Memoir

My current project is Terrible Beautiful, a memoir that explores the contradictions of suffering and love in my marriage to my junior high school sweetheart. Orlando and I became best friends when we were twelve and were married for ten years. Since childhood we carried our love like a talisman. But our marriage ended when Orlando’s alcohol-fueled behavior crossed the line from emotional to physical abuse.

During the final year of our marriage I leaned on my belief in my yoga practice. For decades I had trusted that yoga was teaching me a better way to live. The last year of our marriage would test my belief in yoga and challenge everything I thought I knew about love. 

To understand our love story it is necessary to examine the fundamental nature of love itself.  The story is told in a braid; chapters of the love story alternate with time I spent at an ashram. The ritualized pace of the ashram helps the turbulent story of the relationship to find proper proportion. The daily ashram routines are like a kaleidoscope; rotating my beliefs and fears into view until I am forced to reconcile the fallibility of my limited mind as it tries to understand the larger question of the true nature of love.