My grandmother suffered a stroke three months before her 100th birthday. While the clot moved through her body, she sat quietly on her sofa knitting an army-green winter cap for Russian orphans. She didn’t know she was in the middle of a medical crisis, but the moment reveals something essential about her: she stayed with her purpose until the end, doing something simple and loving. Every week for ten years she gave hats to an organization that worked with the orphans, yet sh

Love is one of those emotions we all feel deeply but can’t pin down. We try to define it, measure it, explain it, yet the harder we push, the more confused we become. Love isn’t something we can quantify or debate into clarity. I believe love is energy that moves through us, and changes form when we no longer feel the same. It can shift into emotions like hate, but it never disappears. Raymond Carver expresses this truth in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love . Four

When I was a little girl, and felt lonely, my initial reaction was to keep my sadness inside, which eventually transformed into anger after a few days or weeks. I became very upset by things that usually wouldn't normally bother me and took it out on the wrong people. During these moments, having someone to listen and offer validation was comforting. Conversely, I remember occasions when I'd huddle with friends and engage in gossip or not-so-nice behavior. This all came from

Allen Ginsberg wrote with a frantic energy of someone who, to stay alive, had to howl, because the world was not a place that accepted him. Ginsberg unleashed his rage in his poem, "Howl" , so the world that refused to see him had to look. Even though we have different life experiences, this poem brought me to fan the same rageful fire in my gut, as Ginsberg. This is a fire born from suffering and grief, that relies on creative outlets like writing, art, music and movement,

I don't remember the world and its human inhabitants ever being this divided before. Where most of the population is either shouting, because they KNOW they are right, and everyone else needs to go live on an Island somewhere away from here, or they are tuning out completely because it's all too much noise that they cannot make sense of. This week as I began reading Gwendolyn Brooks and Grace Paley, I felt a surge of relief in what and how they saw the world. Both women wrote

The first paragraph if John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, shows suburban couples nonchalantly talking about how they all “drank too much” last night, and although, this is a potential problem due to the lack of comfortability around the physical effects of the hangovers, a bigger problem would be to not have a hangover, as that would be going against the grain.   There exists an unspoken rule that they are all in this together, this suburban world in the 1960’s. This group of hung

People suffer. That is part of the human experience. According to Buddha, though, suffering is optional, and we have control over how we...

Last week, on the flight to my father’s funeral in Las Vegas, I meditated on how I would craft his Eulogy, and decided on the Hermit Crab...

I don’t know what I would do without YouTube. It has everything that I need, when I want to know how to do something. YouTube taught me...

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Self-Reliance,”  explained that “We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers...

Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant writer, inventor, businessman, and human, who valued introspection and meditation. He worked toward...

“She has your nose”, I said. “Poor her.” “Your nose is perfect.”  “You’re my mother, you have to say that.”   My daughter held up a...

When my children fell, I fell with them. When they were in despair, I despaired too. I stayed awake many nights worried. I talked about...

The five of us sat in our homes on opposite sides of the country looking at a screen.  I set up the sibling zoom meeting for the purpose...

I remarried in October of 2007, after being a single mother for seven years. That first Christmas, everything the kids asked for, their...

“It’s all here, Mom.” My son Christopher would say, when looking up at the stars. “What is?” I’d ask “This. Life. The real part. You are...

When pendulums swing far to the north, they are sure to swing just as far to the south because, according to the laws of physics, every...

Why does a story need conflict and resolution to be accepted or desired? I’ve been told if people are to engage in the story, it must...

Yogic philosophy teaches that we think, speak, and act in a non-harmful way. In Sanskrit it is called (Ahimsa). I've learned that what...

Because Mom didn’t do the allowance thing, I took a job delivering the Philadelphia Inquirer. It seemed simple enough. “It’s easy.”  The...