I took a solo retreat last weekend to focus on writing. It's been a couple of years since I did this, and to be perfectly honest it was a mixed bag.

Walking alone can be a meditative practice. Walking with children leads to interiority by a different path. My love for walking hearkens back to my days as a pilgrim, when I traversed Spain and, later, France on the Camino de Santiago. On pilgrimage, you follow the path, absorbing the folds of the land in your bones as the body wears out, and mind-chatter stills to a plain - flat, expansive, rounding at the edges. 

We do not belong only to ourselves, we belong also to our culture, and in a culture that demands we use our bodies less and less, walking is more and more - a revolutionary act.

By Sarah Childers. I come from one of the quietest places on earth. There is a difference between quiet and silence. Quiet feels like being held. It is the contented squeak of something small and furred sleeping curled into itself. Silence is the unsaid, bound and gagged.

The morning after Inauguration Day we waited in a crowd along Jackson Street to join the Seattle Womxn’s March. Behind us, a tofu factory. Across the street, an art school. Above us, blue sky and later, after we had passed, a pair of eagles. 

My hair, as far as I’m concerned, is supposed to be blue. It was always supposed to be blue...

Wednesday morning, mere hours after the presidential election was decided, in the calm, quiet of my baby’s room, as I nursed him back to sleep, I wept silently. I wept for the loss of a dream, I wept for the nation, and I wept for my daughters. I faced for perhaps the first time in my life, the fact that for some, women’s rights are not human rights. I started to think about “women’s work.”

The teacup drops from my hand unprovoked. It simply falls to the tearoom’s wooden floor and wobble-rolls under my chair.  The cup is empty; there’s no splash or mess, only the noise of the cup’s landing that may have been a firework for the look the woman across the room gives me. Cocooned on the couch, the woman pulls the plush white robe she must have brought from home closer around her neck and returns to her journal.