Open to Life
As I’ve written previously, I was raised Catholic and tried most of my life to get the right answers so I could be an outstanding one, but that wasn’t the end goal. The end goal was to get to heaven,…
Confession
After a Lifetime of Lies, It’s Time to Face the Truth I have been avoiding this post, but doing so is taking a physical toll, and I can’t put it off. A small, shivering wave of anxiety comes over me…
Being Honest with a Friend Should Not Require Courage
When my fourth child was almost a year old, I had an important conversation with a friend, but I had no idea, at the time, how important it would be. Perhaps I should look her up and reach out again,…
A Harsh Truth
A few months ago, I read Savage Wisdom by Adam Cam, after following him for a while on Instagram. The man is brutal (and he loves his four-letter words), but I’ve long found myself attracted to people who tell the harsh truth…
I Look Only if I Know There’s More to be Found
Few moments of my day (and night) are not filled with thoughts: self-analyzing ones; funny or ironic ones; important, life-changing ones; perceptions; understandings (often years in the making); meager ideas about dinner and getting the laundry in the dryer; connections…
How Many Will Make It Past the Prison Walls and Never Get Locked in Again?
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside Thoughts, conversations, experiences, memories, things that I’m reading are all coming together and leading me on. For Tolstoy, the self is not a system, but an aggregate. It is a cluster of habits and…
Which Way?
If Diamond had had to find out the riddle in order to see Mr. Raymond again, I doubt if he would ever have seen him. “Oh then,” I think I hear some little reader say, “he could not have been…
A New Way of Living
Today is the first day of my new life. It sounds dramatic, I know, but I spent my old life avoiding drama at all costs. So, let’s double down on the drama: everything I thought I knew was just guessing.…
A Madeleine Day
Will I ever retire Walking on Water: just leave it alone or give it away? I doubt it. It continues to speak to me, even though I would never think to include L’Engle in a list of my favorite writers.…
Who Wrote that Book?
Most of my life was largely guided by unquestioned assumptions: my parents loved me, school was a good thing, following the rules was a guarantee of success. I know that my parents loved me, but the other stuff? Well, let’s…
Settling In with the Quiet Sounds
Items continue to pile up on my desk and in my mind. I recently went to TJ Maxx to see if I could find a suitable inbox, but there was nothing that would hold my entire studio. Of course, the…
What Are You Saying?
This seems like a strange choice for a simile: “… as welcomed as child sacrifice.” I came across it in a book I’m reading, and it gets thoughts swimming in my head, thoughts like, Who thinks this way? You want to…
