I really love this piece, Parenting in the Age of Paranoia: A Small Manifesto. The author says a lot of things that I agree intensely with. Many sentences left me nodding firmly to myself. Like this one: We do our child a great disservice when we protect them from all risk and harm, as great [...]
By Inches You want it here and now, a remedy for everythinggone wrong. A magic wand, perhaps, alightedon your shoulders. An angel whisperingsweet nothings while you sleep so you wake benightedwith certainty that you are whole once again. You realizeyour patience is diminishing, and yet what’s required is the reverse.This will not be some biblical [...]
“The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.” – Mark Doty, Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear This is what I am talking about in the post below. By so [...]
I’ve been thinking about presence lately, consciousness, the deep desire to more fully inhabit the hours of my own life. This has engendered some interesting questions in the comments and on other peoples’ blogs. Clearly there’s a nerve here, a seam of emotion and anxiety that is common to many people. Some of the dialog [...]
So, as you know, I’ve been pretty preoccupied lately with questions about how we – I! – can be more present in our lives. Once in a while, I have a day where I feel like maybe, just maybe, it’s within my reach, that conscious life. Thursday was such a day. I felt overflowing, at [...]
I have been thinking about Gwen Bell’s piece about entrepreneurship and melancholy. It is simply beautiful writing, declarative and brave, poetic without being overwrought. And I love Gwen’s candor about her own childhood, about the melancholy that she “cannot outrun.” Most of what this post has me thinking about, though, is what I alluded to [...]
I went to yoga last night. It was a short and not very challenging class, but it felt good. Again, I had that feeling of recognition, the sense that my body knows the language of asana on a cellular level. The reason I went today is that on Wednesday afternoons there is a children’s class [...]
“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me–that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it [...]
Today is the inaugural day of a new project called Present Tense. I want to explore through interviews with wild, wonderful, wise women the way we all grapple with the tension we feel about being present in our lives. I am fascinated by the way that some peoples’ lives are both splintered into pieces and [...]
I loved Sarah’s post yesterday at Momalom about the words she surrounds herself with (literally, as in post-its on her computer and written on her desk). She asked people to share the words that they carry with them. She then tweeted them all day and I loved reading the words that comfort and inspire others. [...]
