Mourning Surf (2026)

12/02/2026

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about various forms of kinesthetic empathy, or placing yourself in someone else’s shoes and walking with them. We are neurologically motivated by “mirror neurons” to process what we see, through our own bodies. With so many visual images coming at us from social media and the news, images that depict people in often harrowing and desperate situations, we cannot help but feel it in our bodies.
I practice kinesthetic empathy in my grief movement classes and workshops – moving with – it’s a form of physical listening and an attuning to another’s experience. By expressing kinesthetic empathy, I am communicating without words that I am sharing the grief being expressed.
I had an incredible feeling of kinesthetic empathy while watching the movie Hamnet recently. The last scene ravaged me in ways I am still processing. But to see the audience reach their hands toward Hamlet, to feel their kinesthetic response formed into that collective reaching gesture was astonishing. They all had tears in their eyes, crying for someone else’s son. Empathy is the basis for tragic drama – the idea that we must feel for those onstage in order to ultimately purge painful emotions, which in turn causes catharsis.
Kinesthetic empathy is grief shared through movement.
Kinesthetic empathy is also shared joy. As Bad Bunny’s joyous performance demonstrated, movement invites us to collectively witness and celebrate the truth of another’s experience.
How are you experiencing, practicing or sharing Kinesthetic Empathy these days? Take care of yourself and each other ❤️

06/01/2026

Rosalía recently made a performance out of stillness for her LUX show – in which she lay motionless for two hours enmeshed in a flowing white gown that resembled bedsheets - creating a meditative, immersive piece for deep listening.

I always tell my students, “Stillness is a movement,” meaning that stillness belongs to the repertoire of movement available to us. Stillness is intentional – it is not the same thing as simply being motionless, because stillness is alive, it has breath, it is a gesture suspended between moments.

I’ve been horizontal a lot this holiday. Some of it was not feeling well but mostly it was and is, exhaustion – a weariness that seems to have no end. As I embraced laying down, I started to think about what it means to be horizontal and how the word horizon is at its core: Horizontal comes from Greek kyklos or “bounding circle.” It refers to a boundary – specifically the line that appears to separate the earth and sky.
So to lie down is to align yourself with the horizon—where the world curves away from view and your body becomes parallel to what is visible, echoing the lie of the land or sea itself as it stretches toward the edge of sight. As I lay down, I imagine myself joining that gesture of stillness and expanse for the horizon is not where things end, but where they open to what lies beyond.
Wishing you a restful and restorative beginning to the new year! ❤️

02/12/2025

Because grief is human-shaped ❤️

14/11/2025

When the loss of your husband also means the loss of your creative partner: I met my husband Jim in New York City in 1998 while I was an artist in residence with the theatre company Mabou Mines. I was busy creating an evening length showing of short plays by Samuel Beckett. From the very beginning I recruited Jim to help me run lights and set up my projector. I had rented a bench from outside Il Bucco for the weekend of my show, and he and I carried it 14 blocks to the theatre! Later Jim designed beautiful postcards for my shows and he never missed a performance. He became not only my most trusted confidant and collaborator, but my greatest supporter. Jim would beam with pride after one of my performances and talk excitedly with people after the show about how I had put it together and what was behind the images and movements. Jim was an incredible painter and craftsman, he played classical piano…Scriabin, Mompou, Brahms…and he deeply appreciated theatre and dance. Some of our most memorable and intimate experiences were spent watching performances – together in the dark, in complete awe.

I have been involved in some creative projects recently and I have dearly missed his voice, his guidance, his encouragement. Without Jim I have struggled to figure out how to be, let alone how to create. My creativity was linked with his spark for so long that without him I can’t find traction. Composer Louis Horst once told Martha Graham that, “Every artist needs something to lean against.”

Speaking with a friend she reminded me how much Jim loved supporting my creative projects – she told me that it was evident that Jim was 100% committed to nurturing my creativity. Wow. He is no longer here to make postcards or have late night talks about dramatic structure, but I dwell in the memories, the lingering love. ❤️ 📷 sitting at Jim’s piano Tribecca 2001

11/09/2025

These photos are not from the news coverage of Sept 11, 2001, they are photos taken by my late husband Jim, from our home in Tribeca as the Towers came down. Our neighborhood was blanketed with ash and paper and Jim, really had not understood what was happening until he walked outside our apartment. Today I’m remembering the thousands of people who died that day and the many who have died since then: first responders, workers, residents, those who hauled away the wreckage…those who helped rebuild. So many lives lost, and countless lives forever changed. ❤️

09/08/2025

Grief is a Beach

“Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy”

So sings Ella Fitzgerald in her dreamy dulcet tones, which makes me want to drift lazily in an innertube or doze in a hammock under a shady tree. Summer can be so full of sensory riches. But grief doesn’t end just because the sun is shinning and the idea of being sad in the summer can sometimes feel so at odds. But summer is my grief season with anniversaries and deathaversaries back-to-back from July through to September. Grief, like storms, just seems better suited to fall and winter.

