A few nights ago, I hopped a red-eye home from LAX with a carryon of sweaters and books, toothpaste. I’d gone camping with this crew, although camping is perhaps a reach to write. One morning, I woke to find glitter in my boot. — Whenever I teach journaling classes, or writing classes of any sort,
Well, it happened. Bee wakes up early, I make coffee, she asks for craft time, I say sure, and while I usually know better, while I usually use this sun-streamed quiet hour wisely, while I usually reach for a book to read while I cook/burn the eggs, while I usually greet the day with my
Surely you don’t ever struggle with taking constructive criticism personally? Surely you don’t consider yourself open-minded, open-hearted, ready and able to accept even the harshest of feedback until suddenly, you find yourself with wet hair and cold coffee and your pants are feeling tight and the toddler is whining and your husband chooses this precise
There was a time I didn’t answer the door. — Once, when I was pregnant with Bee, an acquaintance I’d known from church asked if she could bring dinner over after the baby was born. Do you like Greek? she’d asked. (I love Greek.) But then, the baby was born and the visitors descended and
I’m never gonna bite my nails again, Bee says to me over pistachios. I want to channel my mother, to say Never say never!, to offer a teachable lesson, but I choose to crack another shell instead. Yeah? I say. Yeah, she says. — I’ve been thinking about it, I guess. I’ve been thinking about
I have a short list of things I wish I’d done in my 20’s (respected my more-amazing-than-they-are-now thighs, interviewed a slew of grandparents, backpacked through Europe). It’s ridiculous, really, because I couldn’t possibly have mustered the energy to do any of them. What I wanted to do in my 20’s was what I actually did
Ken and I met in college. We’d both been selected for a semester-long project that all-too-closely resembled The Real World in those days: 15 students were filmed as we worked/napped/ate together in a towering mansion off campus producing and directing three documentaries for PBS. There were fights and tears and new love, and I still
Overheard, today in yoga class, amidst downward dogs and cedarwood incense: Focused gaze. Drishti. Look up. — One of my instructors is a horse trainer by trade. The way it works, she says, is that you move a horse with your gaze alone. If you want the horse to move, you motion to that area