In which I am eaten alive by my belongings Packing is both a lesson in humility and an opportunity for aspiration. It all fits into cardboard boxes, and frankly you can live without it all, but by damn you’re bringing it along anyway. You’re packing the just-beyond-expiration-date garbanzo beans because…

A meditation on moving and losing my mind Of all the stages of grief, I think I prefer denial. It’s the one in which you don’t have to change anything, in which the flowers continue to bloom and you merrily row along. I’ve managed to stay in denial for the…

The search for my mother’s birth parents Finding my grandmother My mother was adopted in 1938, when it was something to hide, a terrible secret. She grew up with a single mother and lost her to cancer when she was only 23. She always had a sense she didn’t belong, of being out…

Being poor is not that bad My middle class family and friends don’t believe me when I say it, but as a woman who was raised middle class, divorced, and plummeted to a different and lower social class, I have to say that poverty is not the tragic story of…

A yearning for legitimate work — What do we prioritize as ‘real’ writing One aspect of my personal writer’s block takes the shape of what I consider the ‘best’ writing, the writing I ‘should’ be doing if I were a ‘real’ writer. I am including all those quotation marks because I know this is something I’m telling myself. It’s an artificial category, ‘real’…

Recognizing the nightmare as a gift — What is writer’s block? Every writer and every artist I’ve ever known encounters a block at one time or another. There you are, blithely writing (I’ll use writing as the example, because that’s what I know) when suddenly the spigot is turned off and there’s nothing there. No ideas, no ‘next thing,’ no nothing. …

Grappling with loss of control — Change means loss Being alive means you deal with loss. There are losses, large and small, that happen because time passes. Things change. From one moment to the next the world reconfigures itself, transforming itself, in a constant flow of permutations. You know this because you are alive. And because you are a…

I am okay, I am okay When I was a kid, I was afraid the sun would go out. My father told me the light from the sun took about 7 minutes to get to us, so I figured I had ample warning to run upstairs and burrow into the…

She brings light, again She is the blood of the world. Her giant rock turns and once again a miracle, illumination! light creates the small things scuttling in the underbrush trees bow with grace, how do they keep from singing? with the exuberance of birds, waking the lumbering mammals, who …