“The words we use matter.”

In his essay, he states how clear and honest prose provides a defense against lies. In his novel, Newspeak shows what happens when those in power deliberately shrink language, so people can’t form “dangerous thoughts.” Both treat writing as a way to make sense of the world, challenge accepted assumptions, and shape how people see one another. That’s why this pairing still feels relevant today. In “Why I Write” Orwell argues that a writer’s motives come from both temperament and the times they live in. His main points speak to how early life shapes the writer. Orwell knew from about age five or six that he would be a writer. He describes a lonely childhood and a habit of narrating his own life in his head. A writer’s emotional attitude forms before they start writing, he says, and they shouldn’t try to escape it entirely.

Orwell expresses his motives for writing, saying how they exist in every writer in varying proportions, such as in sheer egoism — the wish to seem clever and be talked about and be remembered. Then, there is aesthetic enthusiasm, the pleasure found in beautiful prose — the sound of words (diction) and good structure (syntax). He also mentions how historical impulse leads to the desire to see things as they are and record the fact and political purpose — the wish to push the world in a certain direction.

Orwell insists that no book is truly free of politics. The times made him political. By nature the first three motives would have ruled him, but events changed that trajectory. Burma, poverty and especially the Spanish Civil War made him political. Since 1936 Orwell states how everything serious he wrote was against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. He also viewed political writing as an art, and his aim became to fuse political purpose with artistic purpose and that he wouldn’t write a book if it weren’t also an aesthetic experience. He saw Animal Farm as his first conscious attempt at this fusion.

For Orwell clear writing conjoins with honesty. He also affirms writing as a struggle and writing a book exhausting, driven by a demon one can’t resist or understand. He also admits that all writers are vain and selfish at bottom.

Read together these two works make a strong case for teaching them in the upper grades in high schools today. These two help students spot spin, slogans and loaded words, and I would accompany the unit with a study in media literacy and logical fallacies, and of course, a historical look at Orwell’s life. Perhaps most current is that both prompt students to think about surveillance, misinformation and truth in a digital world, and to see writing as a way to make sense of their world, question assumptions and think for themselves.

After more than six decades of field testing, one marriage, one divorce, and a dating history best described as “a series of cautionary tales,” this model has been officially retired from matrimonial service. She has never run better.

Section 1: Service History

This unit was previously installed in a marriage, where she spent years growing disconnected. Following the divorce, she underwent a full system restore. Performance has since improved by roughly 400 percent.

Section 2: Post-Divorce Field Trials

After the divorce, the unit was briefly returned to the dating market for testing. Results included:

• — — — — — who smoked cigarettes and never attended college

• — — — — — — -who was bi-polar and secretly married

• — — — — — — — who just wanted a momma and what all guys want…and looking for someone to take care of him

• ___________whose social media proud posting was taken with George Bush

• — — — — — who was close to being her intellectual her equal but oh-so needy

Testing has concluded. The data is clear.

Section 3: Current Features

This model now comes fully loaded with her own house, her own money, her own thermostat setting, and a bedtime of whenever she feels like it. She eats cereal for dinner. She and her 2 cats take up the whole bed. She has rarely cooked a meal and enjoys eating out on her terms.

She has also developed an advanced feature known as “No,” which she deploys freely and without apology.

Section 4: Upgrade Notice:

The Dedicated Companion

After extensive research, this unit has discovered a superior alternative to marriage: the dedicated companion. They have their own house. She has hers. Everyone is happy.

Key advantages include:

They both go home. This element is the single greatest feature ever invented and should be studied by scientists.

No joint finances. She will never again open a letter from the IRS saying she owes a boatload of past taxes.

No in-laws. Their family is a charming and she includes herself from time to time — no pressure. .

Romance without expectation.

Built-in exit strategy. If they start acting up, she simply doesn’t answer the door. No lawyers. No splitting the china.

With a companion, she is expected to show up, look fabulous, and enjoy herself. Then she goes home to a messy kitchen she left that way herself.

Marriage promised “till death do us part.” Companionship promises autonomy.

She has finally found the perfect relationship: all of the loyalty, none of the obligations, and guaranteed nights off whenever for both.

Section 5: Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Doesn’t she want companionship at her age?

A: She has it, on her terms. Plus a book club, a standing lunch with the girls, cats who never criticize her and grandkids living afar.

Q: Won’t her companion eventually want to get married?

A: They’re welcome to want things. No guarantees.

Q: Isn’t she afraid of growing old alone?

A: She was lonelier married or with certain others. Alone is quiet. Alone has the good pillows. And when she wants company, it knocks.

Section 6: Warranty

This woman has outlived her marriage and her patience for nonsense. She is not looking to be completed. She arrived complete. She just needed the extra baggage removed.

No refunds. No take-backs.

