Category Archives: Blog Posts

Abundance: The Zucchini Principle

We’ve been eating zucchini bread, zucchini pasta, stuffed zucchini, zucchini “crab” cakes, zucchini salad and pretty much everything else, up to but not including zucchini cobbler. It is zucchini season and we are experiencing abundance.

I am a fan of abundance.

I love watching abundance at work. The first thing it does is forces us to be grateful. We have to be grateful because otherwise we will be suffocated by squash. To avoid this fate, we take stock of what we have and acknowledge it. That’s gratitude. Even saying “damn, that’s a big pile of squash” is gratitude.

We may express our gratitude aloud, in the form of (for instance) a facebook update such as “Holy huge pile of squash, Batman!” Expressing gratitude aloud then results in an abundance of zucchini recipes.

It’s easy with zucchini because there’s so darn much of it, but this is tried and true: the next law of abundance is that if you give, you will receive. I’ve given vegetables from our garden to anyone who expressed an interest. Not only have we not run out, we’ve been on the receiving end of some culinary windfalls – completely unrelated to what we gave and to whom we gave it.

Don’t ask me how this works. It’s quantum physics.

One day I came home to find a huge box of smoked meat and cheese. Since we are flexitarians (read: dietary hypocrites), there are some meats we don’t eat. So we thought of people who would enjoy it and passed it along. Within the week I discovered salmon fillets in my freezer, delivered by a friend who had a windfall of her own.

When things pile up they don’t benefit anyone. We complain about what we don’t have, but then let what we do have sit underutilized. When our focus is on the empty basket, we don’t notice the one that’s breaking apart at the seams. Why would anyone, the universe included, put more stuff in a basket that’s already overflowing? (It does. It’s just harder to tell.)

Other things I’ve tried this with are jobs, baby clothes and a quart of heavy cream. I love volunteering but I can never do it for very long because inevitably someone comes along and hires me. I gave all our baby clothes and baby-related hoopla away, knowing if we had a second child we’d have everything we needed (we did, and we did). The quart of heavy cream scored me a mended slipcover I couldn’t figure out how to fix myself.

Exhibit B: A friend of mine is a very talented sculptor whose work sells in galleries across the country and can be seen in many public spaces. A few weeks ago I saw a knock-off of his work in a gift shop and emailed him about it, figuring he’d want them to stop stealing his designs.

He just laughed, telling me they’d have a heck of a time duplicating his latest, life-size, commission. He knew no one could steal his abundance.

My friend is no more afraid of running out of ideas and commissions than I am of running out of zucchini.

And believe me, I’m in no danger of running out of zucchini. Here, have some cobbler.

This column originally appeared in The Magazine of Yoga

I have no idea what your name is

I am great with faces, and not so good with names.

Yes, that’s a cop out. If you see a familiar face and are friendly to the person it belongs to, who cares if you know them? They either walk away thinking it was nice to see you, or how friendly people are in this town.

I am by-face-only friends with a woman who goes to the same events I do at least three times a year. Before we became face-only friends I waved and said hello repeatedly, thinking she was my friend Paula. She is not. She is somebody else, who looks, dresses, and walks just like Paula. One day, on probably the 17th smile and wave, I explained myself and we have been strangers who chat frequently ever since.

“Strangers who chat” is my ideal situation, and probably the reason I can’t remember names. Strangers who chat is my happy place. I am perfectly content staying there. I will see the same person every week for several months and be quite happy not knowing names. There is of course a point where it is too late to admit you don’t know their name and then you’re out of luck unless you sneak a picture and run it through the facial recognition software you don’t have but should totally get.

It’s different when you see someone whose name you are expected to know. I don’t know why people expect others to know their names. I almost always remind people who I am and how we know each other, unless it’s my husband or someone related to me by blood. Not everyone does this though. It’s like some kind of test.

As we talk my brain goes through a search function to glean context. Where are you from? When did we last see each other? How much am I supposed to know about you? I haven’t even started to wonder what their name is. It’s like in “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” where Geena Davis realizes she knows everything there is to know about someone and surmises that they were once in love when actually she was supposed to assassinate him.

You have no idea how often this happens to me.

I used to begin the recognition process with “friend or foe?” but found it clogged the machine. Now I figure if I am accidentally nice to someone who dumped my best friend in high school* they will see it as me taking the high ground and will accordingly become a better person, seeing the error of their ways.

