My friend Melissa is on the other side of the ocean right now, navigating a path of discovery that is both glorious and precarious. On paper, life is easily distilled into chronology and expectation. Lived fully, it’s rich in nuance and mystery and the dizzy dance and learning that we are truly born to belong. In the United States, we’re encouraged to live with fierce independence. But stepping outside our small world, we see that we are not our own. We’re in this together.

We talked about how difficult translation can be, how words don’t easily hop from one culture to another, what we have to lay down in order to receive understanding.

But translation is a lovely thing. It opens us to new ways of painting words. We let go of colloquialisms (words we’ll one day look back on and find have cheapened the depth of what we wanted…