with the intensity and weirdly maternal energy. I'm pretty sure having consulted one (or two) reveals something about where I fit into one social construct or another:  female, mother, middle-class, confused, limited by design, I don't know. But there are a few things I do know. And insights I learned from the fortune-telling experience. I consulted my first psychic ten years ago, stepped, on a Tuesday night, into her single-room, house-like office that has since been sold to a tax firm whose signage is larger but less intriguing than the psychic's welcome message (I'm pretty sure those tax letters don't flash). When I knocked on the woman's door after having opened th...

I write fiction. And non-fiction. And bad poetry, which I don't feel ashamed to admit because poetry inspires, enlightens, and brings joy, but I'm no good at writing it, or at least not really. I could do it, I suppose, but I prefer fiction with its characters and colors and momentum. I enjoy what Marlon James, exquisite writer and person, identified as the arising of characters from [the writer's] need. I don't know who or what will appear when I begin crafting a story, but I know I'm ready for the arrival of anything. I'm even excited about the unknown. Yesterday during an English 1A session focused on narrative essays, I decided that life is like that. Non-fiction, despite not being imagined, is like that. Things happen and no one fully understands their occurrence. But sometimes -- not always, for sure -- we're inexplicably prepared for these moments that seem to have bubbled up from our subconscious. We haven't willed them, we probably don't e...

Some questions sound perfectly benign but hold more power than we think. Like a lot of power. I encountered one such question a week ago when I posted vacation photos on social media and a girlfriend commented, Where are you these days? I was in the Bahamas at the time and thrilled, of course, to answer the question and even extrapolate a little, adding qualifiers like amazing, stunning, inspirational. I may even have confessed, In my happy place. Upon returning home, also a wonderful place but not one as majestic and peaceful and just plain gorgeous as my favorite island, I began reflecting on the myriad areas of my life to which that question applied. Where was I, really? And why didn’t I interrogate myself more often about the figurative places I had settled into -- either by choice or misstep or neglect or comfort? I didn’t often check in with the emotional, physical, and spiritual states I was in. So how did I truly know where I was? And if I didn’t know, how could I evaluate and...