Grateful for Gratitude
“When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in.” Coined by Kristin Armstrong of the Happiness Project at UC Berkeley, this aphorism captures the power of appreciation. If you’ve ever kept a gratitude journal or...
A Calling Not A Job
Last month I celebrated five years of retirement from corporate editing. It seems like a lifetime ago – I don’t live where I used to, or think like I used to, or do what I used to. And the world has shifted radically in five years. Everything looks different now. Work...
Groundhog Day – How to Survive Feeling Out of Control
“It’s like we’re in an endless car ride with a drunk at the wheel. No one knows when the pain will stop.” - Daphne de Marneffe, author and psychologist If your COVID days blur together, if you feel trapped in an endless Groundhog Day, if you suffer from an inability...
Musings on Wise Hope
At the start of the Bay Area’s shelter in place order, I had a daily schedule. I met with my writing community on Slack every morning, put lots of literary Zoom events in my calendar, baked muffins and chocolate chip cookies, attended morning meditation with my Sangha...
Grief and Gratitude in a Pandemic Year
It’s April 6 again, a day to celebrate and to mourn. My oldest daughter Maya died on this day twenty-eight years ago. As the Covid-19 pandemic rages around the globe, millions of us find our lives radically upended; we’re scared, and we’re grieving. For those of us...
Better Late: Love and Marriage after 65
Facebook recently reminded me that my newly minted husband and I have been “friends” for seven years. It made me laugh. Alex is my best friend – yet you couldn’t find two more opposite personalities. How on earth did this happen? No technology glitch or computer crash...
Hey Cancer!
In the 22 days from my diagnosis to my surgery, cancer scared the bejesus out of me. I don’t feel especially hostile toward it. I’m more surprised than anything – and, at times even grateful for the wake-up call. On December 17 I was diagnosed with a rare form of...
The Writing Life
My process as a writer is messy. It’s made of equal parts exhilaration and despair, moments of wanting to chuck it all, followed by renewed determination. I’ve been in a Dosi-do for the last four months as I plow through revisions of my 282-page novel interspersed...
One Planet, One People
Mass killings are happening at such an alarming rate that most of us can’t even remember when – or why – the most recent killing spree filled our Twitter feeds or our TV screens. Grieving faces, flowers and candles left on street corners, and empty rhetoric about...
Celebrating Maya
“Don’t worry about anything – or anyone,” my grandmother said, and thumped her cane emphatically, underlining her words. She was speaking from the “other side,” a world where I could not hear her directly, but a gifted psychic could translate her words to me. I don’t...
