If you’re arriving at Mother’s Day with any measure of mom guilt, mom issues, missing your mom, longing to be a mom, mom dysfunction, feeling like you’re failing as a mom, or maybe just hearing the phrase Father, Son & Holy Spirit and thinking, “Really? No feminine conception of the divine? Doesn’t the Judeo-Christian tradition …
NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month. Never done it! Going to try it. For six weeks now, I’ve been creating these little meditations on how to return to center when we’re distressed, dispersed and distracted. Writing fiction is a centering practice for me. I start to feel weird and cranky when I’m not doing it. Which is …
What—another rough news week? (Gosh, I am shocked, shocked.) So it turns out we’ve got twelve years to get serious about climate change. In other words: My little boy just started pre-K, and by the time he reaches tenth grade, we need some serious environmental come-to-Jesus. Everybody registered to vote? ℘℘℘ On the subject of listening …
These are the last days of summer, whatever the schoolbuses, candle stores, and Pumpkin Ales may tell you. Don’t be rushed by the makers of seasonal markers: This is the liminal space of crickets and figs ripening. The ripening, too, of summer musings into autumn doings. Interesting things happen in middle-times. Liminal spaces are an …
If I’ve been posting seldomly, it’s because I’ve been living muchly. Expect some posts soon with juicy details on the following: Lady tattooers and bizarre coincidences. I’ve been doing one last round of polishing on my novel, which is about a young woman aspiring to become a tattoo artist in the mid-1980s, when there were few …
Milo is asking about God. He’s two and a half now. He orders me to “say pears” at bedtime when I forget. Saying pears sounds like a beautiful practice to me. To name a pear and then another pear: Limonera, Bosc, Bartlett, Anjou. Or in Latin, maybe, a Mass of pears: Pyrus nivalis, pyrus syriaca, pyrus …
I guess I’ll start with the Christmas cards. Most years, if I even manage to get cards out, I make them myself. Last-minute. Stapled together with a couple of Instagram pictures printed out on our low-toner inkjet. I actually like it this way. Punk Rawk Xmas! We’d never had a professional family portrait, until a few …
Perhaps you know that special suffocating effect of 763 toys? (By the way, this is Part 2 of a brief series called The Art of Deletion—editing a piece of writing down to its essential core.) It doesn’t matter how much you vow to raise your child in spacious, creative simplicity. Well meaning relatives cannot allow …