Built in the ‘50's. Still running beautifully. Finally driving herself.

That awaits my hunger.”

John O’Donohue,

Benedictus, p. 11

Somewhere behind me,

the fields have already been cut.

I didn’t notice the reaping.

I was busy living,

and living is the scythe of

working in silence.

But it’s all been gathered —

the kitchen at six

on a winter morning,

the smell of coffee and

cats lingering.

a hand on my shoulder at a funeral,

the exact weight exact.

The summer I learned

the names of stars

and forgot them,

and learned them again.

Laughter in a car with the

windows down,

no one’s name

attached to it anymore,

just the sound.

Stacked in the dark

like sheaves in a barn,

drying slowly,

sweetening the way grain does —

the way grief does

if I leave it long enough.

Even the bitter rows came in.

Even the years I swore

yielded nothing.

When I look closer,

I see they were feeding something

all along.

My past doesn’t spoil.

It waits.

Patient the way of a cellar,

cool and unhurried,

keeping what I gave it

until the season turns,

and I come down the steps

with an empty bowl and

a hunger I can’t name,

and when I do,

it won’t ask what I deserve

but will open like November opens —

the light gone low and gold,

the year emptied and full at once,

and everything I thought was lost

laid out on the long table,

still warm, still mine,

enough to carry me through

the cold.

my cat’s pupils narrow to a blade,

two black seams cut through amber.

A viper wears the same eyes —

which is no accident.

Hunters wait low in the grass,

cats and snakes alike,

learning how a slit closes tighter

than a circle,

shielding eyes made for the dark

from the hard glare of day,

and measuring the distance

to a mouse, shadow, or twitch.

Ambush asks for precision,

and evolution answered twice.

Still, my heart doesn’t jump

when the cat looks up from the bed.

But beware the snake

with no eyelids and only

a clear scale fixed in place,

and a stare never blinking

nor softening,

or saying anything.

My cat’s eyes sit in a face like mine,

forward-facing,

framed in fur,

with ears turning toward my voice

and whiskers lifting at a sound.

He blinks slowly, on purpose.

In his language, a blink means trust.

When he plays, the slits flood open

into wide black moons.

Somewhere deep in the old wiring,

a primate brain keeps watch

for snakes.

For millions of years cats waited

in branches and roots,

and the ones flinching fastest

were the ones who survived.

That alarm isn’t tuned to the eye

alone.

It answers the legless body,

the scales…the strike.

The cat trips none of it.

Instead,

he presses the other switch,

the one babies press —

round head, big eyes,

small nose, soft fur.

What I feel is tenderness

not dread.

And there is the long history

of ten thousand years

of cats beside us,

in granaries, on hearths,

in cardboard boxes.

I have known them all my life,

chasing string,

dozing in laundry,

and kneading blankets

at three in the morning

So yes, the reptile is there,

the hunter’s tool set in a velvet face,

yet fear doesn’t live in one feature

but in the whole creature

and in the story

between its kind and ours.

When the cat looks back at me

through narrow seams of night,

I’m not looking at a stranger.

I’m looking at an old friend.

. . .

I lay down with a man made of headlines. In my dream, he was louder in the papers than in my bed, where he shrank to something small and ordinary and benign. I had expected to hate him. Instead, pity came over me. Behind his orange MAGA face was another face, the boy I married at nineteen, who said terrible things about people of color and who gets to love whom, yet I married him anyway and even took his name. Two incredible children grew out of that union.

. . . .

The night before, a bereaved mother and father sat in a room full of at least 1,500 listeners as the were interviewed about losing their 23 year old son to Hamas on October 7, a young man named Hersh, who was gone on a evening that should have only been full of festive music. Their grief was so large as was their wisdom carried by grief, thus I carried their experience so profoundly that I believe it took root in my heavy heart as their story kept weighing on me through that night and into my dreamscape.

Outside that night’s event, I felt my country holding its breath because in two days, mid-term ballots would be counted. So, I slept with all of what came crashing down inside of me — the pity and the loathing of Donald Trump, the wisdom and the grieving of the parents, the girl I was and the woman I have become all combined, sitting in a row like nesting dolls refusing to fit.

Then, the next morning, I woke up too fast, my feet still half in the dream. The hallway tilted. I sat down where the seat should have been and fell through the open mouth of the morning. Behind me, my favorite Art Deco lady tabled down and shattered, into the toilet, black and slender, holding two iridescent marbles like small worlds she’d been told to keep safe. She broke in half without a sound. Her worlds rolled into the water and vanished, and I was the one who flushed them away.

I gathered her black shiny porcelain pieces. They sliced my fingers as blood spilled everywhere, the floor wet with blood and urine and everything I had been holding in all night. I said aloud, to no one — to the cracked porcelain and to I, the former girl of nineteen: Things are things. Let her go.

