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…
There is nothing more constant than change. You’d think a worn out cliché like this one would lose its currency, but change – especially other people’s change – makes me incredibly nostalgic for the way things were. Adella the Storyteller transitioned. Tommy will sell his Bay Saint Louis house. Tin’s buddy will move to Virginia. Leo will not be cutting the grass at the Hall anymore. Why is this news uncomfortable? Cancelling, postponing, moving, saying…
Since Tin was able to write, I’ve asked him to write me about his favorite day, our best trip, and to write me a letter about what he loves – and this has been his gift to me for my birthday or Hanukkah. This year, he said he wrote a speech for me. There were several attempts that I caught on video, all bloopers till today. Here is his SPEECH. Today was one of those…
Today marks the 11 year anniversary of my mom’s passing. When you look at the world through a calendar mind you mark time as days on a page, joyful vs painful years, and every breath you have taken between the time your mother died and now. A friend sent a note her mother had written and said her mom was unconditional love. I had the good fortune to have had the same from my mother.…
After the 2005 Federal Flood, handmade signs started appearing on telephone and electrical poles around New Orleans that said: Think That You Might Be Wrong. There was a randomness to their placement, which added to the mystery. The signs were around long enough the word wrong was scratched out on one placed prominently on a telephone pole by the Dumaine Street bridge over Bayou St. John and now read: Think That You Might Be A Robot, which…