The stories we carry.

Looking forward and back.

The lake at Kirpalu, seen on my hike.

I’m sure you’re all been bombarded with the 2024 Best of Lists — the greatest books, meals, movies, plays, songs, heck even lip glosses. It’s that time of year. Milestones, markers of time like these, sort of beg for reflection — whether it’s a birthday, a graduation, or the cusp of a new year, we are wired to take stock.

So it’s perhaps fitting that I just came back from a weekend at a memoir writing workshop with the author Dani Shapiro up at Kripalu in the Berkshires, a kind of frozen tundra of yoga, meditation, tofu, and internal exploration that was quite meaningful.

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The retreat required a lot of looking back, turning my head over my shoulder again and again, staring back into the swollen universe of all the things that happened before to make me who I am today; collecting the dents and dramas of my own battered life like breadcrumbs from a bumpy road, revisiting my catalogue of traumas and heartaches, and my list of regrets and rosters of could haves. It takes a lot. The energy of exploring, digging, unearthing, whatever words we use to describe the messy examination of our past; it takes a lot. And, well, there’s no wine at Kripalu.

The main sanctuary at Kripalu where our workshop took place.

Dani was a wonderful guide, and she worked with us over three days — shepherding a group of nearly 160 mostly 50-something women (and 4 men!) through graveyards of regret, grief and sorrow, all those broken pieces of life littered around us. Between hearty meals of braised beans and sauteed greens, and sturdy breads baked from dark honest wheat; after meditations, and hikes, and yoga classes and Surya Namaskar A and B, we shared our stories.

There was a tiny older woman, who wrote about her son, who came home at the age of 32 to try to beat his addiction to heroin. He didn’t. Another woman wondered what her childhood would have been like without her alcoholic mother. What could have been? Another shared a story of the week she fled her husband, a man revered and respected by colleagues, who would come home and beat her senseless. We all carry so much. I was astonished by the thought that we could have all passed each other on the street and never known there was so much trembling inside, just below the surface.

The stories came out of us all, spurred by writing prompts. “I remember,” was one. Try it if you have time. Take a notebook and a pen, that instrument of the heart that finds feelings and incidents and moments and yanks them out of you, pouring them onto the page when you don’t even really know they are there. Write until the page is covered with words.

“I remember.”

Here is part of my list:

• I remember slanted floors in the New Hampshire house.

• I remember my grandmother’s peach tree in summer banging against the windows of the dining room.

• I remember the kids up the block teasing my brother.

• I remember my father leaving and saying he would never come back.

• I remember lying down with my mother in her narrow little ER cot at 3am.

• I remember my heart breaking.

• I remember losing my job and being afraid.

• I remember fevers and my mother and the chalky sweet taste of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin.

• I remember having hairy armpits before any of the other girls and heat of shame.

• I remember Janet calling me Andy.

And on and on. There were other prompts too, like this one: “I could have…but I didn’t.” That one I wrote for pages and pages, surprised that half an hour had elapsed.

The frozen hiking trail.

Thinking back has its place, and perhaps that place is now, at this hinge in time where these fuzzy weeks between 2024 and 2025 will unfurl slowly. I wonder what you may find when you ask yourself these questions? It’s interesting to explore if you have a rainy afternoon at home. Turn on the “crackling fireplace” app on your TV, light a candle, curl up with your cat, open a bottle of wine, or brew a cup of tea, and see what you find inside.

I want to close with this Metta Loving Kindness meditation that Dani shared with us. I’ll see you in 2025. ❤️

May you be safe.

May you be happy.

May you be strong.

May you live a life of ease.

xx

Andrea