The first gift: a stone that nests in my palm. Turned by sea until the sea delivered it to shore, this oblong, ash-colored stone I lifted, held, and slid into my pocket. A year ago, I took it from Whidbey Island. This offering, this theft. I keep it now by my meditation bench and stack…

I often rock my baby to sleep at the witching hour. These can be the hours when thoughts, either darkly vivid or hazily formed out of interrupted sleep, stray to mournful or anxious things. But on this night, my mind is pleasantly occupied with thoughts of my beloved grandmother who died a decade ago. My…

Are any of us sleeping much lately? With such grief in the world right now, I suspect anxiety keeps a lot of us awake nights. What a rosary of sound and image Lisa Russ Spaar gives us to work through with this poem, beginning in the early evening of a sleepless night and ending with…

As I lay there, I anticipated—dreaded—the half-hour intervals of time. The midnight gongs were the worst: the official passage into the next day, the extended knell of loneliness, the reminder that I was the only person awake in the world.