“Where are you from?” we’re always asked. “When?” I want to say. “Today… or yesterday? Or when I was born?” I breathed my first breath in Washington, D.C., my mother having just moved from Denmark and my father from Holland. Dutch and Danish became the first languages I spoke. In preschool, I learned English. Later, French and Spanish. Now, I’m venturing into Italian, which is full of vowels like a song.

Recently in a dream, I found myself in the large, bustling hall of a monastery where the same prayer was being offered in different languages, one after the other. Each of these languages was considered but a name—another name for the same vast reality beheld by all.

My name is Karin, but when this name is meant to distinguish me from all else, I can’t connect with it at all. It has no more meaning than the adhesive label I peel off as soon as the event is over. Only when I think of Karin as a way of calling to what’s deepest inside me, does the name resonate. What if every time a name were spoken, we felt called in that way? Beheld. It would sound like a prayer. 

As a child, I traveled in and out of the country, living in Malaysia and later, Swaziland.  We always returned to the same house in Virginia, nestled in a forest of mountain laurel, oak, and pine. I grew up in the embrace of those trees. Standing still and erect, they infused the air with their gentleness, transforming the sound of my footsteps, the rhythm of my breathing. They spoke a language as palpable as the light dropping through their leaves. I identify with them, and the beings they shelter, as much as with my human relatives. Along with my parents, they helped raise me. 

After high school and college, I kept traveling. Drawn to city life, I studied and worked in the vibrant cities of Lyon, Boston, the Hague, Toronto, Brooklyn. Then, I found myself on an island in the middle of the Pacific. No other place is more isolated, surrounded by more of the vast ocean that covers our earth, than Hawaii. This is where my daughter was born. Her coming into the world—that threshold—struck me with awe, and I still have not recovered. Meanwhile, the land upon which I stood was also newborn, lava spilling into the waves. To live on the shore, both literally and figuratively, to breathe the air there—this is what I crave above all else. I continue to live near the water, in Seattle now. On one side lies Lake Washington; on the other, the Salish Sea.

I chose to focus on writing because in the end, I couldn’t bear to choose. I refused to narrow my focus. Everything that exists can be written about. And everything else as well. I’m driven to connect the most disparate things—to bring home the sheer reality of all that’s here, to bring myself home that way. I never want to stop learning and experiencing.

Teaching, too, is about constantly pressing into the unknown. When I’m guiding another, I’m riding that edge into all that surrounds us. Aligning myself with someone’s abilities and inclinations and then helping them move forward makes for one of the most intimate connections I know. Side by side, we ride that remarkable wave…