August 18th, 2010
So there is the experience of telling someone one of your deepest darkest secrets and having them say “Oh! It’s not just me?” Not once, but twice this has happened to me this week, and it shouldn’t have surprised me. But I am beginning to think that every thinking person I know walks around at [...]
Read the rest...March 28th, 2010
It’s so seasonal one could set a calendar by it, the restlessness: I want to wander. I stack my to-read list with books about walking (I NEED the Rebecca Solnit Wanderlust: A History of Walking, don’t I? I am too impatient with the library hold system where I am the fourth hold and they have [...]
March 27th, 2010
I keep telling myself that since I am inspired to practice banjo every day now, this is something other than weak-kneed obsession. Sometimes, though? I confabulate. I cannot find my favorite song of his, Notes From the Banjo Undeground on the you-tubercle, but if you have been anywhere near me in the last two weeks [...]
March 26th, 2010
I. The walk to the library. The almost-empty bag flops at my side, rattling at the bottom of it the three books I have emptied, I return. I am alone with my head, trusting the boys not to burn down the house in my absence. I am grateful for the lightness of being able to [...]
March 24th, 2010
It starts with trying to review a book for goodreads, the only social networking I can do with any conviction at the moment. I have finished Arlington Park which is blatantly feminist, after all, the most sympathetic character being warned, “You have to be careful. Women your age can start to sound strident.” And of [...]
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 [...]
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?
