Category Archives: Reflective Essay

If you want to know what I was like as a kid, picture Hiccup from the movie How to Train Your Dragon, and that about sums it up. I was a shy, quiet daydreamer with the physicality of a string bean. Instead of listening to class lectures, I doodled pictures in the margins of my notebooks. MyContinue reading “The Knucklehead, the Drunkard, and the Warrior Heart”

How do you feel about change? Do new experiences fill you with fear or with excitement? Are you a Luke Skywalker, gazing out across the desert behind your uncle’s moisture farm and wishing you were someplace else (maybe pulverizing the forces of evil, or just going to Toshi station to pick up some power converters)?Continue reading “Dancing at the Depot”

What makes a story resonate with us? Why do certain books, movies, and pieces of music have the power to fill us with longing, to make us cry, or to overwhelm us with joy? In my experience, the tales that have moved me the most have been stories that artfully depicted things that were deeplyContinue reading “WANTED: Just as We Are”

On an overcast day, I sat on a step by my family’s deck, looking out at the tree line past the roofs of nearby houses. I’d been sitting there for a while when I looked down to my right and saw a bird sitting on the step next to me. It looked like a sparrow,Continue reading “Sucker-Punched by Beauty Ninjas”

What are you afraid of? On any given day, the list of reasons to be worried can seem overwhelming. Sickness. Debt. Loneliness. Failure. Political injustice. Death. We navigate a landscape of murky shapes and looming shadows, picking our way through the charred rubble of past losses, heartbreaks, and catastrophes. Bewildered by what we’ve encountered andContinue reading “What We Do When the Lights Go Out”