Be open to your happiness and sadness as they arise. – John M. Thomas I love this (also yet another sky photograph). As my Landslide post described, happiness and sadness arise for me out of thin air sometimes, swamping me like an unanticipated wave. At other times they come up with a steadier drumbeat, reaching [...]
I was hugely fortunate to be able to go to the MOMA in New York yesterday to view Marina Abramovic’s performance, “The Artist is Present.” I had read some about it, and in particular love this blog of portraits of people who have sat with Marina. I spent about an hour watching the piece. I’m [...]
Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same. Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. [...]
My friend Kathryn introduced me to Laura, because she thought Laura’s new book, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, and the philosophy it evinces, would be of interest to me. In our very first exchange, Laura wrote: “I think one of the reasons people feel like they have less time than they [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I am terrible with endings. Equally terrible with change. The school year draws to a close, the air fills with humidity and the thick, sweet smells of spring moving into summer, and I start to cry. This isn’t even the “end of the beginning” anymore – we are [...]
Inspiration-less on a Sunday night … I started this several weeks ago. Something I want to remember, from these swollen days: that Grace loves my company above all others. On Friday night, after I read some Harry Potter to her, she read alone in her room as she is allowed to do before bed. She [...]
THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron [...]
This guy. Matt. International man of mystery. A lot of you have asked me about him. Well, you’re neither the only nor the first to do that. When Grace was a baby, she went to daycare the 3 days a week I worked. After about 6 months one of the teachers confided that some of [...]
I’ve been thinking today about the places in our lives that hold our rawest and most treasured memories. Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a [...]
I think anyone who’s been reading this blog knows how profoundly touched I was by Devotion, Dani Shapiro’s memoir that came out this winter. I was very privileged to meet Dani at a couple of her readings this winter; she is everything in person that you’d imagine from her graceful, honest memoir, and more. Devotion [...]
