Four years ago, when it was clear the people in our country were so divided, I decided to focus on what unites us. My mind naturally went to “home.” Everyone in the country has a relationship with the inanimate place we call a house. Yet, the depth of a house’s impact often goes unnoticed. When […]
On Plenty
Recently, I came across Henry David Thoreau’s well-known quote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” His sentiment inspired a Google search where I found Just Enough is Plenty by Samuel Alexander, a book […]
On Optimism
A recent Washington Post headline, “Time to ditch ‘toxic positivity,’ experts say: ‘It’s okay not to be okay,’” made me question whether I have answered too many pandemic texts with an “always look on the bright side of life” attitude. The answer: probably. I have a history of optimism. For example, when I was twenty, […]
On and On and On
As the days of 2020 melt into one another, Erykah Badu’s song “On & On” replays in my head. The song was released in 1997, the year my eldest son was born, and I hadn’t listened to it (or the album Baduizm) in a long time. Listening now, in what seems like a warped version […]
On Process
In April, I cut twelve poems from the poetry manuscript I planned to have finished by summer. Twelve out of sixty is a lot of poems. More than that, the poems were a thread in the book that no longer worked. Meaning, I took out a section of poems on a topic that (I once […]
On Listening
A writer has to be a good listener. Some might call us great eavesdroppers too. There’s a practice I learned from the Unitarian Universalists called ‘deep listening’. I sat in a small circle of people and when someone talked, everyone else listened and no one responded. Words floated in the room, living and breathing without input or […]
