We are selling our beautiful house in the Michigan woods and plotting a move to the nearby city of South Bend, Indiana. We have many reasons for doing this and we have been thinking about it for some time but what prompted us to take action, to actually put our beloved home on the market and begin the rollercoaster of real estate searches, showings, and offers, has a lot to do with the election of Donald Trump and the stunning, fast-moving stream of events since then. Continue reading
family
Advent 2016
This feels like the “after all is said and done” day at the end of a month that … I don’t even know what to say about it. You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing. There are so many words out there already. I feel like everything that could be said has been said. Continue reading
Don’t cry for me
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
Divine baby love
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
Ethan
I am in full grandma mode these days. Nearly every week for a period of two months my husband and I are making the 3-hour trip to the other end of the state to help with our daughter’s family while her mother-in-law, who usually is on call nearby, is out of the country. We spend two nights and the better part of three days. It is a privilege and lots of work. The six-year-old is mostly in school but a very dynamic presence when she is home. We spend most of our time with Ethan, who is going on 19 months. Continue reading
Politics and family
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
The low hum
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
Our bodies our selves?
The kind man who lets strangers hunt for mushrooms on our property had prostate surgery a week ago. He has given me permission to tell you this, and that he is doing fine. One tends to be shy about maladies that have to do with our more intimate body parts, like uteruses and breasts and prostate glands. Continue reading
Mushrooms and kindness
It is morel season in Southwest Michigan. We have sometimes found these delicacies in our five acres of woods but not for the past several years, even in the spots where they had appeared before. You never know where they’re going to pop up. I found two big ones by the side of the road the other day when I was picking up trash. I washed them thoroughly and sautéed them in butter with asparagus. Yum. But we haven’t been persistent about combing every inch of our own woods for morels. Continue reading
Color tour
This trip happened because of a fight. I thought my husband had agreed to meet me in North Carolina next month after my week of Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault. We could do the B&B thing, I could share all my newly acquired wisdom with him, yada yada. Belatedly he happened to remember that he had a choir concert on the aforeplanned weekend. For some reason I took this to mean that I did not come first in his life. We fought. Or rather, I blew up and he looked puzzled. Continue reading
the practical mystic 