I wonder what my husband thinks when he turns a corner in our house and finds my head buried in a cabinet or drawer.

Scratch that.

After sharing six homes over the course of seven years, my husband knows that when he turns a corner in our house and finds my head buried in a cabinet or drawer, he’s lost me. Sometimes for just an afternoon, other times for a few days. I’m not sure if he has come to appreciate this or see it as a sign that I’m up for OCD candidate of the year, but he accepts it nonetheless, and I appreciate that he never tries to talk me out of my not-terribly-infrequent habit of household purging. On a mild day, I’ll stick to one room; when I’m on a rampage, the entire house is up for grabs. On my last binge I spent an entire weekend culling, tossing and packing boxes bound for Goodwill, all of which amounted to two carloads of donations and four bags of trash.

That was almost two months ago, and this past weekend I was at it again in my studio. The results: one bag of trash, one bag to Goodwill, all shelves emptied, re-arranged and re-organized, and no more stray art supplies in the bathtub. It might not look remarkably different at first glance, but I see how every nook and cranny has been altered. I savor the new pockets of open space and feel less encumbered by bits and baubles I’ve hung to for years, waiting for the day that perfect project would make them indispensible.

My obsession is not difficult to understand. A close family member has a fixation at the opposite end of the spectrum, which has resulted in a house filled with so many material objects that there is literally no room to sit down. Pathways through the house are created with boxes and the few small spaces throughout the house that exist have room for only one person. I haven’t been in that house for a long time, but the memory of standing in it and feeling the weight of the loneliness that must be felt by anyone who would live in such an environment is still palpable. That house felt heavy – literally and emotionally, as if the amassing of so much stuff was the only way this person could feel a connection to the world.

It could certainly be said that I have gone too far to the other extreme; it isn’t hard to recognize those moments when this little “quirk” turns into a full-blown compulsion. I became so transfixed by the idea of emptying out at least one shelf in my studio this weekend that I could hardly think of anything else, and I knew all along that if anyone could read my thoughts they would think I had gone off the deep end. I simply had to get rid of more; it wasn’t a choice. My studio began to feel heavy, and heavy is not what I want expressed in any area of my life.

Stories of human obsessions, fixations, inclinations and addictions are a dime a dozen, and they are usually focused on attempts to overcome and release them. Rehabilitation is the goal, and anything less is failure. I’m OK with my neurosis. It doesn’t involve abusing my body, hurting those around me, or sending me into a tailspin of debt, pain and sorrow. It is what I need to do to keep myself in a space that feels light – in my home as well as my heart and mind. And pursuing what feels light and airy can’t be a bad thing, even if it makes my husband shake his head in bewilderment every once in a while.

There is a full moon tonight, and with the fires still raging near Los Angeles, it hangs above the sky behind a veil of amber, glowing eerily against an inky blue sky. The sky is always strange in Santa Monica when fires are wreaking havoc nearby — it feels thicker and heavier, as if the smoke was pressing down on the clouds — and the streets of my neighborhood always get quiet. This part of Los Angeles settles down and grows still, perhaps in order to balance out the chaos happening close by. We are in no danger here, but can see giant plumes of smoke in the distance that look like an erupting volcano.

I moved to southern California after finishing graduate school at the University of Georgia, and whenever I told someone that’s where I was headed, I always received the same response: “Watch out for earthquakes!” Seems as though anyone who does not live in the Golden State has the impression that the earth rattles on a weekly basis around here, but I have lived on the south coast for more than fifteen years and felt just over a handful of small jolts. It is peculiar experience, absolutely, but — knock on wood — I have yet to experience a seismic shift large enough to make me run under a table. The idea of an earthquake still feels distant to me; I know I am more likely to feel one than my friend Melissa in North Carolina, but it isn’t something I think much about (until I write that big fat check for our earthquake insurance, then I’m thinking of it plenty, as the high premiums are the result of past devastation.)

The biggest disasters I have seen as a California resident have not come as the result of tectonic plates moving and rumbling. The worst damage I’ve witnessed has occurred when the devastatingly perfect storm of Santa Ana winds, Indian summer heat and human beings swirl together. One month it’s a kid playing with matches, another time college students don’t extinguish a campfire, this week it looks like arson. The worst fire in Los Angeles County history, started intentionally, destroying an area my husband and I recently went on a motorcycle ride through. The newly paved roads are destroyed, the café where we ate lunch burned to the ground, the scent of pine trees extinguished by smoke. And the fires continue to rage, not yet 40% contained.

