I have a new love. It’s called poetry. I have an old love. It’s called poetry, too. They are finally meeting one another, in the space of my mind. While cleaning out my computer several months ago, I found a rich text file that held just one poem, with no attribution or signature. I honestly…
Yesterday my parents and I accompanied my daughter’s class on a field trip to San Francisco. The school rented a small tourist bus for the trip. As I climbed aboard and took my seat alone by the window (my daughter wanted to sit with her friends in the very, very back, and my parents wanted…
A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…
Right now, at this very moment, I am about to type words that I never thought I would put out into the world. Here I go. I feel a great big wave of compassion for George W. Bush. Yesterday in the New York Times I read about an exhibition of portraits by W. that is…
This weekend a good friend and I spent the day together at the coast. As we walked along the marshy trail to the beach, the air was warm and breezy, the sky shifting from silver-cast to blue and back again, the earth dark and pleasingly mucky, and the herbs and grasses and native flowers all…
The first day of this month was the 54th anniversary of the first day of lunch-counter sit-ins in the segregated South. At the very tail end of January, in the course of my volunteer book-shelving at one of the Sonoma County libraries, I came across a children’s picture book called Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood…
Today I walked on the thirsty Earth, and tipped my tongue to the skies. My ancestors tasted the sweetness of rain. Over the past few weeks, I have felt the human energy gathering, gathering, around the idea of scarcity, or disaster. Over the past few days, I have felt the sigh of watery relief rising…
The other day I ran into a friend with whom I worked in Occupy Santa Rosa. Towards the end of my time with the Occupy movement, she (probably unbeknownst to her) became much more than a friend; she became a “Wild Woman” meeting me in the dark woods, offering me another chance to make my…
When the archives of your life are disturbed you uncover some interesting things. Layers of yourself, that you buried for one reason or another. Some you meant to return to; some you were determined to remember; some you very clearly meant to forget. I have been working my way through a fifteen-year-old file cabinet, clearing…
At my Zen center on Monday night Zen student and physicist Chris Gaffney said that some things seem “impossible,” but they happen anyway. Like the way that time slows down when a body is in motion, or when it flows more closely to the earth. There is a small clearing with an old tree on…