I followed my route from the Parfum Museum down through some of Paris's most storied neighborhoods… Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, just steps apart, had long been the heart of Paris's literary scene... Since the 1920s, these cafés had served as twin havens for writers and intellectuals, their marble-topped tables witnessing countless literary discussions.

Upon arrival in the neighborhood, I was greeted with a rather unpleasant and anachronistic surprise. A very realistic head on a pike and a man in a tricorn hat greeted me as I came up from the Underground station. …

Sometimes wisdom comes from unexpected places. For me, it arrived through five crude words at a Christian music festival in 2004: "Pull your head out of your ass."

Saturday, May 10, 2014. The late afternoon sun filters through the leafy canopy outside my kitchen window and the brightness stings my tired eyes. I sit at the table, guitar in hand, staring at the frayed transition where the linoleum meets the carpet. …

The angles are at odds with the almost soft and childish way you look back at me, a mixture of shame and fear in your eyes that I'm not used to seeing so prominently expressed. You look cold, a discomfort evident in the set of your shoulders, the tightness around your eyes. Yet you refuse to wrap your arms …

Just a week ago, I was on the phone with my mom as Hurricane Helene ravaged her home in Mills River, North Carolina. Though I couldn't hear the wind itself, the sound of windchimes on her porch furiously clanging in the background haunts me still. …

We moved in with my mom’s lifelong friend when we got there. The house was in a field next to a small airport for crop dusters. The light on the tower would circle all night long and flash in through the balcony doors at the end of the upstairs hallway. Sometimes …