Emptying

Photograph:  Jar with birds-of-paradise at Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2009

While I was drinking tea this morning—meditative drink, tea
is—I realized that the arc of my life as I approached my mid-thirties slowly
turned away from everything valued by the world I grew up in.  It's as if I had to undo everything that I
had done and was "supposed" to do in order to be what I am.  Even though I began