I do not work in higher education. I work as a mother. I work as a poet. I work part-time as a copyeditor. I work on my children’s school board, as a political activist, and for my rural, collectively-owned community. All those things are work. But because of the society in which we live,…
Things can be crappy (you want a better word but that’s really how it feels) — crappy, top-of-the-line, end-of-the-line crappy, nothing the way it’s supposed to be, including your feeling of dissatisfaction with words, and then you just go, you go out alone into the dark night and walk up the road and the air…
Let’s make him fly, says Milo, about his foam board Santa hitched to tottering, prop-legged reindeer when we get out the Christmas decorations. And I believe him. I believe in him. I have to. Because more people were gunned down today. People who help people were gunned down today. So sweet five-year-old boy, I will…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
I read on Facebook a few days ago that Hip Mama is relaunching in print, and since then my finger has been hesitating over the key that would let me subscribe. Then, to top it off, I was invited by Dani Burlison to the North Bay’s Hip Mama/Rad Dad relaunch party. Am I dreaming? I…