There are those people who can sense you don’t know their name and taunt you with it. They refer to you by name. You counter by mentioning something you have in common, which has miraculously surfaced in your brain. They up the ante with your husband’s name, and as you try to remember if they’re even married or not, they ask about the kids by name, acknowledging their correct ages. This is blatant overkill. No one can keep track of kids’ ages, not even their parents.

Five minutes after one of these exchanges I say to no one in particular, “Lisa.” Her name is Lisa. She is the ex-girlfriend of my ex-neighbor.

Twenty minutes later: Her husband is Tariq.

Twenty two minutes: We still know each other because our kids were in playgroup together.

3 AM: Daniel and Lydia. Now 9 and 12.

Don’t ask me to tell you what they look like. For the life of me I can’t picture them.

*As if any of us had boyfriends.

Angels in tutus

When my daughter turned two I made everyone wear tutus at her birthday party.

A friend had given me two bolts of white tulle – reclaimed from her wedding. It was then a matter of buying several yards of elastic and running amok with a sewing machine the night before the party. It’s important, if you want to feel like someone’s mother, to stay up very late sewing tutus at least once.

When I say I made everyone wear tutus at the party, I should mention that Sugarplum* only had three friends her own age. The party was made up of adults: general contractors, an art gallery owner, a manager from Talbots…you get the idea.

*Not her real name.

Looking back, I realize what good sports my friends are. And we do look back. Do you know what makes for great pictures? Dressing your friends in tutus. It’s impossible to be unhappy looking at pictures of people wearing tutus and party hats. Did I mention I added tufts of tulle to the party hats?

There is a saying: Angels fly because they take themselves lightly. When I was little, my mom would call out a little prayer as I ran down the driveway to the school bus. The quote was “he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” but all she’d say was “angels charge!” I grew up thinking it was a verb. Angels, charge! After all these years, I still try to obey her call.

Sometimes we forget to be charging angels. We take ourselves heavily. We do not think we are angels at all.

Do you know what angels are? There were several at Sugarplum’s second birthday party. They jump out of photographs with light hearts and happy eyes.

Maybe angels are moments. Moments of self-forgetfulness. Moments of joy. Moments of lightness and action (because angels charge). It’s when we take ourselves too seriously that we get bogged down. We let little things unhinge us. Trust me on this. According to Merriam Webster, “lightness” is:

1 the quality or state of being light especially in weight

2 lack of seriousness and stability of character often accompanied by casual heedlessness

3a the quality or state of being nimble

3
b an ease and gaiety of style or manner

4 a lack of weightiness or force: delicacy

I want to be very clear that I’m not talking about “casual heedlessness” here. I’m going with curtains number three and four. Or even better, Merriam Webster’s alternate definition:

The quality or state of being illuminated: illumination

This morning I was talking to a coworker who had surgery recently. She said the hardest part was asking someone to drive her home. Recently divorced, she was alone and had no one to call.

Finally, she asked her neighbor, who chided her for hesitating. The neighbor drove her to and from surgery, bringing her homemade chicken soup on her return. My coworker noted that the curative properties of the soup were not the ingredients, but the fact that someone made it for her. Later, she discovered her neighbor’s last name is Angel.

Give people a chance to be illuminated.

They are angels just waiting for a tutu.

This column originally appeared in The Magazine of Yoga

Cartoons, chocolate cake, and the silent treatment

When we were kids, my sister and I would get up crazy early on Saturday mornings and do things we weren’t allowed to do. It required stealth, dedication, and complete silence – attributes we honed over the years. We were so good at being bad.

We really knew how to live it up. While our parents slept, we’d make ourselves bowls of cereal and rot our brains in front of Saturday morning cartoons. By not waking them up, we could go rogue and put Quik on our Rice Krispies, approximating the highly coveted, sugar-laden cereal mom refused to buy. We’d creep into the den and watch cartoons, sometimes in a pillow fort, banking hours of t.v. time before anyone started paying attention. It was the greatest.

Later, it occurred to us that mom and dad were probably awake, lying in bed silently but for the occasional high five. Furthermore, mom may have forbidden our making of Quik Krispies to ensure that we washed all evidence out of our cereal bowls when we were done. As an added bonus, we had to do all of this without arguing. She’s an evil genius.

To our credit, we figured this out before we both had kids and understood the value of a morning off.

