I am part of a group of girls who meet to watch episodes of An African City – a sort of Sex and the City set in Ghana. Our next event is coming soon and I’m already trying to figure out what to wear since everyone else came with such glorious outfits last time. I’ve been thinking a lot about Africa, about visiting with Tin, about Senegal where his ancestors might have come from since…
So while Tatjana is out of town, I’m using her car. I actually started using her car a couple of months ago to pick up Tin when I couldn’t afford the gas to go back and forth across town to his school. So I was happy to have the car and my gas bill reduced to a quarter of what I normally spend for this week. Only Thursday, I took Tin to a playdate in…
I started taking aikido classes a month ago. I’ve worked out a trade with the sensei there and I’m writing his newsletter and able to practice there. I took about four classes and found out there was a seminar coming up and a fellow classmate convinced me to sign up for it. So I did. The sensei who was doing the seminar is from Finland – a 57-year-old woman who has done Aikido for 40…
Last year, in February, after we had moved out of the LaLa, and moved into the three-room apartment that I thought would be home for a while, a few things happened to shake up life. The first was that it was the beginning of shared custody with Tin and he caught the flu and so he ended up staying with me since he had gotten sick there. As he slept noisily in his bed, and…
I hit the ground running on so many different fronts lately that I found myself moving at psycho nano speed and wasn’t sure how to bring it all back down to earth again. The first problem, was my meditation – a ritual that I had performed daily – got interrupted by a puppy. Sorry, but Stella wakes me at 4am and 5am and then 6am and at first I was just staying up and staggering…
My mother used to say she never wanted to be a burden to her children, and yet the burden of her dying quasi young continues to weigh on me. She would have been 74 years old in 2009 had she made it to her birthday, but she died at the end of November instead of making it to December 28th. She was the oldest daughter to her mother – a woman and grandmother who I…
I’m helping a rally in Congo Square this Sunday for Mother’s Day for the Kidnapped Nigerian girls – I hope everyone comes out to show their support and solidarity with these mothers and daughters and Nigerian community.
The Tao te Ching – the way – the method – the path. Back in 2011, I sat on the stairs on the Andalusian coast of Spain and watched ants crawl up the wall and form a question mark. It was uncanny how the universe was painting my confusion for me to see it – detached and unexpectedly. Yesterday, at aikido class – did I mention I am taking aikido? – there was a framed…
When my friend adopted Stella’s brother, one of the puppies from the litter that looked a little like her, I told her she should call him Stanley. But her son had other ideas for his name and so HedgeHog won out. HedgeHog came over for a playdate along with Tin’s friend and I watched in utter amazement as the boys roughed and tumbled and the puppies mirrored them right underneath the trampoline. Snips and snails…