I have blog writer’s block today. I think it comes from standing between two places. I mean, we are always standing between the past and the present. But I feel that space in a deeper way as I listen to the washing machine dry our clothes. As the sunlight pours in my office window. For […]
Category: At Home
Comfort
Comfort by Nancy Schatz Alton The work of my life is love. It’s a self-centered ache that I offer you on a platter: love. This work the world likes to pretend is beside the point it’s the round point of my pencil telling you listen, love: I love you as you are your cranky self. […]
Flex
“Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.” —Corita Kent If I don’t think about science, I forget how to be an experiment. That fail is written into the rules. That maybe fail is the wrong word. That reacting to the world is its own experiment. I’m pushing up against a time limit today, wanting to write […]
Workable
I’m not sure how my office looks the same when everything is change. Last week a source told me that every problem is solvable. The week before that I wrote down the phrase “Everything is workable.” Set it in my office. I keep coming upon it. Something about my almost 50-year-old body does not feel […]
Bitter to Better
During the hardest years of my young daughter’s life, I often wanted to be somewhere else. It’s not a proud thing to admit. It’s just the truth. It was hard to watch her struggle. To not know how to make her life easier. To watch other kids seemingly learn with ease. It was hard to […]
Lightness
I’m a collector of phrases. I live with some phrases for decades. I tape them to my desk and on my window sill. I read them as necessary. But I need new phrases all the time. Right now I have a new one on my bulletin board above my desk, written in my scrawl. It […]
Bloom!
The skyrocketing pollen count has me in her grip. Or is pollen a he? Perhaps a they? All I can tell you is that I am tired and chilled, and I get why Liz had to sleep in yesterday, as the pollen count took her down first. Comma, comma, comma. We are not down. We […]
Culmination
Last night, I dreamed someone hired me sight unseen. Before bed I walked beneath a clear, starlit sky, happy. I’ve fed myself decades of get-to-calm tips until this culmination: waking to good news sleep-delivered to my hungry soul.
Astonishment
There’s so much to love in this world. Did Mary Oliver say that? All her favorite words are in my lexicon— Astonished—How I love to be astonished. How grateful I am by unexpected sightings: Caroline curled up on the couch, studying with her friend. Liz step wholly into herself: saying exactly what she thinks. OK—not […]
My Safe
A man carries a safe onto a moving van parked in front of my home. We place our important papers into the safe. What important papers do we carry inside of us? Which sentences do we cross off to make better sentences? Sentences that help us become confident enough to do what we want to […]