I was reminded of all this today, Saturday morning. It is not early, but I am still being quiet in the hopes no one notices me. While the kids exceed their allotted computer time, I am in the kitchen eating leftover Buffalo chicken strips and chocolate cake. No one is judging me. No one is criticizing my choices. And no one is asking to share.

Do I hear them whispering? Are they saying things like “shhhh, if we’re really quiet she won’t notice.” Or are they completely hip to my shenanigans, bookending me between generations of people benefiting from my silence?

Frankly, I don’t care. It’s Saturday morning and I have cake to eat.

10 things I meant to do before my book release party

I imagined this going down differently. The launch is now 5 hours away and I am out of time for a whole list of things I envisioned myself doing. Specifically:

  1. Sit in the sun to cut the leg glare
  2. Have my makeup done again
  3. Decide what to wear
  4. Try on that thing I decided to wear
  5. Give up and buy something new to wear
  6. Send an email to people who subscribed for the sole purpose of hearing about a book launch and now will never make it omg
  7. Live in a country that is part of the Paris Climate Agreement
  8. Warn people who are in the book
  9. Get a fancier carrying case for Turnip the chicken
  10. Write a blog post about my upcoming book launch

Things I did:

  1. Marry someone with a cool last name because it will look so great on the cover
  2. Write a book.

There is a book. We have a gorgeous venue. I will have clothes on.

I’m calling it a win.

Book release party!

Frying Pan Gallery
250 Commercial Street
Wellfleet Harbor, Cape Cod
June 3, 5-8 PM

Books by Susan Blood $15 signed by the author
Prints by Rob Conery $10 signed by the author (includes free download)

Food! Drinks! Books!

Music by Brady Signs
Flowers by GATHER

 

a Cape Cod diet

The Monomoy South Beach Diet

I was listening to Robert Finch talk about his new book The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore with Mindy Todd on WCAI this morning, and discovered that Cape Cod has its own South Beach. Which means Cape Cod has its own South Beach Diet.

Still listening, I looked up Monomoy South Beach to find out which ice cream stands and clam shacks were closest because surely that would shape this diet. If you’ve ever been to the Cape in the summer, you know it’s all about ice cream and fried food.

I was mistaken. The South Beach Bob mentioned is in the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, which changes everything.

Not only is it a NWR, but it is an IBA too – which of course I know is an “important birding area” because obviously my finger is on the pulse of all things ecological, biological, and geological in my adopted region. Or at least it is while Bob is reading. According to Mass Audubon, Monomoy and South Beach are home to many significant species, including Peregrine Falcon, Bald Eagle, Roseate Tern, Piping Plover, Tern both Least and Common, Common Loon, Northern Harrier, Short-eared Owl, Pied-billed Greeb, Short-billed Dowitcher, Sanderling, Red Knot, Ruddy Turnstone, Hudsonian Godwit, Whimbrel, Willet, American Oystercatcher, Black-crowned Night Heron, and Snowy Egret.

If you want to go on the Cape Cod South Beach diet you have to eat marine worms, insects (fly larvae and beetles), crustaceans, mollusks, fish, frogs, seeds, berries, leaves, pigeons, and songbirds.

Which just figures.

I may not know what birds can be found in our IBAs, but I do know that local, native New Englanders do not mess around. They are a hardy, no-nonsense, un-mess-withable lot. They know how to do everything, can fix anything, and will do it themselves, dammit.

People here see your pile of watercress and acai berries and throw a squid and some bear sausage on it. Note: we did have a bear wander over the bridge once – probably in search of ice cream and fried food.

Totally unrelated, did you know that there’s a fish called a Sarcastic Fringehead? Do not look up images of it or you will never sleep again – unless you’re a New Englander in which case you probably eat them with scrambled eggs.

As I have mentioned, I am not from here. I am therefore skipping the diet and going straight to reading Bob’s book instead. I’ll let you know if he includes recipes for marine worms and sand shrimp.

The Outer Beach by Robert Finch

 

I'm told my face looks like this

Writing guitar face

It has come to my attention that my face is talking behind my back.

When I write, my face makes all the expressions of the words in my head, as if I am speaking them. Sometimes I feel this happening, but I hadn’t realized it was noticeable until my teenager pointed it out. Teenagers notice things and then share what they find fascinating. Like what your face is doing when you are lost in thought, for instance.

Unfortunately, odds are good that this is happening all the time. I write for work, I write for play, and I write for my mental health. I write reminder notes and grocery lists. I am writing right now. Before I sat down to write I made coffee and tried some of these words on in my head to see how they sounded together. In other words, I was writing while I made the coffee.

