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…
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…
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…
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…
A friend once gave me an 'end of the day' clay bead - a bead made of the remnants of all the beads that had been created that day. She gave it to me when I was pregnant with my son, my last child, and was facing new…
"It is not beauty that endures, it is love that makes us see beauty." - Leo Tolstoy In 2010, I sold my beautiful 1908 Craftsman home in a small railroad town in Montana – a home with 'good bones,' a yard full of mud and dog poop,…