It helps to be out of the country.
It helps to get the news in one fierce shock rather than watching it unfold over hours like a slow-motion train wreck.
It helps to get the news in the morning rather than in the middle of the night.
It helps to get the news in hot sun rather than cold rain. Continue reading
Ooof. There is such a thing as emotional multitasking when your attention is pulled in wildly different, significant directions. Not a rollercoaster, with highs and lows, but rapid shifts between different realities.
I realized this when I sat this morning for a full hour and a half, alone in a quiet house, with my brand-new grandson, and was flooded with such huge hit of love that it shook tears from my eyes. Continue reading
Watching the Olympics makes me think about superpowers. Not the global kind but the personal kind. You can’t help believing in superpowers when you watch gymnast Simone Biles fling herself high in the air, backwards and twisting, and land on her feet. How’d she do that? More than hard work and practice is involved. Some magic is happening, on the order of leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
I wasn’t going to write about politics at all but here I go again. My last three posts got a little back-and-forth going with two cousins who are on the other side of the seemingly intractable political divide, one evidently more strongly than the other. This was no anonymous internet-commenter free-for-all. It was family. Continue reading
I have watched the Democratic National Convention every single night so far. I usually find political conventions boring but this one has kept me entertained. Watching has made me 95% proud to be a Democrat even though I’ve usually shunned party identification. If speeches are any gauge, this is the party of community, compassion, intelligence, humor, hope, and love. Continue reading
After my last post a commenter on Facebook asked if I was just anti-Trump or whether I actually support Hillary Clinton. The commenter implied that neither is an acceptable choice for president.
It’s a good question. Continue reading
I forced myself to watch Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night. Well, the first hour of it, anyhow. It was the longest in recent history. I have nothing to say about it, or him, that hasn’t been said. My small words cannot shed light on the darkness he preaches and embodies. It’s yuuuge. Continue reading
On this Fourth of July I would have been traveling home from Congo. I have emerged from the sharp grief over the trip that didn’t happen but I am still stuck in a limbo of boredom and puzzlement because I have no idea what I am going to do next. Continue reading
This is not my passport. It is my husband’s. I thought a passport was an appropriate image for this post but I don’t have mine right now. It is somewhere in the bowels of the DR Congo embassy in Washington, DC.
I hope I will get it back someday. I certainly will not have it by Wednesday, which is the day I was supposed to leave for the DRC. Continue reading
Photo by ABC 7 News, NY
We read the news of the Orlando massacre on our smartphones as we were driving back to the Midwest from a week of profound spiritual teaching and encounter in Maine. It brought the four of us in the car crashing down to earth-reality after a mountaintop experience. What happens when you come home is always a test of the validity of the spiritual experience you get in a retreat setting. Continue reading
the practical mystic 