I have thought about setting up a video camera and training it on my face to capture what is happening, but that way madness lies. That’s probably what happened to Greta Garbo, J.D. Salinger, and Richard Simmons. I suspect I have Guitar Solo face when I write, but I’d prefer not to have that confirmed. Rowan Atkinson had the same problem:

The only thing to do is to write about puppies, and subjects that don’t make me ponder deeply. I have an uncanny ability to ponder deeply about things – like why no one has ever called their band Desmond’s Tutu, or what should go on my hospitality rider when I start that band.

To be clear, I am not an open book. I am really good at stuffing my emotional response out of sight in actual conversations. But if I am having a conversation in my head in addition to the one we’re having? All bets are off. I need some kind of alert when I start sorting words in my head publicly. It would work like a posture corrector for my face.

Maybe that’s what meditation is about. Today I’m going to have one conversation at a time and Be Here Now. When I revisit arguments I never had in the first place, I will shift my focus and envision what it feels like to be a leaf in the spring. Today will be stunning and my face will not collapse from exhaustion promptly at 3 p.m.

I’ll let you know how it goes – but it will probably be obvious. It’s written all over my face.

(Illustration is from The expression of the emotions in man and animals, by Charles Darwin, 1872)

makeup lesson

How my makeup lesson went

I was asked for a new headshot. One where you can see more than my eyes over the edge of a coffee cup. One not taken in the ’90s.

And so I set to work fretting about it, which is a long process. Pictures are the reason I drive with an expired license.

In the midst of the fretting process I remembered that I had taken Sugarplum for a makeup lesson and had promised her I would have one done, too. This is why the fretting process is so helpful and important. It brings to light things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Without the fretting process I would have gone barging into a photo session with my own face, and now I don’t have to.

When Sugarplum had her makeup done I had to look twice to establish that she had makeup on. She looked like the inside of a seashell – all glowy and smooth. I want to look like the inside of a seashell, too, so I scheduled an appointment with the same consultant.

It turns out I am the outside of a seashell.

My makeover starts with extra moisturizer because the foundation is falling into my pores. I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t sound good. She applies foundation over the moisturizer, bronzer to replace the color taken out by the foundation, and then blush to lift my face. “See how lovely and dewy it is?” she says, handing me the mirror.

Where she sees dewy, I see damp. Dewy is my lawn in the morning. Damp is my face after I’ve had a hot flash, or run up the stairs, or covered it with wet makeup that is still…wet. I am at a place in my life where I’m more likely to opt for a jar of cornstarch and a poof. But I go with it. At this point there is so much moisturizer on my face it’s only a matter of time before something hydroplanes.

And then it’s the eyes. She puts highlighter and concealer under my eyes to get rid of my dark circles. We both pretend it worked.

She has to remove a little leftover eyeliner before continuing. I don’t tell her it’s yesterday’s mascara, doubling handily as today’s eyeliner. I have time management and economy down to a science and I don’t want her stealing my moves.

Next she gives me eyebrows. I have eyebrows of my own, but they’re the same color as my skin. She fixes that with a $42 pencil, which I buy in a drunken moment of having eyebrows. I also buy the lipstick she swears by because she puts hers on in the morning and it stays put until she eats. In my case that means about an hour of wear, but I vow to eat gently and without using my lips.

I accidentally wipe half my face off on my sleeve in the car on the way home and now I have to change my shirt, which sets me back because I really like this shirt and wanted it in my headshot. Maybe I’ll hold it.

I need to take the photo fast before I lose the other half of my face. Based on her recommendations, it will run me $342 plus tax to replicate this look at home. Tonight I will sleep flat on my back like after face painting at a fair, in hopes I can wear it again tomorrow.

J. Geils, Peter Wolf, and a rock nymph

I love J. Geils, don’t get me wrong. Specifically, I loved (and wore out) Love Stinks and Freezeframe. But it was Peter Wolf’s face I cut out of the cover of Rolling Stone magazine with manicure scissors, gluing him to my bedroom wall. I dreamt of the day when my high power music industry career would give me the chance to meet and mingle with the likes of Peter Wolf. I would be a smart, savvy, rock nymph. There would be affairs.

When I at last had the opportunity to meet Peter Wolf it was exactly like I had never imagined. I did not, for instance, imagine myself middle aged and 7 months pregnant. We were having our second child, so I looked like I was overdue with triplets.