But I also know this — that as eerie as it is to look in the sky and see ash, as horrible as it is to think about all that has been lost — it will grow back. I have driven past enough areas swept away by fires and seen bright green sprouts bursting through soil as black as coal to know it will grow back. And against the charred remains, all the new shoots seem to glow. Emerald greens, stark whites and tall, shiny leaves, as if the land of Oz had been lying dormant underground, and once the fires came through, it could be unearthed.

On any journey that involves loss, there is always room for new growth, as well as the realization that there are some things — in the world and in our own hearts — that cannot be destroyed. The fires now burn, but it will grow back. It will grow back.

There are certain moments from my past that have held their place in my consciousness since the day they happened. While other memories faded, drifted to more distant parts of my brain or vanished within minutes of occurring, a seemingly arbitrary collection of snippets has remained. Like the inside pocket of every purse I own that is always used to hold my house key, there are areas of my mind that harbor flashes of time that don’t seem to make much sense in terms of their longevity. Why would it be important for me to remember one tiny exchange with a high school girlfriend when I was barely 16 years old? The one where, as we headed to bed after a late night out, I said to her, “I’m so tired…so tired I’m not even going to wash my face.”

Even in high school, after a few sleepovers and slumber parties, my friends knew I had a non-negotiable ritual at bedtime: Washing my face. Instilled in me by my mother from the time I was a teenager, the act of washing my face — along with an array of other steps like moisturizing and toning — became a ritual that has stayed with me my entire life. No matter where I am or how tired I am, if I have water and sink (even a bowl will do) my face will be clean before I go to sleep. But every once in a while, I give myself permission to go to bed with the day’s makeup and dirt still intact, and when that happens I think of that conversation.

There is something comforting in the knowledge that this is a ritual I have been devoted to for nearly 30 years, that through all the twists and turns life has thrown me, in all the different countries and cities I’ve visited, I have taken this routine with me. Through everything, washing my face at the end of the day provides me with a few precious moments when time stands still and the world is quiet. The grime of the day is washed away, and every step of this process lets my body know it is time to wind down and prepare for whatever dreams lay in store for me.

The night I told my friend I was so tired I wasn’t going to wash my face, she totally got it — she knew I was tired. Really tired. Her knowing that didn’t have any profound effect on our friendship or the course of that evening; in many ways it was meaningless. But it stayed with me nonetheless, and I am beginning to think the reason it continues to shine from the dark recesses of my memory is that it provides a bookmark, something that shows me how long I’ve practiced this ritual — that despite so many changes and moves and travels, there have been small pockets of consistency in my life. Washing my face every night is not a practice that is going to change my life, but it is a small act of kindness towards myself that never fails to make me feel good, and perhaps that is enough — as with any act of kindness towards anyone, sometimes the smallest deeds are enough.

I love those goosebump moments of recognizing kindred spirits. In the best cases, this happens in person, but very often it happens with individuals I come to know more distantly – through their writing, artwork or music or through stories someone else shares about them.

Over the past year or so, as my creative work has shifted from visual art to writing, this has happened more often with writers, and I have learned that when I sit down to read, I must always have a pen at hand to mark passages, quotes and excerpts that tug at my soul. I’ve recently marked pages in The Art of the Personal Essay, The New Yorker, Plant Dreaming Deep and Sun magazine. I’ve nodded my head and folded small corners, always feeling a unique combination of relief and joy that I am not alone with certain thoughts, ideals and longings.

My latest experience of falling in love with someone I will never meet happened when I read an article in The New Yorker about the tragically brief life of writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer born in 1892 and killed during the holocaust in 1942. I had never heard of Schulz before reading this article, but his book The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories now sits on my desk, having just arrived in the mail not five minutes ago, having been ordered on Amazon.com not five minutes after I finished reading the article about him.

The author of The New Yorker article was David Grossman, a writer himself, and it was this passage of his article that made me wish I could reach through history and hold Schulz’s hand, if only for a moment:

“The Age of Genius was for Schulz an age driven by the faith that life could be created over and over again through the power of imagination and passion and love, the faith that despair had not yet overruled any of these forces, that we had not yet been eaten away by our own cynicism and nihilism. The Age of Genius was for Schulz a period of perfect childhood, feral and filled with light, which even if it lasted for only a brief moment in a person’s life would be missed for the rest of his years.”

