The Year That Could Not Be Written
This has been a year that does not want to be written. Out loud.
I had an essay in progress about the way my son was navigating loneliness but decided it was too private.
And then, fire.
“The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love…” or, Waking Up with Simone on Easter Morning
Good morning. It is Easter and the sun just rose. Every morning recently I have been waking and sitting with my coffee, my journal, my cat, and Simone Weil. She was a radical philosopher, a mystic and marxist, a spiritual seeker and committed materialist, who relentlessly sought an experience of the reality of justice and…
Flower Mind / #FireHaiku
During the Kincade Fire some friends and I wrote some little things. Literally, little things: haiku. And then I wrapped some more words around them, and published it on Medium. I’m just getting around to putting it here. I hope you enjoy.
We Never Know When We May Need a Hand Extended Across the Sea
November 22, 2018 I am aware that I am sitting in a house on Wappo land, in the Mayacamas Mountains. I am sitting on land that is owned collectively, in a house that is owned collectively, as part of one small effort to live an alternative to the steamrolling system called private property and industrial…
Not Broken
On the morning of election day last week my eight-year-old was lying on the sofa with a blanket over his head. “What’s integrity?” we heard him say, in a muffled sort of way. I took a deep breath and said, “Wow.” Then breathed some more. “Integrity,” I said, “is when a person is making choices…
Dreaming of Barbuda
Last night I googled “how to go help rebuild Barbuda” and got not much besides the Prime Minister asking people to be tourists in Antigua, Robert DeNiro pouring money in so that he can build a resort, and an appalling opinion piece out of Jamaica (with lots of healthy comments) stating that Barbuda should take…
Choosing the Edge
Something shifted in me during or after the press conference yesterday, or during a stormy night, or when I cried in the bathroom this morning about the way Trump bullied that orthodox Jewish reporter, with whom I surely disagree on many issues but who deserves respect and dignity like us all, or on the way…
Hawk/Mountain/Cry
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,…
An Ordinary Day
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.…
Personal Archives I, or I Am Not a Historian Anymore
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…