“Ruffled feathers and endless squawking over a minor difficulty is typical of a crow’s life. I lean back on the counter and realize that could be my line….”
The thing about life that is so obvious, but easy to miss, is how our overt realities rarely match up to our covert realities. Just as I wrote those words a car alarm went off in the neighborhood its staccato horn reverberating through the quiet streets of Campbell. Oh, that’s rich. I sit here in […]
Preparation Is Key I knew this chrysalis stage was going to be rough, as if tackling pubescence in your fifties, but I have to admit the unrelenting … My Concept of Beauty Is Aging Well To my readers, I’m traveling this week, visiting my oldest son. So I’m posting an essay I wrote for Navigating […]
It rained for about three minutes today, if you have anything that resembles a life, you may have missed it. I watched every glorious second, gave praise and thanks, then went back to writing. Which I admit, looks a lot like I’m lounging in bed in my pajamas, playing on the computer, avoiding life. It’s […]
The Guest House, by Rumi This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat […]
Warning, this post contains impolite language, do not read out loud if children are present. “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” Kurt Vonnegut [obviously the policemen] I know things are bad when it takes me three […]
So glad you asked. Larry yells from his office, “Cheryl, come check this out.” I yell back from my room, “Kinda busy.” The thing is I made the piss poor decision, for better or for worse, to clean out my closet right smack in the middle of all the Christmas hubbub. I still have shopping, […]
I wasn’t going to belabor the death of my dog in yet another emotional post. I really wasn’t. But some strange force, not the least bit concerned about overanalyzing personal tragedy in a public forum, took over, and I didn’t have the strength to fight it. The thing is you don’t have to publish everything […]
I’m reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, alongside Joan Anderson’s A Year by the Sea, after recently finishing Ann Patchett’s Pulitzer Prize Finalist novel The Dutch House. What a twisted reading experience if there ever was one, but then again, it’s the beginning of my new life, half of me is enmeshed […]
I’ve come to believe the gift of storytelling is our most evolved attribute as a species, the heritage of humanity if you will, but the truth is our most powerful stories often come about as a result of something tragic. They emerge unexpectedly, as if Moses from a basket in the river of time, swaddled […]
That is the colossus of invitations, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, and now that I’m feeling adrift in my infirmity (rib injury), it takes on a whole new meaning. I’m actually shocked at the severity of the pain and the manner in which I am managing it all. Maladroit comes to […]
Living in the Gap 