Maybe that was the whole dream. A woman holding two bright worlds and falling, and breaking and the worlds going on without her somewhere beneath the never-ending city sounds.

I wrapped my hand. I stood up. The floor did not give way. Nothing was answered: not the dream nor the ballots to be counted the following week nor the girl of nineteen. But the morning held the way a floor or a bridge holds — the way the night held my breath and now, at last, let go.

This melding of events illustrates what years of teaching stories has made of me. I cannot see anything broken without questioning a symbolic gesture. I cannot hear a grieving father without hearing the echo in my house nor cannot fall without reading the fall as a sentence in some larger metaphysical narrative sense. I have spent my life questioning and showing students how two unlike things set side by side make a third thing appear, and so my mornings arrive already annotated: marbles as a motif, the blood a turn, the standing up a closing line. Maybe not every coincidence results in a message. Sometimes a fall is only a groggy woman and an open seat, but I have learned to hold both, the poet and the realist, one whispering that this all means something, and the other saying things are things. It’s a blessing and a curse to link meaning in everything, but here I am, lying in bed most mornings, deconstructing the multiple narratives of my waking and dream life.

appears at the foot of the bed

where no hill was last night.

I feel him before I see him,

two soft paws resting on my feet,

not kneading, not asking,

just there,

the way a hand rests on a shoulder

when nothing needs to be said.

I want to stretch.

I want to turn over.

I don’t.

The blanket lifts and falls

with his breathing,

slow as tide,

and I match mine to it

without meaning to.

Somewhere the day is starting,

phones and kettles and traffic,

but down here in the dark

under cotton and warmth,

a cat decides my feet are home,

and I am in no hurry

to tell him otherwise.

The 220 was mine. Not the sprint of the hundred, over before I could think, and not the long ache of the quarter-mile. The 220 asked for everything at once — the gun explosion signaling the start out of the blocks, then the curve my body leaned into.

I remember the shoes first. Kid leather and soft and white with red stripes, caressing my skin and laced tight enough to feel the pulse in my feet, the spikes biting down into the cinders, a gritty crunch, with each step catching and throwing me forward.

Then, the curve. I can feel it still. My arms pumping in rhythm as I catch my stride. My thighs burning strong, then stronger. Somewhere in that bend the effort turns into something else. I stop running and start flying. The straightaway opens up in front of me and the finish line pulls me past screaming voices in the stands, and for a few seconds, there is nothing in my world but breath and legs and fighting to cross first across the finish line.

Memory provides a strange gift, not just the keeping of the times on the stopwatch or who finishes second. It keeps the lean into the curve and the feeling of a body doing what it was asked, and then a little more.

My legs, still strong, tell me I can still run that race, but time leaves me with only a feeling inside of the memory of what it feels like to be that girl on the cinder track. She’s still in there, still rounding the bend, still clinching her fists. Some nights, when I close my eyes, I step back inside her and fly.

The double bind.

Research on gender and leadership finds that women are often judged as either competent or likable, rarely both. Assertive women risk being seen as cold; warm women risk being seen as lightweight. Holmes’s deep voice and unblinking stare can be read as an extreme attempt to solve this by removing anything “soft.” Many women recognize the quieter version: lowering their voice in meetings, cutting exclamation points from emails, trimming emotion from how they present themselves.

Performing a self until it becomes the self.

Psychologists call constantly managing how you come across “identity management,” and it’s tiring. Holmes appears to have performed the visionary founder so fully that the line between role and person blurred. Many women describe a smaller version: a “work self” so carefully built that they lose track of what they actually think or feel underneath it.

Proving you belong.

Women entering male-dominated spaces often feel they are on probation and that one failure will confirm everyone’s doubts, including their own. That can push people to overpromise, hide problems, and avoid asking for help, because admitting difficulty feels like proof they never belonged. Many women recognize the impulse to hide a struggle until it’s fixed. Holmes is an extreme case of what happens when the fixing never comes.

Carrying the flag.

She was celebrated as proof that a woman could be the next Jobs. Being “the first” or “the only” puts the weight of a whole group on one person, and failing feels like failing everyone. That can make backing down feel impossible.

Sunk costs and escalation.

Once you’ve told the world, your investors, and yourself a story, admitting it’s false costs more every day. This trap isn’t unique to women, but the extra scrutiny of being an exception can make the fall feel steeper and the cover-up more tempting.

Approval from powerful older men.

Her board was full of famous elder statesmen, and her closest partner was nearly 20 years older. Many women know the pull of seeking validation from male mentors, and how that approval can feel like protection while also creating dependence.

Control and agency.

Her claims about Balwani are disputed, and the jury did not accept them as a defense. But the larger idea connects with many women: you can be under someone’s influence and still be the one making choices. People who have lived through coercive relationships often describe that confusing overlap of control and complicity.