Chris mentioned it so nonchalantly: Peter Wolf was making a guest appearance at a music festival he was doing sound for. He said it like “there will be lobster fritters, Peter Wolf, and free parking.”

I actually stopped what I was doing and made him back up. “The Peter Wolf?” I asked.

“And a line array,” he most likely answered. It was awhile ago, but chances are good that’s how it went down.

It was my big chance. Most people Chris does sound for end up hanging out with him at least a little and there I would be. I tried on my entire maternity wardrobe to find the perfect look, rejecting stretch pants with belly panels, empire-waist tunics, and a sundress made of two circus tents. Try as I might, it was impossible to create the illusion of 17, so I settled on something that didn’t bind, itch, or ride up when I sat down.

I bought a string of food tickets long enough to circumnavigate my belly and Sugarplum and I set to work festivaling while the first bands played. We downed fish tacos, fried oysters, onion rings, funnel cakes, and maybe some nachos. We stayed outside near the food trucks until Sugarplum couldn’t take it anymore and made me go inside to see the bands.

Sugarplum has been a dancer since she was in utero. Wherever Chris was working, we’d go. She heard a lot of bands through amniotic fluid and would faithfully start to shake it when the music started. Once she reached terra firma, she danced whenever there was music – from a cell phone ringing to a New Jersey rest stop.

She danced while I sat and watched, too slow, cumbersome, and self-conscious to join her. When she got tired we sat in the front row watching more bands until she fell asleep in my arms. It was 9 p.m. and there was no sign of Peter Wolf. I couldn’t believe how close I was, and how much I wanted my pajamas. We said goodnight to Chris.

I carried my sleeping rock nymph to the car, past the tour busses and the parties, and home to bed.

For the record, love does not stink. Rest in peace, J. Geils. And thank you.

Pages from Sugarplum’s autograph book:

David Lowery (Cracker), Colin Hay (Men at Work), Evan Dando (The Lemonheads)
Juliana Hatfield, Frank Black (The Pixies), Peter Wolf (J. Geils Band)

spring concert for small rock stars

Barfing on the band

So cute, right? My little indie rocker decided what to wear to Spring Concert a few days ago. He even did laundry. The suit jacket is obviously still big for him – a hand-me-down from an older musician he quietly admires – but it has a certain indie band David Byrne quality to it and paired nicely with his favorite skinny jeans.

On the third song all the kids changed places. Studley made his way off the risers and to the front of the stage, where he barfed like a rock star.

Not that anyone can blame him. This entire spring has felt like someone threw up on it.

I didn’t see the barfing. I saw him being escorted out of the room and thought “wait, he’s getting kicked out? What on earth did he do?” Studley is more of a pensive, layers of electronica musician than a hard core rabble rouser. Although now that we know about the barfing, we might want to change that up.

I climbed over seats and parents and video cameras and went to my son in the hall, where he was stifling sobs over his ruined suit. We got him cleaned up and headed home, totally beating the traffic jam. This is not our first rock show, people.

Because I respect his privacy, I may or may not have mentioned all this at work. I work with performers, and they had stories of their own.

“I barfed on someone’s head.” “I wet my pants at the second grade assembly.” “I had diarrhea at the bows.”

They all seem completely unscarred, with full lives both on and off stage. They also told me what probably happened: He had locked his knees.

I think they need to practice this in music class when they rehearse for concerts. As for Studley, we’ve been coaching him in case it ever happens again. The next time he feels woozy on stage he’ll yell “thank you, Detroit” into the mic, vomit on the front row, and collapse victoriously in the wreckage.

I suggest you sit toward the back.

The real Trout Towers

Imported from the old blog, because people still ask:

In yesterday’s comments, Kristin said “you know, Susan, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t visualize Trout Towers, with the musicians and the upstairs neighbors and the chickens and all.”

I don’t blame her one little bit. I thought about her comment and thought it would be fun to encourage readers to describe the mental picture they have of Trout Towers. I would rather like that. Please go ahead and do that, even though I am about to spoil everything.

Trout Towers is a full Cape – two stories and a full basement. Fun Fact! The person who built it made the windows and chimney larger than normal to make the rest of the house look smaller. It is the clown car of houses.

It looks kind of like this:*

Or it would look like that, if it weren’t for a few curiosities we like to leave around the yard. Like the lawnmower. And a woodstove. Doesn’t everyone have a woodstove in their driveway? No?

