Hello from Gilead! There have been so many times where I can’t stop thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale, which is my favorite book. (The TV show also moved me deeply, but like everyone else, it became too heavy for me, too dark, too disturbing and I found myself never choosing to watch). For instance, right after my separation, it was much harder than it should have been to get a credit card with just my name on it and I thought of the scene in Handmaid’s Tale where women were suddenly no longer allowed to use a credit card, and also how women couldn’t get a credit card in their own names until 1974 in America, a fact I was reminded of recently during a visit to the United States Archives to see the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence because I have an honest fear those crucial founding documents might just become relics at the rate Trump, Vance, and Musk are going.
It’s a discombulating and frightening time in Washington DC. Some friends have been fired. Others have laid off much of their staff. Many have lost most of the federal funding that makes their jobs run, funding that helps countless people here and in other parts of the world. DC’s law-abiding and orderly aura means that it looks as if things are continuing on as normal. No screaming in the streets, just some small and respectful protests. (Not that I’m screaming in the streets either but I feel like I should!) I walk these streets a lot and damned if every older woman I pass isn’t talking loudly about this to a friend and if every young woman isn’t on the phone with their mother detailing the shock of their days and the scariness of this falling backwards time. A friend who lived here during the last Trump administration (while I was living in Jerusalem and then Morocco) comforted me by saying that the vibe of Washington DC changed less from 2016-2020 than you might have thought. I fear that cannot possibly be the case now, what with thousands of federal jobs being callously eliminated. This is an industry town. The industry is government. The government is being destroyed. Will the town follow? I hope not. I am sticking around to do what I can.
Buuuut, actually I spent much of February in “grown up” countries as a friend just called ’em. (Seriously, America is showing up real young and dumb right now, like she ain’t a day over 200). First, I was in my favorite city in the world, Paris, for a few days. It was perhaps my 12th visit, and you know what my number one favorite thing about Paris is? That when you sit at a streetside cafe table, you face outward, meaning you are explicitly encouraged, by design, to look at strangers passing by. It’s a way of observing the outside world that I truly wish was more widespread.
Then, I was in Brussels staying with my Foreign Service Officer friend for about a week and that same fear and uncertainty about losing one’s job/foreign aid ending is very much present at every U.S. Embassy around the world. My mandate was to help my friend feel at home in her new apartment and I spent my days hitting up the flea markets and scoring some amazing finds like a stunning painting by a rather famous Syrian painter, a framed real scorpion, vintage cut glass wall sconces, and six green rattan dining chairs. And we ate mussels. Because mussels in Brussels.
After Brussels I went to the French alps for a week with a big group in a ski chalet. I do not ski, but I do hike and hotub and sauna and spa and eat and drink and it was extremely cozy. The Alps are the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever experienced and being there in the winter made me like wintertime even more.
And I’ll just bury this line here: The best part of the Alps trip for me was a petite romance with a deep and sexy man that was as invigorating as jumping into an icy cold Scandinavian river, which is a real thing I did a few days after the tryst when I was visiting a Danish friend in Copenhagen. I had suspected that it would be pleasurable to hear a hot French man say “Emily, I want to make love to you” because I watch Emily in Paris, but the depths of that pleasure surprised even me. So yes, that, then icy river, then a layover in actual Iceland, and then back to my cozy Washington DC apartment to plot what form my resistance would take.
But wait, after a week in DC (which contained plenty of fun and light things. It is not all doom and gloom), I had another long planned trip to the Dominican Republican for a yoga retreat. I went on this same yoga trip last year solo and it was profound. In 2024, while I was laying in shavasana, I forgave my ex for ending our 12-year marriage, I penned a poem called Lavender inspired by the scent on the hands of my beloved yoga teacher, Gemma. I broke three cups, I felt raw. That year, I walked on the beach and wanted to capture my face looking as sad and searching as I felt. (Didn’t work. I’m not an actress!) To contrast, this year, I walked on that same beach, set my phone on a dead tree, turned on the self-timer to try and capture myself as sexy as I felt. That is to say: I’m in a different place now. I’ve come to see my powers of perception less as me being a raw nerve and more of me being a tuning fork. I take things in. I hold them and process them. I share them. Taking in the vibrations, putting out the vibrations. Also making this yoga retreat different was that I was sharing it with two of my best friends, who were also experiencing their own profound moments under the guidance of the ray of light that is Gemma. Their presence helped make the whole thing more fun.
One kind of profound thing that happened for me on the this more lighthearted retreat: During a meditation that almost felt like a hypnosis, or a lucid dream, Gemma instructed us to picture a word to dedicate the meditation to. I’ve been feeling pretty intense pressure to have a “real” job (ie one that makes full-time money) and decided the yoga retreat could be a good reset for me and that I’d return to DC with a plan to make that green. I had a word in my head that meant something along the lines of having a set plan of attack for my next career moves, but I cannot for the life of me recall the word. At the end of the meditation, Gemma said “You’re in a forest and you see an opening to a cave. You walk into the cave and there’s a candle burning on the floor of the cave. You sit down and lean in and in the candle’s flame, there’s the entire sea. In the sea is your word. What is your word?”
I could not remember the word I had chosen, the one that meant I needed to hustle to provide for my financial future. Instead, I very clearly saw the word “REGENESIS”. I repeated it many times. That’s my word. That’s what this time is for me. It’s a rebirth.
To resisting. To regenerating.
Emily
thenextdinnerparty.com 