March 8th, 2010
The starting recognition that how I experience things is shaped by my attitude has this pernicious sprouting of a harsher personal philosophy.
If my internal conditions shape experience, and I am responsible for all of those internal conditions, then I am entirely responsible for my own happiness. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, [...]
February 22nd, 2010
If one is mindful one can wake up on Valentine’s Day and be grateful for the abundant loves in one’s life. I go reflexively into an abstracted third person doing it, as if superstitiously deflecting the evil eye, because there is no rationale behind how tremendously fortunate I have been in love, a husband who [...]
February 9th, 2010
Mostly at yoga I am not overcome by words. The words Dana uses to guide me, the custom images she fits me are tools, means to an end, and I feel released from words; I feel a little guilty today that I finish with her and grab a notebook to scrawl.
It is what it is.
The [...]
February 2nd, 2010
I think I need to turn the comments off on my blog for a while.
I was talking about this with my friend Sarah, today. She doesn’t have comments on her personal blog, and she told me that some people don’t consider it a real blog if you don’t have comments. But then she blogs for [...]
December 18th, 2009
Ungently, I woke up at 2 am, not sure whether it was a throbbing in my jaw that caused this, or the anxiety attending the realization I am going to have to take action. The fears are taller than me, like the boisterous, intimidating eighth graders at Rainer’s school and the gauntlet they present when [...]
November 30th, 2009
So if I still kept a memory book, there was a day a week or two ago when my teenaged (!)(*) son said something that would surely have gone in it. He uses Twitter, and told me that sometimes when he looks at Raven’s and my tweet-streams he feels like the luckiest kid he knows [...]
November 17th, 2009
So you don’t need to be in a twelve step program or even have the number of people in your life that are in such programs that I have in mine to have bumped into Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:
God grant me the serenityTo accept the things I cannot change;Courage to change the things I can;And wisdom [...]
November 16th, 2009
I walk Rainer to school past some graffiti every day, OAT, like that, giant block, all-caps letters and my brain turns it into mirror writing of TAO and this becomes my answer in my head to this friend’s voice in my head poking me with her favorite 12 step program refrain about how we are [...]
November 12th, 2009
All of this solitude and greyness and the fear my voice has rusted shut.
It isn’t protective silence, or withholding silence, or shamed silence. It’s just silence.
I mean, it feels more like a gathering up of the voices in my head, sorting them. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes in music. Only if I put on music [...]
October 14th, 2009
And there. It’s fall. The sunflowers burnt out, the drizzle yesterday lacing a wind that was slapping dry leaves mercilessly, so that the walk to pick up Rainer from school felt like a scouring, my outside state complementing my windswept interiors.
I think I’ve stumbled across resolve, some small sureness, that paradoxically throws everything into question. [...]
It’s that conundrum, how do you sum yourself up concisely for the random, bored web surfer? You don’t really care what I do, or where I live… at least these things don’t set me apart much from the millions of other people on the internet. That is, I “stay at home” with my four sons in Portland, Oregon, and write earnestly about the things I think, identifying as a Bahá’í, a feminist, a St. John’s alumna (though I graduated from the University of New Mexico) and recovering philosophy student, a Suzuki parent, a reader… Is any of that really who I am? How about the list of random factoids?
