There’s a particular white wine I’m sipping that transports me back to the sun-bleached limestone and olive-tree-studded mountainsides of southern Greece. It was introduced to me on our trip last month by Giannis, a fourth-generation winemaker in the off-the-beaten-path Papagiannakos Winery sandwiched between the bustle of Athens and the blue waters of Artemis Beach on […]
travel
Finding Inspiration and Joy on a Girls’ Trip to Cabo
Two little words can carry a wealth of promise. A promise of adventure, magic, nourishment of the soul, and, you know, margaritas. What are these two mystical words? “Girls’ trip.” I recently spent almost a week in the beautiful Cabo San Lucas area of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula with two dear friends I’ve known for four […]
Touching Down in a Foreign Land (Flamingo International Airport, Bonaire)
To step onto land unfamiliar is to invoke a kind of magic. It’s a magic of expansion—of the mind, of the spirit, of the air in my lungs too long compressed by stillness. It’s a magic of discovery, of anticipation. It’s a magic of hope. As I step onto that land, I pause, feeling for […]
Breaking Through the Gloom
Back in September, when we thought we were living through the worst of the pandemic (I’ll pause here while you get that hysterical laughter under control), I’d had it with humanity. Sure, there are a lot of individual humans that I like—love, really—but by September, humanity as a whole had reached a whole new level […]
Finding Familiar Stories in Sicilian Ruins
An ocean scene mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina in Sicily Standing in the remains of a palace built nearly two thousand years ago, I stared at mosaics on the floor depicting stories I knew. And those stories aren’t just two thousand years old. In fact, those stories were already a […]
Postcards from New York City
The cabbie, with one hand pressed firmly on the horn and the other making exasperated gestures, crammed his way between a city bus and a gray Rolls Royce while keeping up a running Senegalese-accented and highly colorful dialogue with a colleague on the phone. Dirty snow from last week’s storm fought with piles of black […]
