Accepting Autism
Ten years ago, April was designated Autism Awareness month. April 2 is World Autism Awareness day. There has been a movement towards renaming both of these, replacing awareness with acceptance . Robert Frost wrote,” Always fall in love with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My […]
Literally
I suppose all parents have those first moments of recognition; the sudden realization that the world has pushed itself inside your child’s innocence, the bittersweet rush of comprehension that s/he will never be quite the same again. Having a child with disabilities creates a different trajectory. Timelines are unpredictable. Those milestones that mark the development […]
A little more “Pub Cred”.
One of my goals as a creative person is to put more of my work out into the world. If writing and art-making gets short shrift in the bigger picture of my life as Bink’s mom and chief advocate—and it does—the amount of time I spend on submissions is barely worth a mention. All writers […]
Little Altars Everywhere
My home is host to little altars everywhere honoring lives lived, seasons arriving and leaving, the hundred sparks of grace and wonder, sorrow and understanding that pock and foliate hours and years squeezed into the dance of this body, my particular, grand, unbearably blessed and gratefully transient human experience. On good days I go bowing […]
Notes from a Parallel Universe
I’ve written a fair amount about life with my adult child. As I plod ever so slowly towards creating a book about the journey, it occurs to me that the pace at which I’m working on that is in sync with the overall pace and rhythm of our life together. Bink will turn 28 this […]
Me and My Shadow Go to Market
It is May 2020, still early in The Covid Times. We take ourselves to the market, by which I mean our whole selves, me in my layers of self-consciousness— the run of the mill kind that most of us don without thought— she baring all, as usual: no pretense, nothing to hide. The market rule […]
LATELY
The ground seems foreign, new roots and stones anchored in the middle of familiar paths, and my feet stumble more, much more. Are you stumbling too? Such heavy air, a downward press on the shoulders makes it hard to look up, check out the sky. I can’t speak for you, but I feel your heart […]
When the Beginning is also the Ending
I haven’t done a lot with poetic forms. Something inside of me chafes at the notion of trying to fit the body of a poem, beating heart and all, into a prescribed number of lines or a particular shape or meter. I did enjoy this exploration of palindrome verse, though, also known as mirror poetry. […]
Medicament
Medicament This morning’s waking, tight and tender to the touch, felt like neck ache, and all along the spine of this day my heart climbed and slid, ridge-riding the grief and uncertainty of these past months, pushing up towards bone-like pinnacles, vertebraic protrusions of more bad news— illness and violence, economic cancer, people hating their […]
Gifts and Visitations
It’s been just over a month since my dear friend and soul sister Marina died, after a quick and nasty tussle with appendiceal cancer. She visits my consciousness daily, in ways both fleeting and substantial. We talked a lot about the afterlife in her last months. She told me clearly that, when she visits me […]