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Hearing with Heart: Grieving for Lost Sound

On October 16, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, Health / 10 Comments

Her brows scrunched together and her hand covered her mouth to hide her feelings. Her eyes said she was saying something important, but I wasn’t wearing my hearing aids and heard nothing. Not a sound. Blank space.

My Creative Dilemma: Push Ahead or Yield?

On October 9, 2012 / Creativity, My Land and Home, Nature, Spirituality / 12 Comments

If I only push harder, I’ll catch a tailwind and launch my book. This month it will be finished, I said in August. I said it again in September. Burn those engines on high heat and surge

Bookends of a Marriage

On October 2, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, Family and Friends / 29 Comments

On a September afternoon in 1966, when I was a 21 year old student at Cornell, I met an older man—he was 25—in a motorcycle shop in Ithaca. His muscular body arched over the skeleton of an

Zapped by the Dalai Lama

On September 25, 2012 / Family and Friends, Spirituality / 12 Comments

I squinted in the harsh morning light and shivered in anticipation. Standing outside a hotel near Carmel, NY on a May morning in 1997, I felt like a celebrity stalker. I was hungry for spiritual contact. My

Engaging and Letting Go: Holding the opposites of love and loss

On September 18, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, Family and Friends, Spirituality / 14 Comments

“I asked Liz to marry me,” my older son David says on the phone. I hear the drone of engine noise, so I know he’s driving home from a weekend trip. “What did she say?” I tease,

Better Than Your Grandma’s Marinara

On September 11, 2012 / Family and Friends, Health / 11 Comments

When my husband Vic and I got serious about healthy eating in 1967, his mom Virginia gave me a copy of Let’s Cook It Right by Adele Davis. Vic was not thrilled with bran molasses cookies and

Governor Cuomo: We Won’t Let You Frack New York

On September 4, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, My Land and Home, Nature, Political Action / 4 Comments

On August 27, 2012, people from all over New York State marched to the capital building in Albany and delivered 3,200 pledges to resist fracking to Governor Andrew Cuomo. Hundreds of small environmental organizations joined under the

Small Goodbyes: Opening the Heart to Loss and Love

On August 28, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, Family and Friends, My Land and Home / 9 Comments

Being alone was all right, as long as nobody came and left again. — Das Blauekleid (The Blue Dress) by Doris Doerrie, translated by Ellen Schmidt At 1:00 am, I look out my bedroom window and see

Creating Community with Pie: Inspired by “Making Piece” by Beth Howard

On August 21, 2012 / Bereavement and End of Life, Family and Friends, Health / 10 Comments

Pie is community glue, its very own language of love. “That blueberry looks just like the pie my grandma baked,” one grizzly old guy tells me at the Hector Fireman’s Fair. I grin and laugh and ask

Angry Faces, Churning Water: Fracking Industry Threatens Seneca Lake

On August 14, 2012 / Health, My Land and Home, Nature, Political Action / 12 Comments

In July 2012, Tony Ingraham of Walk in the Park made my blog “Angry Faces, Placid Water: Fracking, LPG Gas Storage and Seneca Lake” into this video. Inergy, a Kansas City based company, was working on their