During this quarantine without life’s usual distractions, anxiety follows me like my puppy. I’m safe, but the Earth trembles. I smother one flaming fear by reminding myself I’m OK. Then another flares. When my husband was dying, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus helped me find beauty and solace. This spring is nearly as difficult […]

My email feed and Facebook page burn with coronavirus news and magic ways to avoid the covid-19 pandemic. I remind myself to breathe. Our house is on fire. And still, the moon makes her nightly rounds and birds sing their spring songs when I walk the trails with my dogs. Limey green moss spreads up […]

I dropped into a Deep Well of Grief this morning. I grieved for dreams shattered, especially for younger people, for dying humans everywhere, for a struggling world and suffering planet. Then I did what I do when depression threatens to devour me. I put on my boots and went to the forest with my dogs. […]

Just before our fortieth wedding anniversary in 2008, I drive my husband Vic to Strong Hospital where he’s being treated for lymphoma. The long drive is familiar after two years. Spring-green hillsides shout May vitality and hope, while Vic chokes and gasps in the passenger seat next to me. He’s exhausted from cancer treatment and […]

I lie in the dark in my lover’s arms listening to his slow sleeping breath. I’ve known him just a few months, but he’s the man I want to marry. A streetlight on West Seneca Street beams through the window illuminating the tangled sheets and white envelopes and papers scattered on his desk. What are […]

I’ve always felt grounded, sturdy in my hiking boots on a challenging trail, but there is no “always” in bodies. We change constantly, quickly or slowly. In 2013, as my L ear roared and the hearing disappeared, I listed left and fell against my friend Janet Wylde while we walked. I struggled up and fell […]