Each week, I sit in a two-hour meeting where I unravel the carefully composed narrative I have created about my family. This is the story I have told myself, as well as others, for so long. In the meeting, I’m asked to take a closer look and like any good story, there are stories hiding within the story, and none of the characters are truly who they seem at first gloss. In the long held…
The idea of a spiritual journey without a destination struck me as harsh. The journey is opening yourself up whether emotionally, spiritually, lovingly, whichever, or all together, with a destination in mind. I look for signs of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual maturity in people. I look for it in myself. The destination is right at that point of connection – did we all move up to the same wrung? Or have I rounded the bend…
“I’m going in” is what I told myself at Story Slam last night, but luckily so many people had signed up, I didn’t have to take my turn. While I was waiting, I thought about how my story was a tale of embarrassment very unlike the Christmas stories being told. I felt ambivalent leaving, in one sense I didn’t have to tell my story, but on the other hand, I know sooner or later, I…
I spent three days with my teenage son in the desert and had a realization. I’m getting older. I have been able to fake that I am 50 years older than him by keeping up with his energy level. I have a high energy level. A new realization set in when I was in a higher elevation, exhausted from waking up in the middle of the night to catch an early flight, and all the…
I went to the synagogue begrudgingly one year, because my son was studying for his bar mitzvah. I had taken to spending the high holidays in my own celebration for years – honeycakes, apples with honey on Rosh Hashanah, and a day of no screens, just meditation and journaling for Yom Kippur – this felt holy holy to me. There I was sitting in a stiff chair in a synagogue listening to the chanting (and…
Remember the eagle feathering the nest superficially so that the nest becomes a crown of thorns and the baby bird must fly away? The mama eagle sits there with empty nest syndrome – suffering from her own doing. That didn’t really happen. The mama eagle did not suffer. Her job was done, and she let it go. Mary Oliver wrote: To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love…
My dreams have been selective the last 15 years. This year so many of those dreams have come true that I’m ending 2024 feeling vulnerable AF. The dark alley soothsayers warned that my son was headed down a path where charlatans (adult and child) were trying to take his power – I put all my energy into stopping that from happening and then miraculously, dark turned to light. Instead of lions, and tigers, and bears,…
Tolstoy described a child as a sphere of vulnerability, another place the world can hurt you. My journey into vulnerability came the moment I laid eyes on my son, when I knew with divine clarity that I was born to be his mother. I didn’t need a reading, medium, or Oracle to tell me this – I felt it inside my most profound sense of being. They say you bring home a 10 pound baby…
Here begins the next solar cycle of my life. Doors quietly shutting as 2024 and decades of a turbulent, confusing cycle come to an end. I’m spending Christmas and Hanukkah in a small mining town in southeastern Arizona, 11 miles from the Mexican border and 5,538 feet above sea level. My heavy breathing is evidence I am in an alien landscape having come from the underworld (I live below sea level in Mississippi). My meditation…
Four Women One Fabulous Villa Mexico is beautiful, proud, polite, full of murals, has tons of art and culture, bustling with commerce and activity, family loving – Mexico City has more museums than any other city on Earth – including Paris? VIVA MEXICO In Summary: In Cuernavaca, we stayed at the wonderful Casa de la Grúa. https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/20743463 We ate at Hacienda de Cortes (where tree vines form the roof of the restaurant and you can…