“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 […]
All posts filed under: spirituality
Abracadabra. The (Delusional) Stories We Tell Ourselves
I once knew a couple who took stock of their marriage every year to decide if they were going to renew the contract. There is something ghastly about undergoing an annual performance review of your love, but it does speak to the need to ward […]
Moon Rock
Several lifetimes ago I moved to Washington, DC and married a man who made it a habit to regularly visit the Air & Space Museum. On his way in and on his way back out he would touch the moon rock on display at the […]
I’m so happy
Sometimes when I go about trying to be present, I wonder if I might be corrupting — just a wee bit — the actual living of my life with all that deliberate, effortful awareness. The extra awareness can almost make it feel like I’ve created […]
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 […]
Unleashed
There is something in us that comes out when the environment changes, like that funny thing that always happened in school when the power went off. Under cover of darkness, mild mayhem would erupt. We would all start ooooohing and shouting. Excited tusseling would break out. It was like […]
Be cool
She fell a little too much in love with me so I had to dump her, but it could just as easily have been me falling in love with her. This story is about what it takes for us to do what we do. Oh […]
The shape we take
Personality has always seemed a solid thing to me, as part of the original package as our genes. After all, who we are certainly couldn’t be developed as haphazardly as a bad habit we pick up. And yet as Lao Tzu maps it out, there […]
Making sandwiches
When my daughter was in high-school she worked at Bagel Central, an iconic establishment in downtown Bangor. Laid back and sunny with floor to ceiling windows and wire baskets of bagels; racks of Danish, rugelach, muffins and cookies; and glass cases of endless desserts, spinach […]
The Great Balloon Escape
One of life’s big existential mysteries grabs up a 3-year-old, his middle-aged grandmother and a random old guy walking by. We drove up under the canopy of the retirement community, opened the trunk and the passenger side door and grabbed the first load of birthday […]
Be cool. 