I didn’t know if we could jam 10 helium balloons into my little Mazda but we did, along with all the other makings of an 86th birthday celebration for my mother. We drove up to the entrance of the Inn where my mother had a […]
All posts filed under: spirituality
The Good Paradox
As the official gratitude holiday, Thanksgiving comes with some hefty expectations for feeling grateful, mightily so. It’s a good thing to do — good for the head, good for the heart and for the good of all, which science has proven beyond doubt. But there […]
The nature of water
“Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot … Be water, my friend.” […]
Recognizing Lovely
We all want to feel alive and feel the vitality of life coursing through us but lately my hands have made me aware of the very opposite, aware of vitality slipping away. Lately, these hands have become a big problem in my life. I’ve got […]
Thin Places
I’d been trying to write a story about a close friend who had died, reaching for something beyond my grasp with only puny words to get me there. What I was trying to capture was the way the first annual camping trip to Baxter without […]
Everywhere
“Hey, there’s a sunset,” Gail says. No one was expecting this. We’d spent the last few hours of the afternoon with rain dropping pleasantly on the screen house tent, water spattering our arms through the netting. When it came time to cook dinner we’d all […]
Precisely because…
I had this week’s post all planned out. It was going to address the dread uninvited guest who shows up at the holiday party, hangs around too long at the buffet table then follows you home. You know who I’m talking about… Food Poisoning. Given […]
Glimmering through the day
That phrase, “Just getting through the day,” has always seemed like a lousy way to live, and yet that’s often my sense of how it’s done, how we talk about it, how I do it, using little stepping-stones of pleasure to keep me moving along. […]
Drop the Mic
Sometimes the only thing to do is be quiet and get out of the way. Such is the case with this lesson in astonishment, a spoken word poem entitled, “Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps.” As Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson recommends, […]
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 […]
Be cool. 