Shitty Spring Day
Just an original poem today. I think you all know the sort of day I’m talking about here.
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Curiosity—my new favorite mental health modality
I was sitting on my mat in yoga last week at the beginning of a vinyasa class. The instructor was walking around the room getting the music and lights adjusted, and I thought, She and I are doing the same job. I’m a psychiatric PA. My main role is medication management, deciding which meds will…
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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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Be bad at ANYTHING
There’s an unspoken rule, once you reach real adulthood (I’m not talking age 18—I mean the time in life when you can really do you) that you should only do things you are good at. That rule is silly. And it sucks. Literally it sucks all the fun out of life.
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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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Waking up
I’m just waking up this morning. I heard River get up out of bed and walk through the house. Then he climbed back into bed, ate a little dry cereal from the bowl he requested last night and he’s been quiet for a while now. I have been mulling over this question of how to…
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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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The luxury of play
Torrey Pines has become a holy place to me. I’ve made it a routine stop on my way back from dropping R at his dad’s house. I get out of my car and smell the bushy plants of the coast and the estuary. It reminds me of the smell of the sage brush in…
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There is beauty in the wobble.
Saul was one of the first patients in San Diego to scream at me. I remember the first time seeing him. I went into the field with my nurse to see patients in their homes. We came to his independent living facility (ILF), which was house in a poorer neighborhood in San Diego. I followed…
