All posts filed under: wellbeing

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 […]

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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 […]

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How Does Your Dinner Taste

Sometimes we get so tangled up in our mind we have a hard time seeing clearly — being able to see where we are — which is why this poem by a young Japanese schoolboy* is so startling: In the middle of Japan, surrounded byThe […]

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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 […]

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Tight Pants

I’ve never understood how we (I’m acting like I’m not the only one) don’t always know what we’re thinking. For instance, how is it that I woke up in such a shroud of darkness the other day, wore that mood all day long like a […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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What is wrong with us? I heard resilience described the other day as a coat hanger. Or rather, we are the coat hanger who gets bent out of shape; the coat hanger’s structural ability to be bent back into shape is what we call resilience. […]

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Tapping into our deep stories

Deep stories, the ones we tell about ourselves that keep us stuck in a different point in time…that is the stuff of therapy, for sure, but it’s also the stuff of a technique called tapping. Tapping is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you […]

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Elephant droppings. Pace yourself

Over the span of two weeks back in August I got really old. All of a sudden, I had become a person who groaned when getting up in the morning. Getting out of bed had turned into a slow, creaky process practically overnight. Everything ached. […]

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