What happens when we don’t take responsibility for healing our own lives, and instead project our buried trauma out onto other people – our children, our families, our friends, our colleagues? What happens when we use all our energy in criticism and complaint, when we use charity and judgement as a way of maintaining privilege […]
Before she went blind at age 42, she read tea leaves for signs of joy and trouble. Through the subsequent five decades I watched, fascinated, when Grandma took her glass eyes out to clean them, as casually as I now clean my glasses. For many of those eye-blind years she lived alone in house […]
There’s no other way to heal, I think. I’ve read this many times. It is lodged in my blood now, where it often sings me awake at night, sometimes until dawn. It is in my belly too, still mostly undigestible. The difficulty lies in the difference between what my heart reads and what my head […]
Sometimes the boat NEEDS to sink, little miss willpower. Sometimes it’s just time to release Her. Boats are practical things that keep you afloat on water, carry what you need for a journey, bring back what you harvest. They are all female. Boats are dreams, freedoms, passions, yearnings. They are shared, protected, obvious solitudes. In […]
To draw a line. A simple line can identify both home and trespasser. Political lines describe differences, places of meeting: here and there, you and me, us and them. Natural lines are always clear, but changing. Shoreline, treeline, river, snake, stick, shadow. Lines can protect the sacred, the private, the personal from the public. Open, […]
This spring term has been spine-cracking difficult, not just because of the workload but because of what it’s transforming in me – a requirement of fulfilling what has been assigned: Read the following ten books by next week; comment and engage in discussion online re same; define a research question and complete a lit review […]
A chickadee nests under the inside eave of the porch, which of course gentles the way I open and close my front door. I hope to make friends with this family so that the anxiousness at comings and goings subsides for all concerned. In any case, a new series of daily negotiations has begun. I consider […]
The red book records the odd. The black one, scars. The green, intent The blue, fancy The yellow is a large sieve to catch memory for story glue. but in a private, cathartic moment They will all burn. This is not a world that is kind to things sorted and filed in this way. In […]
If you’re not feeling nice, why act nicely? It just gives people the wrong impression. I like this. I’ve been taught something quite different from this idea. It’s only dawning on me now how niceness can distort. Being civil and considerate, acting with kindness – I get. There’s something clean and mutually respectful about those […]
We are what we imagine in ourselves. In this moment, though, my imagination is a dull grey. It trudges with jaw set to endurance mode. Wings furled behind dragging in the mud – too much damned effort to get off the ground. Is it me that’s too heavy, or the current …vicissitudes? My experiment in taking […]
I’m drinking beer in the solarium of a pub my band used to play in 35 years ago. More nachos than I can eat, hanging baskets full of boston-themed plastic plants, my old cello safe and warm beside me. A guy with humperdink-voice just started to play a three chord song – now I get why, […]