This shows the woodstove in the front yard, which would be tacky. Ours is in the driveway and therefore totally classy.

I may have mentioned at some point that Chris likes to bring things home from the dump. Specifically, windows. He’s fond of shower doors, but those must be around on the other side of the house because I couldn’t find a good picture of them. Also, my mother-in-law’s electric cart which we forbade her to drive because she was a maniac. And blind. But whatever.


We are also great fans of the exercise thing and have various wheeled contraptions around the yard for that purpose. Mostly bikes, a tricycle and a jog stroller that birds may possibly be nesting in by now. I do not jog.


And let us not forget the chickens.

Lucky for everyone, Chris took down the geodesic dome he built and left to die on the lawn. It was going to be a garage, but never quite worked out that way. It was kind of an awesome, if overly large, sculpture – until we had kids and the kids had friends and the dome started to look like a really, really big home owners’ insurance claim.

So, it doesn’t look like that at all.

It looks like this.

* Whoever actually owns the house I used in this illustration, I am really, really sorry.

Sitting Pretty

I ran into a friend this morning in a beach parking lot. Figuratively, I mean. We’re both okay.

She was wearing a navy Izod polo dress, faded to denim and soft with wear. “I’m wearing all my old clothes from the ’80s,” she said.

No one wants to see me in my clothes from the ’80s. Black lace and camouflage, arms ringed with plumbing supplies and a pair of pants that looked like they were made from a Hefty trash bag – it’s a mercy none of it fits now. It was my way of saying “I am not from here and I am not one of you.”

I was of course from there and looking back, was one of them. I just didn’t like admitting it. I used my clothing to define myself, as did we all.

I remember a political science professor in college telling a classmate that although he was welcome to wear hot pink nail polish in class, it would just make things hard for him out in the real world. It was his choice, to either smooth the road ahead or make it unnecessarily rocky. Like it or not, we are initially evaluated by our appearance.

He didn’t say it’s right or just, he said it’s the way it is.

My friend is a mountain biker and likes his roads on the rocky side. This guidance did not phase him or alter his course toward what became a very successful career. He probably doesn’t even remember the conversation.

I’m not a mountain biker, and prefer to stay off the really steep inclines. I’m more of a Parisian side street kind of girl.

I used to wear vintage dresses to parties because I am shy and the clothes always inspired people to come talk to me. They sparked conversations about history, art, fashion and eventually the hors d’oeuvre table because that’s where my real interests lie. The funny thing is that because I wore clothes that were different, people thought I was confident and extroverted.

Which isn’t to say I’m not extroverted. I am very extroverted when I am at my house, alone, expressing my thoughts via my laptop. In my vintage kimono.

Clothes do many things, then. They mark us as one of the herd or single us out as the black sheep. They make the road a freshly paved expressway or a treacherous single-track of adventure. Not all on their own, of course, but as my professor pointed out, they do weigh in.
Part of their influence is the way they make us see ourselves. If you tell yourself that something is true enough times, eventually you believe it. If you choose to wear that message daily, it expedites the process.

In college I was incensed that people would judge my friend by his nail polish. I thought they should see him for who he was and value his contribution. It’s a two edged sword, this fashion thing. We use it. We are surprised and appalled when it uses us.

Years ago I spent a long weekend at a Zen monastery. One of the things they asked was that we wear loose, dark colored, simple clothes, with no patterns or pictures. They didn’t want our clothes to be visually distracting.

I didn’t think about it much as I packed my favorite black sweat pants and t-shirts, but it’s one of the things I appreciated most while I was there.

With no visual statements to distract me, I saw people as they were: beautiful and exquisitely memorable.

When I came home I made a concerted effort to simplify my wardrobe. We are all so perfectly us, we don’t really need the sandwich boards around our necks, telling people who we are and what makes us different/better/smarter/wiser. Sandwich boards are heavy.

I don’t always practice what I preach. Today I am wearing a particularly loud sundress because it makes me laugh like a maniac when I see a reflection of myself. It also makes random strangers smile when I walk by. It’s not good at a monastery, but it’s perfect for work.

These are my current guidelines for clothing choices, subject to change. I don’t need to be different. I don’t need to tell people who I am. I just need to be comfortable and happy.
And although I would have eaten live frogs before wearing my friend’s Izod dress in the ’80s, it looked covetously comfortable this morning.

That’s pretty fashionable.

This column originally appeared in The Magazine of Yoga