In the North, November has always felt like a portal month to me—a time when sunlight dims and shadows lengthen, and the landscape begins to strip itself of color. The sun sets before five here in the valley. Trees once dressed in fiery oranges, reds, and yellows now reveal their bones, and on walks outside I can smell the smoke of woodstoves. Now our kitchen tables glow with candlelight, bread, and mulled cider.

Loss and Life in the Same Week

This November has carried its own lessons about the interweavings of loss and life, grief and celebration. In the span of a week, I found myself resting in the warmth of new friendships, celebrating the birthdays of people I love, and grieving two profound losses: a dear friend, and the father I am slowly losing to Alzheimer’s.

I learned last Monday that my friend Maria de los Ángeles had passed away. She was my age: a writer, social critic, and activist. Only months before, her email newsletter—Heart-Centered Living—had mentioned the beginning of her cancer treatment: “boy, has my heart stretched since,” she wrote. Rather than “shriveling up and being all about ‘me,’” she continued, “I’ve found myself expanding, feeling more connected to everything that is, surprising myself with deep compassion for others who may be suffering.”

Maria lived up to her name.

Days later, I sat beside my father at Thanksgiving, holding his hand and realizing how much of him has already crossed into another kind of November. He smiled at me, he told me he loved me, yet the man I knew for so many years seemed mostly gone.

Loss and life, held together in the same week—two sides of November’s doorway.

Meeting Maria

I first met Maria back in 2007 or 2008, when I lived in Miami and she was a columnist for a local community website called Miami Beach 411. She was a gifted writer—humble, thoughtful, and generous with her care for others.

I remember when she completely dedicated herself to caring for her aging parents, at great sacrifice to herself, and how she always found a way to survive, even in times of precarity. When she moved to Washington, D.C., I would visit her on my own trips to the city, and we continued our conversations about mystics, healing, and grief.

Exiled in the Heart

Then she moved to Spain, where she found joy in deepening her study of flamenco dance. After that move, she wrote in her newsletter about being “exiled in the heart,” a daughter of Cuban exiles living across an ocean.

It’s hard to describe this stateless limbo. Part of me feels weightless and free. Part of me feels tethered to the life I left behind. I’m living in Santander next to the beach and my life is filled with new friends who feel like family. Residency permit is in process. And yet, and yet, I grieve the loss of country, witnessing the insanity from across the pond.

It’s during this time, however, where the mystical dimensions of life come in to support me. I stay heart-centered, no matter what geopolitical borders surround me. I latch on to human connection as the real frontier—politics will come and go. Surrendering to what is without bypassing reality is the mystical challenge—prayer and spirit, muscle and grit combined. I pledge allegiance to my own mandates and follow my intuition. I find comfort in my own footsteps in the sand. The blood and bones that made me walked here long before I was born.

In my very last communication with Maria two weeks ago, wishing her happy birthday, I compared her to the ceiba—my favorite tree, a portal between worlds—and she loved that. She too was always a portal. She introduced people to one another, crossed borders and connected worlds, and transformed difficulty into comfort.

Heart-centered.

The Shadow House

I keep returning to a memory from the spring of 2019, when Maria took me to one of her favorite places: the Shadow House in Bishop’s Garden at Washington National Cathedral. Even its name felt like a lesson—a place where shadow doesn’t cancel light but frames it.

We sat inside the eight-sided building’s old stone arches, surrounded by tulips and cherry blossoms, talking about poetry, dreams, and the hard seasons of our lives. In front of the gazebo sits a bronze statue of a baby Pan: a liminal figure himself.

It struck me later that the Shadow House held all the elements I now think of as portals in my Core-Respondence work. On the April day of my visit, each archway offered a view of pinks, purples and greens: blossoms and plantings eager to meet sun. Shadow House, spring light. Laughter, tenderness. Two friends held in a threshold between worlds.

This stone building with eight arches, amid a place of emerging life, both grounded and opened our conversation, holding us gently. I didn’t know then how much that moment would return to me now, in this November of loss.

Maria’s Wisdom on Thresholds

Maria understood thresholds instinctively.

In a newsletter sent after the death of her brother, she wrote about George Inness’s Pool in the Woods—a painting she loved for its liminality and the way moonlight penetrates darkness without dispelling it. “Faint human figures sit in this threshold moment,” she wrote, “neither too dark nor too bright.”

She compared it to the Buddhist bardo, the in-between state between death and rebirth.

Looking back now, I see that Maria lived in these spaces with uncommon grace. She understood the places where shadow doesn’t end, and light doesn’t dominate, but the two meet and make something tender and true.