This is not content.
My old boyfriend Lee used to say, as we were driving in his car: “NEVER GO STRAIGHT! ALWAYS GO GAILY FORWARD!” Such effervescent and insistent proclamations in the case of my helping him look for an address should have clued me in early on that Lee was planning to revert back to his former lifestyle,…
Resolve – Firmness of purpose; to solve a problem or a dispute. My word for 2013 was “resolve.” I dissected that word last December, and like any misguided wordsmith, instead of thinking “how does this apply to me” I just pulled it all apart and wrote in second person. I have a tendency to do…
When that habit is feeling bad, it’s hard work to feel any differently.On my “bad days,” the one thing I hear over and over again from people who love me is: “You are too hard on yourself!” This bad habit of self-loathing has been my ever-lurking shadow. It goes hand-in-hand with the long walk I…
I have two absolutely wonderful sweet and generous friends who also happen to be gorgeous. They totally intimidate me. They love to exercise at classes that actually cause one to sweat and feel sore, and because of their dedication they also actually fit into single-digit-sized clothing. So it came as a complete surprise to me…
The brutal impact of self-censorship Right now, you are experiencing with me my biggest risk of 2013. Back in 2009, after the kids came to live with us, the kids’ attorney advised me to consider cutting back on my online presence. I was shocked. I felt sick. It hadn’t occurred to me that the family…
I need to get l**d. I need another cup of coffee. I need to walk the dog. Are my hands in the right place? it really bothers me when I am watching an NFL game and the guys are listening to the National Anthem and have their hands over their clavicle. Hmmm. I don’t think…
The getting in the way is part of the way. Already I can feel my fingers resisting saying: “Don’t say the awfulness. Don’t tell them you Feel lost in the lives of everyone else You take care of, and it’s your own fault anyway because You’ve read The Four Agreements and you Know better” and…
On my tripwire connections of mind, body and soulHow do you feel, on this first day, in your mind? In your body? In your heart? In your soul? First, I feel like saying “Oh my goodness hello and I’m sorry!” If there is anyone out there who has been counting on me to blog…
Is it worth being sentimental over one tree? The last time I mentioned to friends that we might have to cut down our two huge Norway maples, one FB friend replied “good riddance. They are invasive species to New England anyway.” I sometimes think that our attachments to trees or cars or other “stuff” isn’t…
My memory of my youth is a haze of fine particulate.I don’t remember what I did in the summer as a kid. Not specifically. I remember that I played outside with the neighbor kids and my siblings. We rode bikes and ran around. I went on vacation with my family. There was the library and…
At the beginning of my parenting experience, I said “no” often. The noise and the mess was a lot to handle. Not to mention the plain issue of just keeping track of where all the little live bodies were in space and time. And what they were planning to put in their mouth at that…
A friend of mine posted a question of Facebook asking: Those of you who were elementary schoolers in the late 70s and 80s: Could you please share a few books that you read then that meant a lot to you? Or that you just super loved? I responded right away without thinking. The “Little House”…
I admit it: when it comes to Twitter writing projects, I am such a sucker. Well, that assumes of course that getting myself tangled up with an online community of like-minded thinkers and writers (99 percent of whom I have never met!) makes me a sucker. Yes, please. I’ll take another lick of that. So…
I am fully aware that it is a bit ironic that I write a BLOG with the word “letters” in the title. Is it a misnomer? Maybe… Originally my blog was “Letters from London (and Elsewhere)” and it was really just a way for me to — en masse — “post” to a bunch of…
Today is wrote a small stone called “The Time.” I wrote it for two reasons. First, because I notice I had about 11 minutes before the kids had to leave to go to school. The kids were happily engaged in something and I suddenly thought: “Hey! I should write my small stone right now, while…
