Kauai is messing with you

This Kauai trip, it’s been interesting. I had the extra burden of writing a book while I’ve been here. That has made the trip decidedly less zen than my typical solo retreat. Also mercury is in retrograde. The Verizon tower was down on the North side of the island for a couple of days, plus…

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What if I decided I was safe?

When I was first married, I lived in a laundromat.  I say it that way because the apartment was actually IN the building of the laundromat, but I wasn’t sleeping on washing machines at night. During my short time there, I encountered a man who used the bathroom sink every morning to bathe and then…

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The Crocs Miracle: Living with Intention at Disneyland

We did it! Connection and joy. It’s possible, even at Disneyland!

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Finding stillness in Santa Cruz

I’ve been on a woodsy, restful, vacation this week.  I took almost the whole week off from writing.  A week off from patient care.  I finished an oil pastel drawing I started weeks ago.  Yoga everyday!  I found a studio that offers a daily kundalini class.  I’ve been knitting granny dishcloths while binge watching Parks…

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Write the recipe for bliss

Identify those ingredients that make it bliss and put them together in your current circumstance. Put your butt in the sand. Fry bacon on the beach miles away civilization. Stare into the starry sky. Give your soul what it craves.

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You can make anything!

Sometimes creativity feels like a crushing chore, but when I think about Ruby it feels more an attitude. An irrepressible impulse that played out in the bread she baked, the cows she milked, the clothing she sewed, the baskets she constructed, the beets she hoed, and the rocks she laid. Her mosaics matter enormously and not at all, in the same way that each life matters enormously and not at all.

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Run in the desert under a starry sky

I’m sitting on my couch listening to R do his howling cry of bedtime loneliness interspersed with plunking on the alligator xylophone.  It’s 9:32pm.  He’s normally in bed an hour earlier but we are coming off of a travel weekend which included strange sleep schedules and a long nap on the car ride home—on top…

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Day 8: The call is inside me

I wanted to write this post immediately on returning from Hawaii, but for some reason, I couldn’t.  Some things need a little time to settle.  On our last day, Cass and I woke up early, packed up our things and drove with the top down to Pu’uhonua O Honaunau.  It’s a national historic park, south…

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Light and shadow

When I was in Hawaii last week, I visited Painted Church or, more properly, St. Benedict’s Catholic Church.  It’s a scenic, little-white-church tucked away in the greenery south of Kona and worth a quick stop.  The church is famous for the murals covering the walls and ceiling, painted by Father John Velghe, an untrained folk…

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