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 […]
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 […]
Dragonflies
As I write this, my dear friend Marina lies dying in a lovely room inside the oldest house in an historic and pretty New Hampshire town. A wonderful woman who worked with her in the local general store has taken her into her home. Hospice has set her up well with a hospital bed that […]
Little Big Thing
“Stay in awe of life. The little things are the big things. “ ― Richie Norton “I’m cold.” Bink had just gotten up, a good hour later than she used to get up on any given pre-Covid Monday. My eyes scanned her body, noting the hybrid pajamas I’d hastily grabbed for her to put on […]
Collateral Sorrow
It’s been a time of times, a steady landslide of uncertainties. Yes, the Covid, the shutdown. Yes, Bink and so many other adults with disabilities being home all day every day for many weeks, with all the usual programs and activities canceled. Yes, the mass suffering and loss that has accompanied this pandemic around the […]
Prospecting for Grace
Praise The faithful sun, generously stirring energies of Earth and atmosphere, coaxing every green thing towards the rising song of spring. Parents walking with their children outside, smiling and laughing, nodding at neighbors out washing their cars. Quieted streets yielding their usual ruthless noise to melodious birdsong, squirrels rustling in the brush, the wind whistling […]
Communicable
PROPAGATION I’ve taken to humming in the produce section while caressing the plums, sneaking sniffs of the cilantro, eyeing the lemons, audacious in their yellowry. It’s a low, soothing thing, the thrum of air over vocal chords, nearly a buzz, and I am almost a bumblebee, hovering over color, circling the end caps as I […]
BEGIN AGAIN
BEGIN AGAIN “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Begin again is the dry brush dipped into water. The soft tip […]
FISHING
Perched on the frost hardened bank of the wide, cold river, eyes intent on the rushing water, dark and high, I notice the greenish brown river grasses, rooted hopefully in their muddy beds, in a permanent lean as the current pulls them forward, and my eyes train between the reeds, strain towards that bottom where […]