It is hard for me to comprehend how a writer with such beautiful, thought-provoking dreams and ideas could be taken from this world as brutally and inhumanely as he was. Then again, this has been the fate of many a writer, artist and philosopher, from Franco’s victims in 1940s Spain and all those who disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1980s. Writers and artists tend to be outspoken free thinkers, and have been targeted throughout history by regimes wanting to dictate every thought and action of their constituents. Schulz was targeted because of his religion rather than his vocation, but the result was the same: The world lost a great artist, as it has lost many artists at the hand of those whose goal is antithetical to every artist’s deepest mission: The goal of annihilation — of ideas, of beauty, of life.

Much has been said of the importance of the work artists and writers do, how our unique interpretation and expression of all that exists in the world — from birth and trees to war and water — is necessary for humanity to continue evolving, and I have written much about my emphasis on sharing work that is positive and inspiring. Even with a piece of writing such as this one, which discusses murderous dictators and the creative lives cut short at their hands, my underlying goal is to offer a spark of hope — a ray of light that can shine on “the power of imagination and passion and love” that Schulz so fervently wanted all of humanity to be able to capture and create.

There are sad stories in this piece of writing, but in their midst lies hope and encouragement for all of us to create beauty, write stories and sing songs, particularly those of us in the United States, where we are free to pretty much do as we please. We need to draw, write, sing and dance because we can, because so many cannot and so many will never be able to; we need to put our mark in the world in whatever way enables us to vibrate along that frequency where passion is pure and our voices are strongest, where Schulz still lives and breathes and whispers his words, where the bullet that took his life away is nothing but an illusion.

This past weekend, two of our best friends moved in with us. My husband and I have a wide array of friends, ranging from my artist girlfriends to his long-time colleagues to couples we hang out with on a regular basis. These particular friends of ours are a couple, and they occupy their own unique space in our world, where a stranger observing the four of us interacting would probably not be entirely sure who was married to whom. One afternoon, three of us went shopping for a couch for my husband and me, and I could tell our salesman was totally confused. Who was the couch for — the woman and this guy or that guy or was it for the two guys? I’m sure when we walked out of the store, receipt in hand and new couch ordered, he still did not know which one of us was coupled with the other and who was going to get to enjoy that new couch.

When these friends were suddenly out of a job and a home — because their jobs gave them a place to live as part of the package — there was no question they would move in with us while they looked for new employment. My husband and I had no discussion about it; the four of us did not sit down to set out rules or boundaries or timelines. They just moved in, and that was that. Last night we had our first dinner together as “roommates” and we toasted our good fortune — our home, a delicious meal, good music and each other. We all tried to watch a movie, but couldn’t stay awake, so we turned off the TV, said good night and went to bed, just like any other typical suburban household on Main Street, USA.

In conversations with other friends over the weekend, when I mentioned, “Our friends just moved in with us,” I experienced reactions that were one step short of shock and awe. I find this especially funny considering my husband and I run a bed and breakfast; friends from across the globe have stayed with us for weeks at a time and not a month goes by when we don’t have someone other than the two of us sleeping under our roof. The idea of this couple moving in for a while barely registered on our radar. The only thing we really need to consider is where to put all the other friends who booked their stays here long before our household increased by two. Other than that, having friends in the house is par for the course around here, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Perhaps the mortified reactions I got this weekend had to do with anxiety over how it feels to think about letting someone into our own little quirky worlds. For this to work, I have to be willing to let my friends see that I leave the kitchen a mess most mornings and I’m obsessive about laundry. I’ll see what brand of half and half they prefer, and they’ll have to listen to me practice piano. Considering I’ve only had four lessons in my entire life, this doesn’t mean they’re getting private piano concerts; they’re having to hear me muddle my way through “On Top of Old Smokey” a dozen times in a row. In sharing a home, we’re going to be exposing another layer of our lives and ourselves, and that isn’t easy with just anyone. I can’t say my husband and I would invite any of our friends to live with us if they were in the same situation; this decision was easy because it was these friends, and with these friends we have a foundation that makes this possible.

The four of us have seen each other in good moods and bad moods, in tears, in the midst of arguments with our respective partners, tired, jet-lagged, angry, tipsy, melancholy, giddy and grouchy. We call one another friends and our actions have backed this up from the day we met, and perhaps that is why our connection has been so consistently strong — all four of us, for our own reasons, believe in the power of our actions more than our words, and we strive to act according to what we say. Each of us has our own unique stories of loss, betrayal and grief, and through these experiences our integrity became important to us and we eventually found our way to each other. We can laugh as freely as we can because we know we can also cry when we need to; we trust each other because trust has been built through a thousand tiny moments where we made the choice to be there for each other no matter what.

Today, that means we live under the same roof, and our hearts will be all the richer for it.