What does it mean to make your body a home when all it has ever known is the loud incessant chatter of rooms too full of thoughts so mean, you’d only dare say them to yourself?

Amanda Held Opelt is a songwriter, speaker, and writer based in Boone, North Carolina. Her work stands at the intersection of faith, grief, healing, creativity, and belonging.

In 1330, five days after he killed his wife, Geoffrey of Knuston of Abingdon sought sanctuary in a church in Northamptonshire.

A flock of gulls rises from a choppy sea, hangs aloft in abeyance – a distraction

To be alive means to be in relation...

Dew clings to leaves and calms the dust, soothing wild asters tangled in goldenrod.

I used to think that my hometown would always feel welcoming, that I would always be able to slide back into place. I plotted my return for many years.

It takes 650 steps to walk the perimeter. 

The stars were dancing on the waters as I looked out from Stella Maris chapel.

It is common to intellectualize the sacrament of Communion, and to view the practice as a sacred ritual of reverence. 

Some things never change. I love that.

I am one of two hundred teenage girls walking through the Ozark green on a muggy July evening.

What is “sanctuary”? To me, sanctuary is a refuge, a retreat from the noise and myriad voices competing for our attention.

I learnt of loss and how it attaches itself to your body

On a sweltering August afternoon when only a man deranged would return to Savannah, I wheel up.

How can I explain the joy that I get from reading? Words can't fully express it.

The shack’s one room is wallpapered with pages of the Denver Post, a decorative soul.

on the page we grew like dusk falling, something breathtaking, impossibly ravishing

Last weekend felt like coming home. 

Fire, 20 miles south, 30% contained.

“Who else is on the reservation?” asks the assistant naturalist, who appears to be around the same age as me, as she finds my name on the registration list for a bird talk.

Low-water years, our pond is Walden-size, just right...

Théo has lived and worked in this forest, Madagascar’s Parc National Ranomafana, his entire  life.

I was swimming alone late one September afternoon at Great Pond in Wellfleet when...

I go there again and again, never tiring of the place. When I’m away, I imagine that it waits for me, no matter how long my return might take.

Sunday, a day early, but those murderous temperatures, and we’d had our gators if not our dolphins, our tidal marsh kayak if not our sunset river cruise, decent meals if never a feast...

I don’t want to worry. But I do. I want to lay my burdens down and find rest. But I don’t. My mind interferes.

Came on my bike, hot in the August sun and beaten down by what life had been dolloping out to me.

laid out in the tiny details...

I arrived at Nrityagram dance village in Karnataka, India in July of 2014 with the monsoon rain.

Gardenias droop in August heat at the Episcopal plot

Earlier this morning, he called his parents with the bad news. He had just learned he has Covid-19. 

Sunset, palm trees, and chicken on the grill - these three ingredients should have made for a perfect evening.

Cherished family memories ground and bond us, enriching our lives in ways nothing else can.

That hot June night, my mother made me ride with her in the dark blue Dodge out to Route 38, what we thought of as “the highway.”

What a dinner Monica has prepared for us. First, she and Allesandro and the younger couple with the baby girl, bowls of snacks and a glass of local red wine in the shade of the towering fig tree.

When I was a girl, I knew only one thing about Loop 360: it was the road that took my family to the barbecue restaurant overlooking Bull Creek

Years before I went to restaurants with dishes like “scallop mousse” and “seaweed gremolata” on the menu, I was a Jersey girl who loved bagels.

I cleaned out the cookware cabinet in my kitchen. Marie Kondoed it. 

The gutter overflowed with brown, spiky husks like the aftermath of a tiny urchin apocalypse.

What could she have wanted with all of those empty containers, so meticulously cleaned and stored so haphazardly around the house?

Plenty of potatoes, garlic and lamb. Bundles of sage and jugs of harsh red wine.

I know you would remember every tea, we sipped in New York, Philadelphia, Toronto—blurred, now, to Earl Grey for me.

The pistils stand on end—thin red reeds, in a tiny glass bottle.

I can't hear the TV news over the soothing static of diced onion in the pan.

The tomatoes cool themselves, in the long breezes, hoarding in their flesh, fabulous waters.

Haven't we all been cut into halves? One half empathy, one half what the hell.

No amount of mother’s food or drink could give her comfort.

Put yeast in a cup with hot water and sugar.  Sift...

Her shadow on the barn, cast by winter-weary sun, is taller than a five-year-old.

Cucumbers sprawling in garden, insects tickling yellow flowers, we grow together.

She, holding ladle, wanting, no, needing to help.

Dressed up like an armadillo rolled into a ball, the avocado ripens on the sill.

Old man Peesel’s cherry orchard, of the empty prairie, the fruit reddened our fingers, lips...

For my grandmother, fat was a solution, not a problem: my grandmother’s miracles employed bacon fat and lard.