As darkness descended, the last Mourning Dove baby peeked over the rain gutter edge. Its sibling had already left the nest. That morning, I saw a parent feed the nesting baby by regurgitating half-digested seeds into the baby’s eager mouth. It must have tasted like heaven, like chocolate cake or peanut butter and jelly. The […]
On election night, I went to bed before 10 p.m. My breath was shallow. My belly tight. Reading didn’t help. I got up and took Ambien. Damn this election and the fear-mongering headlines. I awoke at 2 a.m. and considered going downstairs to check results. I resisted and fell back to sleep. I looked at the […]
“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” ~Madeleine L’Engle This morning, soft gray dawn peeks through my bedroom shades at 6 a.m. With daylight savings time gone, I wake up early, but miss those summer evenings when I walked my trails at 9:00 p.m. In the dark days, it’s easy to slip into a world of twenty-four hour light. […]
“I don’t come to Vic’s cairn so often now,” I said to my friend. She and I had walked my favorite forest trails before taking a side trail to the stone memorial where my husband’s ashes are buried. “Soon after he died, I read an article that advised, ‘Give your flowers to the living, not the […]
My college years began with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963. In 1968, the year after I graduated, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. The world felt threatening and unstable. A lot like now. I was a political science major at Cornell with a focus on Southeast Asia and China. The mid 1960s were […]
I miss my big brother’s Sunday calls. I want to tell him Bob Dylan won the Noble Prize in Literature. My brother Jim brought Dylan records home from college when I was 14. I want to tell him Clinton will win this endless upsetting election. He was sure Hillary Clinton was the woman for the job. I want to […]
Gayatri Devi was close to sixty when I met her in the 1970s. She was small, dark-eyed, and bubbled with joy and laughter. She wore a white sari with a cloth draped loosely over wavy graying hair. I was drawn like a bee to clover. Friends had told me about a spiritual teacher who focused on […]