It’s funny how clear and mindful one can be when illness is a thought playing in your head vs. the sensory experience of snot dripping from your nose, your head feeling like a Zeppelin, and your body aching so much from relentless fits of hacking that you’re sure you’ve just coughed up a portion of your lung into the toilet.
The Crack in Everything
September 16, 2012 By | Leave a Comment
Washing dishes in the warm ease of a recent morning, something shifted in me. As I rinsed a glass and placed it on my dish rack a beam of sunlight bounced through the tumbler and changed my life forever.
Homage to a Noble Cat
August 21, 2012 By | 16 Comments
Yesterday evening as the sun was tipping its brilliant countenance towards the horizon, my dear cat, Clause, died in the warm embrace of my bedroom in the care of someone who was not me.
A Good Day
June 10, 2012 By | 1 Comment
As often happens on my Sunday writing day, I sit down at my computer and have no idea what I am going to scribe. Somehow, so far, grace and my muse have always found me.
Is there any I out there?
May 20, 2012 By | 4 Comments
As a writer my I is fixated on birthing pithy lines of prose and then killing all my little darlings, watching words emerge as perfect butterflies from ethereal cocoons only to pluck the wings from their temporal bodies in search of deeper meanings.
Blind ambition
May 5, 2012 By | 4 Comments
I’ve been awash in the words of Annie Dillard these past weeks. Reading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and “The Writing Life” have been epiphanies and deep hard lessons in the way of words.
Leonard Cohen, may I have this dance?
January 29, 2012 By | 13 Comments
The other day I realized I may never have sex again. Or learn to play the cello. Or ride the Orient Express. When you reach my stage in life a lot of the things you thought would have happened by now haven’t and things you thought would never end now have a looming expiration date.
Maybe…
September 2, 2011 By | 1 Comment
At last weekend’s meditation retreat with Ven. Bhikkhu Sona he told us about a nun in residence at Birken Forest Monastery. Her name is Sister Mon, but he calls Sister Maybe. If Ajahn Sona says “See you tomorrow” or “Have a good day” Sister Mon’s reply is always “Maybe.” Impermanence, or anicca, along with dukkha […]
End of Days
August 24, 2011 By | 6 Comments
My first shift as a bonafide hospice volunteer without the training wheels of the classroom and my mentor by my side was last Saturday. It was also the anniversary of my mother’s death, the first death I ever witnessed. I have welcomed the others that have followed. That may seem strange to some, but the […]
The Non Meaning of Life
August 13, 2011 By | 9 Comments
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.” ~ Eric Hoffer The other day I was savoring with a bit of pride the scenery of my present life. I felt a surprising contentment after the brass ring I thought I needed fell from my grasp last week. The bucolic vision was […]
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