Finding Alignment

My self is multiple; my core is a unified whole. If I am aligned from my core, radiating outward, I can hold the parts of myself in appropriate relation to each other. Holding to the love at center, I can hold my fear and my need loosely, like I hold the sky, and connect it to the ground, the place where I can walk forward and move from love and not fear.

Post-christmas, post-christian Christmas post

Christmas has become a cathexis of pain for me, I thought, as I leaned my head on the window after a good cry in the grocery store parking lot. It’s a good word, a useful word, I felt at the time; it gives me a way to name what’s happening here, why it actually makes

Shelters

on divorce, grief, and finding peace in the elements* It surprises them, the nudity, but being naked is its own form of prayer.  We brought the coffee and the chocolate granola over the rocky outcropping down to the lake, wind lapping ripples against the granite shore. I sipped the sacramental first, perfectly hot and dark

Uprooting: On faith and pretending

It’s that kind of day. Sometimes you just feel like putting on your boots and tromping around the garden, or rather, the mess of overgrowth that could be the garden, and cutting it all down. Chopping the unwieldy branches and gathering them in piles, hacking them into manageable pieces and stuffing them in the organic

Writing in Crisis as Necessity

The time we’re in can aptly be described as a crisis. There’s a very real life or death risk of unknowingly infecting someone or contracting this virus that could put someone high risk on a ventilator. We can’t see each other in person. We’re isolated in our homes, physically detached from our communities. So we meet

Nesting Instincts, Guest Post

In my “Writing Memoir in Time of Crisis” course last week, we asked “How is our memory of the past shaped by the present moment of pandemic? How is your relationship with memory affected by the questions you ask of your memory?” Memories do not exist in a vacuum but are shaped, toned, and seen

Writing Women’s Memoir in Time of Crisis: Self-Reflection as Self-Care

During a time of crisis—as in this time of being isolated, rising death tolls, economies crumbling, and jobs slipping away— writing about one’s self or personal past may seem self-indulgent. However, somewhat paradoxically, the work of writing about personal past experience can be a powerful tool to enter the present more fully. Like many freelance

The Opening of Morning

In the morning I had both my girls in my arms. Catherine snug on top of my bicep, hair nuzzled in my armpit. Madeleine just beyond her, within reach of my fingertips. Both almost breathing heavily, eyes almost totally closed, but then a cardinal lights up the widow with a red splash of sound. Both

Of Denim Jumpers and Blackberries

I never thought I’d homeschool. Not in a million years did I want to be associated with the families in denim jumpers, with awkward social skills, knowing lots, sure, but not knowing how to live in the world. Why would I want to do that to my kids? And what about myself? Of all the

Hiking in the Rain for Mental Health

Finding community in Free Forest School When we moved to San Antonio in 2016, I was 8 1/2 months pregnant, with a 2 1/2 year old. I had my baby the next week. It felt like I’d been ripped from my community and thrown into a sweltering solitude, in a new city, with no friends