Just posted on YouTube:  my TEDSummit talk on what we really talk about when we talk about soul.
This was in Banff, in June, and here it is, unedited.  Which I love, because you get to see it raw, gaffes and all:

And yes, of course, if the spirit takes you (as it were), share and pass it on!

Many strange things happened this week, but this was one of the strangest.

I was in the middle of a two-day recording session for Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, experiencing the delight of reading my own work for the audio-book. Standing alone in a padded room, just me and the microphone a few inches from my mouth, I moved my arms – indeed my whole body — as I spoke, as though I could reach through the mike and draw the listener in.

At home, though, the resident feline was fading fast: Dashi, fourteen years old, a silver-grey tabby with blue eyes, a wide range of vocalization, and a personality ranging from ornery to enchanting. Early in the morning of the second day of recording, I realized there was no longer any doubt about what I had to do. Tears streaming, I called the vet, wrapped the cat in her favorite fleece blanket, and took her in.  She died cradled in my arms, barely thirty seconds after the final injection. It was hard, and awful, and yet right. She had a great life with me, and I saw her out of it as best I could. That, in itself, was a privilege.

“I should cancel the recording session,” I thought, but something in me said not to – that it would be good to lose myself for a few hours in total focus. By midday, I was back in the studio. “You are absolutely rocking it,” said the director, to whom I’d said nothing of what had happened. Then, with only the last chapter still to go (on what we mean what we talk about soul), I called a cigarette break and headed toward the door.

A man was leaving in front of me, and as he went through the door he kind of half-sang a “bye-bye” to everyone there. Something in me picked up on the lilt of it, and without even thinking, I began to sing “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

Here’s where I should say that I can’t sing. I mean, I’m no good at carrying a tune. I once took jazz lessons to try and deal with this, but enthusiasm without talent can only take you so far.

As I went out that door, however, I was singing perfectly. I could hear it: every note crystalline and pure. And I went on singing, my voice carrying through the rain on Seattle’s Fourth Avenue, the cigarette dangling unsmoked in my fingers as I let the song rise up into the grey sky, thinking all the while of Dashi.

And I knew as I sang that I’d never sing that beautifully again.

(“Pack up all my care and woe, Here I go swingin’ low,  Bye bye blackbird / Where somebody waits for me,  Sugar’s sweet, so is she, Bye bye blackbird /No one here can love or understand me, Oh, what hard luck stories, they all hand me / Make my bed and light the light, I’ll be home late tonight, Blackbird bye bye.”)

April 5, 2016 publication.  Riverhead Books.
And already available for pre-order here, here, and here!

The luxury of finishing a book: you can meet a friend for lunch. That’s what I did last week at a homey Turkish restaurant near where I live. It began life as a rug shop, but since Sureya, the proprietor, loves to cook, she started serving food among the rugs. People turned out to love her cooking in return — I’ve taken Turkish friends from out of town there, and they practically wept with home-sickness – so the rugs retreated to a small pile at the back of the room. Plain wooden tables and chairs multiplied, and the news spread.

Last week was a normal mix for this place: a pink-haired student with Gothic script tattooed on her bare shoulders; a couple of hijabi mothers with babies; plaid-shirt-and-chinos software types; even a suit or two.

My friend and I ordered lentil soup and some eggplant dishes, and when Sureya brought them over she told us about her plans to move to a larger space nearby. The color scheme would have lots of turquoise, she said, and she was already haunting eBay in search of beautiful plates to replace the plain white ones we were using.

Maybe there’s something about Sureya that calls forth truth, or maybe I was still light-headed with having finished the book, but I said “Um, Sureya, you know, people tend to get light-fingered around beautiful plates…” And I found myself telling her about the time, many years ago, when I was out with a few friends in New York, at an Italian restaurant that the waiter told us was due to close soon. I don’t remember how many bottles of wine we’d drunk, but it must have been a few, because by the end of the evening, it seemed an awful pity that this restaurant’s hand-painted ceramic plates were to disappear along with the place itself, which is why several of them were somehow transferred into purses, jackets, and trousers — including those of an assistant district attorney from a major American city I won’t name here.

My friend looked on in bemusement at anyone so foolish as to tell such a story to a restaurant owner even as she was eating in her restaurant.

“So maybe stick with the plain plates?” I concluded.

Sureya seemed puzzled, as though I’d suggested the most peculiar thing. She thought about it a moment, and then her response knocked me for a loop.

“Why?” she said. “Let people take if that’s what’s important to them. Why even worry about that?” And I realized she was right. Who would even dream of stealing from a woman like this? That would be to invite such bad karma…

She was smiling as she reached behind her for a blue glass dish, and held it up in both hands. She moved it around in front of her to catch the light, swaying as she did so, almost dancing with it. “Look,” she said, “how could I not use this? isn’t it beautiful?”

It was. And so was the eggplant. And so is she.