A Season of Gift Giving
It’s ironic and perhaps tragic that a former friend who looked forward to getting old never got the chance. After her death from breast cancer in her late thirties, her husband called to let me know. She and I had…
Where We Belong
I am disappointed in you is the message I tried my entire life to avoid, and it had companions that showed up regularly to keep me on my toes: It’s never okay to be yourself and People like us don’t…
Do You Know How to Be Yourself?
In the introduction to Free from Lies, Alice Miller describes a survey she commissioned in 2002 that asked 100 mothers at what age they thought “they might begin impressing the necessity of good behavior on their children by giving them…
Do Any of Us Understand Time?
It has been two weeks since I sent my email to the friend I wrote about in my last post. Since then, I have also sent her four books that I have no idea if she’ll even open, but I…
Quarried from Hard Words
Apparently, it is time, once again, to pull The Way of the Empath by Elaine Clayton off the shelf. I could make a little note in my planner every couple of months: “Begin again with The Way of the Empath,”…
Not Good Enough
I’m not here to explain. By rights, I should have hit the Publish button after I typed in the period following “explain.” Nothing more is needed. But I always believed I needed watertight answers and too many words. It was…
Five Poems
Anything that feels like a school assignment pisses me off. Nothing, though, gets my blood boiling like being forced to keep a journal. In a college screenwriting class, the professor (whose arrogance rubbed me the wrong way pretty much from…
Row Your Boat
We are supposed to have a foot in this world and one in the spiritual realm: the sphere of God and angels, yes, but more than that: a “place” in which emotion guides us, where inner wisdom/knowing leads the way.…
250+ Ways to Wash Dishes
600,000 B.C. Can you even begin to wrap your head around how long ago that is and what life here on earth must have been like then? Are you thinking about dinosaurs? Maybe imagining a caveman carrying a club and…
A Satisfying Morning
More wonder in this wonder-filled world: the book beneath The Gift in my second-cup-of-coffee stack* turned out to be Soul Food: Nourishing Poems for Starved Minds, edited by Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce, and the next poem presented for my…
The Gift of Art
My morning included a small scale existential crisis. Robert Bly’s Looking for Dragon Smoke, a book of essays on poetry, was at the top of today’s reading stack, and by the time I finished section three of the first essay,…
An Awakened Soul Does not Go Back to Sleep
Thank God for Michael Meade and Awakening the Soul. How long ago did I buy the book? How many times had I tried to read it before I finally settled upon it about a week ago? Books come to you…
