What is a Poem? You know that feeling when you’ve got too much to do and you can’t imagine how you are going to pack it all in so to calm yourself, you count ahead to the next quiet day, which doe...Read More
Breath In and out, in and out, in and out. In and out, tree and me, we breathe one another. Lung to leaf, she inhales my breath to build her body. Bronchioles branch, delivering her gift to all my cel...Read More
An Unexpected Benefit of Getting Older With many hard learned lessons behind us and a closer view of the finite future ahead, our desire to satisfy external standards of success becomes suddenly less ...Read More
Steady The rain started gently, welcomed on that hot, dry day. When we heard thunder in the distance, our parents called us inside where I sat at the window, cozy, and watched the trees begin to shutt...Read More
Window There is a pain that stands between me and the world. Like a wall, it keeps me separated, living in its shadow. It is the pain that followed me out of childhood, based on bad information imprin...Read More
Happy Sunday morning! This one was written a while ago, but today, I dedicate it to our friends, Bryan and Petra, Josephine and Russ, who lost their dear, kind, beautiful mother, Diana, this past week...Read More
Source Unlike these birds who wake up singing, I like to start my day slowly, quietly. I sit at this window and stare for a bit into the contrasting shades of green. The green tells me- reach up, grow...Read More
It’s been 64 years now, but still the same feeling. Birthday Girl Fifty-eight years ago today, my mother gave birth for the tenth time. I do not know if it was day or night, a long labor or shor...Read More
Kindness From the porch I see ferns and wildflowers and lush oak saplings emerge through last year’s leaf litter. A phoebe flitters back and forth to its nest above the door, full of desperate hatch...Read More
Months The months fly past, each with its own essence, its own meanings and memories gathered from all the years on this journey around and around the sun. I say good-bye to a month and in no time at ...Read More
Entropy You know that moment in movies when the main character, having spent day and night chasing a murderer, conquering demons, saving lives, comes home to their high rise apartment with its wall of...Read More
Resilience We humans- we were made to adapt. Our very survival depends on it. Sure, we’d rather not. We resist, we deny, we shake our fist. We feel overwhelmed by the impossible magnitude. But slowl...Read More
Happy Sunday morning and happy Easter! My mother was born on Easter day, 1920. She died during Holy Week, 2015. She was an Easter kind of person. Her almost always cheerful disposition belied the trau...Read More
Smoothing I’m onto you, Mind. I know what you’re up to. How, as I go through a challenging experience, you kick in, deal with, adapt. But also pull back, detach, protect. Then, afterward, you begi...Read More
Toward Love “The heart beneath is teaching to the broken heart above.” Leonard Cohen Here you are at this precise time, in this exact place, at this very age, the culmination of so much. Every mom...Read More
Early March, Five am Two cardinals take up a call and response this morning, one trilling up, the other down. They are calling us awake from the night, from the long winter when they were mostly quiet...Read More
Essence Song While the chaos of the world spins out of control, encroaching, threatening, step back for a moment and listen. Beneath the noise, there is a familiar wordless melody calling to you. It i...Read More
Field Notes Psychology textbooks seem to draw a distinct line between middle and late adulthood and so I imagined that once my child-rearing days were over, once career ambitions waned, I’d settle i...Read More
Mid-February Look at the tree. Just by growing, by reaching toward the Light, it provides so much- breath and beauty, shade and haven, nourishment. It doesn’t punish itself, but endures what must be...Read More
Other People Of course, the big lessons came from family members, teachers, the major players in your life. But there were other, less obvious people, too. You know who they were- a neighbor whose kid...Read More
Dear God Dear God, As you know by now, I am not a fan of pain in any form, my own, of course, but especially not in my children and now grandchildren. Always way worse. I know, I know. It’s an unavo...Read More