This morning arose with a busy day ahead of me: back to back dental appointments for myself and my son, forgotten about in the blur of yesterday's holiday; stacked phone calls and a desk overflowing with papers and good intentions. In the midst of the pull to go here and…
The sunflowers wave as I step outside to cut parsley for the small red potatoes I've steamed for supper. When I miss my family, I cook their food. I mince onions and saute garlic in olive oil, add basil and tomatoes and simmer my grandmother's spaghetti sauce. I bake the…
A few years ago I began creating a "Book of Love," a psalter of the heart. I was watching my favorite TV show, Call the Midwife, and heard a quote that cracked me open: "God hugs you. You shine so finely it surpasses understanding. You are encircled by the arms…
Yesterday, in my monthly Soul Writer's Circle, we were asked to write a poem about embodiment. One prompt invited us to weave a scientific fact about the body with a story about the body. I remembered a statistic I'd heard, how our bodies are mostly not ours: we can only…
Images of elephants - trunk tied to trunk - have touched me ever since my mentor used this image to remind us of a helpful truth: that we are creatures of attachment. We belong to one another. This is never so true as when we are experiencing great pain or…
I just returned from a visit to my large, loud, loving Italian-Polish family in the Cleveland suburbs. As we often do, we told stories and looked at old family photos. A poem came today about one of the photos: a photo of my brother and cousin, in their t-shirt and…
There is a moment when I walk out into the early morning light in my pajamas and robe to offer my son's friend a fried egg sandwich as he waits in the car before school. He looks up from his phone, and his whole face alights. In that moment, I…
Isn't it something, what flows from our bodies, our hearts, our minds? Sometimes I don't even realize how irritable I'm feeling until it comes out at our old dog, who in her senility, forgets that she isn't allowed in the kitchen. I regularly trip over her as I wash the…