On Monday evening, which happened to be the evening of my 43rd birthday, my husband came home with the mail and dropped it on the desk as usual. And it was the usual pile of bills and holiday catalogs and appeals for end-of-year donations. And the Princeton Alumni Weekly. For years, when this magazine…
Because I am finding my way through this fear of routine massacres in America. Because it is so mysterious to me to raise a son. Because I really have strong feelings about guns— here’s a poem: ON REMAINING NEUTRAL WHILE YOUR FIVE-YEAR-OLD HANDLES A GUN It takes practice. It must, to find just the…
This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Santa Rosa Creek Zen Center on May 11, 2015. I. There’s an old, well-known haiku by the poet Basho that goes like this: Even in Kyoto— hearing the cuckoo cry, I long for Kyoto. In koan practice with the Pacific Zen Institute,…
My poem “Horse Dreams” was accepted, and published online this past Friday, by Vine Leaves Literary Journal. This was my first published poem. Last week, I made a not-so-subtle celebratory fuss about it here. Why the hoopla? you might ask. It was a 4-line poem, and thousands of people publish poems. What’s the big deal?…
I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. I am a published poet. See? It’s still true!…
I spent the weekend raging. Beginning on Friday night, glued to the links I’d followed from Facebook about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I raged against the simplicity of media analysis, raged against hatred, and then, at midnight, sitting up in bed, I raged against my husband for not “getting” politics and race in precisely the…
My grandfather Robert was a large man, in many ways. He drank Coca-Cola, smoked too much, adored candy, ate liverwurst sandwiches with potato chips on top. He died of emphysema when I was in high school, before I got to the age when I could have straight-up conversations with him about the world. He was…
Yesterday, after my husband and I woke to the sound of our children giggling in their bedroom, but before they came and crawled into bed with us, I turned to him and asked, “What are you thankful for?” He answered, “Pretty much the whole thing.” So there you go. Thank you, whole thing. I guess…
A poem for Flood Wall Street and the People’s Climate March September 21-22, 2014 Today I’m staying in my pajamas because I can. I’m curling back in bed with my computer and checking Facebook, not one time, not two times, but eighteen times while my children are at school. I might bake cookies.…
Forgive me as I work out some thoughts here, out loud. Perhaps some of them may bloom. I woke in the middle of the night last night with a stark, shamelessly Zen poem in my head: No gate. No goal. No high. No way. No one. No how. Buddha beyond and here and now. At…