I remember taking my five-year old daughter to the beach to build sandcastles and feeling terrible that we had left my very ill husband that afternoon. How could we be at the beach without him? It was something we always did together as a family. But we did find lots of ways to bring summer inside that year, from banana popsicles, to watching Jaws on repeat to opening up the doors at night to take in the August moon and catch a whiff of the night blooming jasmine outside his room. Even now as I am coming up to the ten-year anniversary of Jim’s death, I am reliving his last summer almost day for day, as I look at pictures and read my journal from that time. It’s gorgeous outside and I’m curled up in a ball. I come to the day Jim died in my journal. I hesitate to read what I wrote. But I am not surprised to find that only a few hours after holding him for the last time, I am in the ocean. I remember crying in the ocean - already shocked that I could inhabit a world that he was no longer in. I’m going to the beach today, swimsuit on, sunscreen on, because tears and summer must co-exist for me.

“One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky…”

28/07/2025

It started with a book. Well two books. As my wedding anniversary approaches, I cannot help but reflect on my life with Jim and and that special day when we met. NYC. East Village. Coffee Shop. Two city dwellers reading books on a Sunday afternoon while their laundry spins nearby. Very handsome, I think. Reading. That’s a plus. Then I notice what he is reading. It’s a biography of Thomas Jefferson. Wow I think, that’s kind of funny because I’m reading Declaring Independence, a study of Jefferson’s oratory. It’s for my Ph.D. exams. Ok that’s an opening. What are you reading I ask? Or did he ask me? I don’t remember because I was lost in the sensation that I was somehow speaking my first words to the person who would become my husband. We talked a long time and he walked me home only to discover that we were next door neighbors. What followed was a beautiful romance, pre-cellphone, which led to a few months of leaving notes for each other on our mailboxes – “J’aime, want to have a catch?”
“Hi Jim, want to walk in the snow today?” – “J’aime, I love you.” I still have these notes and I cherish them.

Jim died August 14, 2015 six years after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. I haven’t shared this story before, but it’s my story, it’s our story, and writing it down, sharing it here helps me keep these memories alive. So much love, a lifetime of love in my heart for us. ❤️

08/07/2025

Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large. I contain multitudes.” I invoke this idea in relation to grief because so often grief makes us feel smaller than we are, or as it did for me; made me want to disappear. Instead of shrinking down under the wright of grief I want us to remember how much we carry, all at once, inside of us when we are grieving. I remember caring for my husband while also raising a toddler, and continuing to work and mentor students. I remember being madly in love with my husband and at the same time beginning to grieve the loss of our future together….in grief past, present and future collide, dreams and desires are held along with devastating news and difficult decisions. We are shapeshifters in grief, navigating through myriad roles and identities. But grief itself might be the greatest shapeshifter – it comes into our lives and never leaves, endlessly changing and remaking us.

For my upcoming workshop for PALMA COLECTIVA we will embody and explore our multitudes…see link in bio for more info.

30/06/2025

About two months after Jim died I took my daughter to Oakland, CA to visit a friend. It was a short trip and we had made the journey many times. I was caught completely off guard when I returned home to find him not there. My heart was blown open all over again. Normally he would have made dinner and he would be watching football or puttering around the house - home was wherever he was. I learned that I had to anticipate these moments. I didn’t travel for some time after that. This coming home to his absence was something I felt every time I walked in the door but it was especially palpable after a trip. If you are grieving and you find coming home is not the same, I’ve put a few things that helped me above. ❤️✈️❤️

20/06/2025

Weaving with the threads of my life here in Sligo this week: three years studying Irish theatre and living and working in Dublin, learning to surf and embracing the healing waves while I grieve the death of my husband, dancing since I was a child and teaching movement to students, actors, grieves, kids- dancers and non- dancers, politicians and filmmakers…grief + surfing + dance IN IRELAND!! It’s a pinch me moment and I cannot wait for this retreat - to welcome the women who have traveled far and near to this beautiful place that is alive with nature’s wild beauty. Oh yes, and there was that date with Van Morrison!

05/06/2025

Just a reminder that movement doesn’t always propel us in one direction. Our bodies move in many directions and our grief moves in multiple directions, sometimes all at once! Movement can go forward, but we also move in spirals and squares and diagonal lines - backwards and forwards and on the ground and on our toes, rolling, turning, jumping, falling, crawling, rising…the grammar of our bodies is movement and there is no proscribed path through grief - so we must all become the choreographer of our own grief.

24/05/2025

I’ll never forget waking up in Jim’s apartment in NYC on our first Memorial Day weekend together. He jumped out of bed and said excitedly, “it’s Memorial Day Weekend! Let’s get our swim suits on!” It was the starting bell of summer and perfectly expressed his enthusiasm - we spent the most wonderful day on Fire Island that weekend. I miss him so much, his voice, his intonations and our favorite sayings that only we knew. My beloved husband I miss every molecule of you. I’m sharing this little piece of Jim with you today: “It’s Memorial Day Weekend! Let’s get our swimsuits on!” ❤️🇺🇸❤️

Mourning Surf