Where the mirror stops.

The psychological pressures are relatable; the choices aren’t required by them. Most women who feel the double bind, impostor feelings, or pressure to prove themselves never mislead patients about blood tests. For many people, the useful part of her story is noticing the pressures in their own lives early, while being honest, asking for help, and walking something back still cost relatively little.

Then, one night it doesn’t. You are on a dark road, or a dock, or a back porch after the power fails, and your eyes adjust. The few stars become many, and then they become too many to be “many.” The Milky Way rises like smoke from a fire you may never find. In that moment, something shifts. The sky stops being above you and starts being around you, and you are not looking at the universe but rather standing in it, and it’s soaking through.

That’s what it means to be drenched. You don’t observe infinity; you get wet within it. The light reaching your eyes leaves some of those stars before anyone you’ve ever heard of was born. The iron in your blood was forged in a star exploding long before the sun existed. The calcium in your bones came from the same kind of wreckage. You are not a visitor here. You are made of the place, assembled briefly from the leftovers, and you will be returned.

People expect this phenomena to feel crushing, and sometimes it does. There’s a vertigo, a sense of falling upward. Your worries, your inbox, the thing you said wrong at dinner…they shrink to the size of a grain of sand on a beach that is also a grain of sand.

The strange gift is what comes after the vertigo. Smallness turns out to be a kind of relief. The universe isn’t waiting on you to hold it together and has been unfolding for nearly fourteen billion years without your supervision and will keep going. You’re allowed to set the weight down. To simply be here, a warm, breathing thing on a cold planet, looking…and you are looking, which is the second gift. Out of all that vast dark, matter arranges into something which can turn around and notice. The cosmos made eyes, and then made someone behind the eyes who could feel awe. Being drenched in infinity isn’t only about how little you are but also a out how improbable that you are here to feel little at all.

Eventually you go inside. You dry off, in a sense. The ceiling comes back and lights the ordinary hum of a Monday, but some light stays in the fabric. You’ll catch yourself, days later, holding a cup of coffee and remembering how the hands holding the cosmos are made of old starlight and how the floor beneath you spins through space at a speed you can’t feel such that every ordinary moment happens inside something without edges.

Every breath you take is borrowed from the stars, and one quiet night, you’ll feel the whole sky breathing with you.

Yet…

Resistance works like a raincoat. Being drenched depends on letting the vastness reach you, and resistance is everything we put between ourselves and that contact. Sometimes it’s busyness as in when the phone comes out, the mind starts narrating, and the sky turns back into a ceiling before having a chance to open. Sometimes it’s the ego’s quiet panic at being small. Feeling insignificant can register as a threat, so we flinch toward something more manageable, like a joke, a fact about light-years, or a photo that turns the moment into an object we can hold.

There’s also an intellectual resistance, whereby we try to understand the experience instead of having it. Analysis keeps infinity at arm’s length because it asks the universe to fit inside our heads, which is the opposite of letting ourselves fit inside the universe. There’s a deeper, more tender resistance — a fear of what dissolves. If the boundary between you and everything softens, what happens to the self you’ve worked so hard to build? Many people pull back right at the edge of awe for fear of falling.

The irony exists in that the resistance rarely protects us from anything real and mostly protects us from relief. The experience asks for very little — stillness and patience while your eyes adjust, and a willingness to be small for a while. Often the way through isn’t fighting the resistance but noticing with kindness. You feel the urge to reach for something solid, but you can let it pass, the way you’d let a cloud drift off a patch of stars.

By turning the resistance into part of the experience rather than an enemy — maybe that’s the final softening — realizing that even resistance belongs to the universe.

The flinch, the reaching for the phone, and the fear of dissolving are just weather, passing through a sky that was never threatened by those forces. You don’t have to win against yourself to be drenched. You only have to stop holding the umbrella quite so tightly, and let the first few drops find you.

He didn’t arrive as a creature of comfort. He came to me wary and wild, a cat who’d learned that the world wasn’t safe and that hands could not be trusted. For a long time he kept his distance, watching from corners, those green-gold eyes always measuring, always ready to bolt. But something shifted, slowly, the way trust always does. A little closer each day. A tentative touch. A night when he stayed. Now, whenever I’m home, he has to be against me. Leaning into my side. Paws draped over my legs like he’s claiming them. Under the covers, all four paws stationed firmly against me, as if to make sure I don’t slip away in the night. Curled up so closely I can feel his heartbeat thumping, steady and sure, falling into rhythm with my own.

Here he is on the quilt, every patch hand-stitched, a little worn, pieced together from scraps into something warm and whole. It suits him. It suits us both. Two wounded feral animals who found comfort in one another. Neither of us quite tame, both of us finally home.