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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jasper’s This-Is-Good moment
Jasper is a jail-break kind of dog that slips his leash or digs his way to freedom, however the opportunity may present itself. Pam is a 60-year-old “I’m-on-it” sort of woman who drops her bike on the sidewalk to chase down neighborhood dogs on the […]
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. […]
The holistic significance of hair
Back in 2012 I was on standby for a phone call from my friend, Kerry, who would tell me, this is it. Meet me at Debbie’s. Debbie was the hairdresser who would shave all of the hair off of Kerry’s head. She would be bald. […]
Bread in one hand; grief in the other
A while back I asked my sister if she was exhibiting any weird behaviors that could be associated with the pandemic. She gave it some fair thought and said not really. Like many folks here,* she’s a leader in a healthcare system and has been […]
Life is still good
Lately the going has been quite rough for everyone, but I happened upon something the other day on my walk that made the world still look pretty delightful. At 6 in the morning In downtown Bangor I found a friendly-looking, middle-aged fellow wrestling a stuffed […]
Be cool. 