A long time ago, someone gave me a quote and I have pulled it out and read it many times, and given it to those who I thought needed it, and preserved it for future reminders. I was feeling boxed in recently. I felt suffocated by events out of my control. And I realized how convenient it is to fall into a pattern of belief and then I watched Obama’s eulogy of Senator Clementa Pinckney…
I spent a year and a half in community with a group and in the end had to leave when someone in that group committed a crime against my family. The celebration of what that group accomplished just took place in public, on stage, this past Wednesday. I was not there. Nor was I even in the photographs listed. And my speaking part was dropped from the 10 minute video. I have spent the last…
A book arrived today from my friend in Boston, a mix of words and their meanings fully wrought. I was reading it mindlessly today, waiting on Tin to finish swimming, when I got to the third word – ANGER. ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to…
Yesterday morning, I got up early and went for a run with Stella and then hopped in my truck that has part of the suspension work done and headed to Ponchatoula to a full-day meditation retreat. As usual, I got lost on the way; then when I realized only ten miles later, I started to backtrack and was making a U-turn on a country road and ran right down into a ditch only a mile…
I walked passed a field of clovers today and saw a four leaf clover, no wait, I saw five four leaf clovers, and so I picked them. Stared at them in the sunlight to make sure what I was seeing was correct – compared them to the three leaf clovers that were the clear majority in the field. I saw a friend getting his child out of the car for school and gave him one,…
I went to see Ellen today and told her that my faith has been rocked. She asked me, from a philosophical standpoint, what is faith? My faith is not my religion, my faith has been my confidence in myself, that I had walked through the valley of various hells and could withstand anything that life threw at me no matter what presented itself. That’s what was shaken. That faith. If my life was put on…
A colleague of mine sent me this a few months ago: The time for healing of the wounds has come. The time to build is upon us… We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination… There is no easy road to freedom… None of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for reconciliation, for nation…
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me At All ~ Maya Angelou Shadows on the wall Noises down the hall Life doesn’t frighten me at all Bad dogs barking loud Big ghosts in a cloud Life doesn’t frighten me at all Mean old Mother Goose Lions on the loose They don’t frighten me at all Dragons breathing flame On my counterpane That doesn’t frighten me at all. I go boo Make them shoo I make fun Way they…
I do miss living on the bayou and waking every morning to the lovely light that only water seems to do justice to no matter if it is dawn or the gloaming or even pitch black out. My world the past week is loaded with advice by well meaning friends, do this, do that, but a friend kept insisting that we needed to be in water. So when Tin got out of school yesterday I…
Tin had a playdate with some friends at the pool and so I had a couple of hours to shake off my heaviness. A friend took me to the French Quarter to amble around. We stopped in Exodus Goods, a shop owned by Solange, which is tucked inconspicuously on Conti street a few feet from Decatur. There on the counter sat these spiral earrings calling my name. The artist calls them “entering the cosmos” and…