A man had a dream he was a butterfly. In the dream he felt with his whole heart that he was a butterfly. Then he woke up and realized he was a man. But then a thought occurred: why couldn’t he just as easily be […]
All posts filed under: existentialism
Bigger Than We Think
Is there a more complicated and conflicted relationship than the one we have with our bodies? And that’s just on the conscious level! Who knows what is going on in our subconscious. But I got a little window into that deeper realm when a friend […]
The Art of Peace
Spinning a story in our head about the scary thing that is going to happen is like painting a picture of a tiger then forgetting it’s not real. On Friday night I created such an exquisitely detailed painting of the bad health outcomes I anticipated […]
The Yang of Your Yin
Growing up, my sister and I were always “the girls.” We were a duo, a team, always in complementary consort, covering all the bases. Amy was science, I was art. Amy was reason-based, I was emotion. Amy was practical. I was extravagant. But together we […]
How the Light Gets In
A psychiatrist once told me that when people reach a breaking point with a mental health issue, they tend to deal with it in one of three ways: The religion part was the surprise punchline but after a few beats it made sense. If a […]
What would nature do?
If we were just starting out at the beginning of time and didn’t know much about how to thrive, we would need to look no further than nature for instruction according to Janine Benyus*. Just by looking closely, we would see that nature, among many […]
A Blessing for the Lives We Actually Have
“Blessing” is one of those words I avoided for the longest time. I would never say, “Bless you,” when someone sneezed because, for one, I didn’t really know what it meant, and for another, my family didn’t do that. We didn’t say anything at all […]
Lonely But Not Alone
Leo Bird knows what it’s like to walk into a cafeteria and be faced with what might seem like a mild dilemma: where to sit. Except it’s not mild, not mild at all. Leo, the college student son of one of my longtime/lifetime friends, was […]
Our Story in Layer and Time
There is nothing like the Grand Canyon to make you feel like a speck in time. I hadn’t foreseen the irony of that as my partner and I planned a trip to the Grand Canyon to celebrate the 60 years we have each been on […]
The Fashion Transition
Short read Knowing how to get old is confusing. There seems to be a lot of loss involved. Maybe we can work with that. The whole read For quite a long while getting old seemed mostly like a transition in fashion and hairstyle…the age when […]
The wisdom of trivia
Mom always goes first. She’s spent time — who knows, maybe all week — getting organized for her Saturday Zoom share and needs to get it out there before she loses her train of thought. We are scrupulous in getting right to her once everyone […]
Down to the bone
After raising 5 kids and packing them off to college, my cousin Karen cut her hair, threw a few things in a backpack and trekked around Europe for a while on her own. I was floored. No make-up? No blow dryer? That someone could travel […]
Be cool. 