September 9th, 2010
It’s one of those memories with dream-like clarity so I hardly trust it, it might be a composite, the site where my father is working on a house for someone with enough money to buy land where there are no close neighbors. We would go to where he was working I think bringing him a [...]
Read the rest...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. [...]
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 [...]
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?
