Today is Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which I became familiar with and began celebrating twelve years ago when I moved to Texas, just north of the Mexican border. If you want to be moved and educated about this holiday, this movie will do the trick.…
This year I've been a part of a monthly writing group where we meet to read poems, write, and know ourselves more deeply. Each month has a theme, and this month our theme was failure. A bucket of poems have come in the wake of this exploration. Most of these…
This poem came one morning when I was scrolling through etsy, looking for a new pair of earrings. Scrolling etsy can be inspirational and joyful - there's so much creativity alive in the world. And I'm often amazed at how often I crave something new when I have things in…
In my most recent poem I mentioned that two poems came to me last week about softness. The first you can find here. The second began with a line borrowed from Mary Oliver's famous poem, Wild Geese: You do not have to be good. And so I wondered, how I…
In my most recent Soul Writer's circle, the theme was 'softness.' Two poems came to meet me in this reflection. The first poem wasn't about softness, but about strength - and how softness can be another kind of strength. My relationship with softness is multi-faceted. Sometimes softness feels painful…
Here in Texas where I live we've been in a drought for several weeks. Now that we're in September, we feel the gradual cooling and shortening of the days. It's so subtle it's easy to miss. And yet tuning to these changes brings hope and steadiness: this burning heat will…
Here in Texas, like so many parts of the world, it has been hot and dry. Each day it's 105, 106, 104, 107. You don't check the weather as you know it will be hot, it's only a matter of degree. With the heat there has been no rain and…
We recently drove across town on a quiet Saturday afternoon to visit friends and meet their newborn daughter. During our visit, their daughter mostly lay snuggled against her mother's chest, asleep. They told me about their daughter's first weeks and how she only slept when she was lying on their…