The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold. -Ranier Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1,4 More beautiful and thought-provoking words from the lovely blog, A Year with Rilke. Isn’t Rilke, in his characteristically simple but powerful imagery, talking [...]
I read Jo’s gorgeous post, Everything Under the Gaping-Mouth Moon with a wince of recognition. She writes – beautifully, as ever – about the dissonance she experiences between her own “singalong life” and the horrors that she knows are out there in the world. “While children starve in North Korea, I barter with mine about [...]
Reading A Double Life reminded me vividly the weeks and months after Grace’s birth, which were the darkest of my life. As she recounts it in her memoir, Lisa Catherine Harper’s depression seems considered, thoughtful. I plunged back into my own, remembering how inelegant my complete and utter collapse was, how inchoate the roaring of [...]
I’ve been thinking an awful lot about achievement, and the Race to Nowhere, and the ways we hide from our lives. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how complicated it gets when the ways you hide from your life are applauded by the world. For me this has mostly been true: whether it’s running or studying [...]
I suspected I was going to enjoy A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood by Lisa Catherine Harper. I didn’t, however, imagine that I’d devour it almost in one sitting. I adored Harper’s book: it is full of careful, scientific details that were new to me, it is written in eloquent, beautiful prose, and more than once [...]
There’s no vocabulary for love within a family Love that’s lived in, but not looked at Love within the light of which all else is seen, The love within which all other love finds speech, This love is silent. -T.S. Eliot I’m in New Hampshire (on the Lost island, I joke, for the complete lack [...]
I am thrilled to share writing from Christine from Coffees & Commutes here today. I absolutely adore Christine’s blog and every single time I read it I find myself nodding with identification. More often than not I find myself crying. Christine has written candidly about her struggle with depression and about her ongoing efforts to [...]
I have been a Peggy Orenstein fan for a long time. Years ago I wrote about her now-famous New York Times article called “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?“ I also read and adored both Flux and Waiting for Daisy. Schoolgirls is next on my list. I have read several reviews of her new book, Cinderella Ate [...]
About halfway through this day, at home with a not-very-sick Whit, I realized it was my half birthday. 36 1/2. Gulp. I remembered my attempt at being funny, exactly a year ago. For some reason, humor makes me feel MUCH more exposed than writing my regular, self-revealing posts. I don’t know why this is, but [...]
I have these little note cards that I occasionally write a message on and slip into the kids’ lunchboxes. The other morning Grace and Whit decided they wanted to write notes to each other for their lunches. I just about melted. My kitchen island with some slightly-tired roses. Whit’s fierce bedhead one morning at school. [...]
