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, [...]
September 28th, 2009
One more thing you notice when you drag yourself to the journal every morning on waking is that while every day has been endowed with a standard number of hours, the number of words that you need to capture the twenty four hours since the last time you picked up the pen is highly variable.
Some [...]
September 20th, 2009
Mara Leah Collins hears the thumping tail of expectation beating hopefully every time she opens email or Facebook.
Mara Leah Collins is vaguely disappointed but cannot name what it was she was hoping for.
Mara Leah Collins thanks you for playing.
Mara Leah Collins is disturbed at her tendency to compose Facebook updates throughout the day, the clever [...]
September 14th, 2009
In my head is a long list of the various purposes a blog can serve: updating people who care about the things going on in one’s life, keeping a record of one’s thoughts and feelings in a more searchable version than the towering stack of notebooks, a way of curating the life of the mind, [...]
August 18th, 2009
And after a day of travel-knots in my stomach, and the bumps and sways of the plane descending with the synchronized bobbling of all the heads ahead of us, we found ourselves, me and the boys, in New Mexico. I filled my daily journal pages with less analysis and more catalogues of description, thunderheads piling [...]
July 16th, 2009
But I don’t.
Because I’m running around in the manner of the newly decapitated Gallus gallus domesticus in preparation for flying with the four boys to Albquerque on Saturday, only this is the week one set of boys has camp in the morning another set has camp in the afternoon and trying to keep track of [...]
July 12th, 2009
“Mara __” prompts the Facebook status updater like some wordless existential question. I am out of the glib and the funny and the clever and thinking of the two hundred people whose status updates I look at and who, if they haven’t politely, discreetly, hidden mine, if they haven’t sworn off Facebook or dismissed it [...]
June 22nd, 2009
The curious thing abut a skylight is that the sky reduced to a small rectangular patch suddenly seems so much further away, so much further up. I lean back and am nearly overtaken with vertigo. How different this is from lying on one’s back in a broad and grassy meadow where the world seems evenly [...]
May 19th, 2009
I don’t remember how I was, but it was an age where I remember grown ups being faces hovering far above the legs at my eye level. It was the boredom of mothers shopping, my mother and her best friend together, shopping taking twice as long as it normally would because it’s also now a [...]
May 18th, 2009
All along, I think, I’ve been trying to parent with compassion. Trying to listen to what the kids were telling me, what their frustrations were signaling, what it felt like to be struggling and learning like they were. Maybe not all of of my on-the-spot reactions have been perfect, but I’ve been able to pretty [...]
May 15th, 2009
There’s a precarious moment, a moment when I feel I wobble on a quarter’s edge, ready to fall to either exuberance or hopelessness, and I’m struck that while the exuberant rush of feeling I can do anything, the giddy excitement, may be more fun than the gloom of realizing nothing I have done matters and [...]
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?
