What a year, just about everyone I know is saying. Here's some of mine in 14 blog posts spanning the seasons. Thanks for being here as part of my community. I wish you all your own everyday magic. Kat on her birthday one year Loving Kat -- January 3: " Grief is like a giant sack filled with large, angular rocks and also ripped up piles of feather pillows. It’s impossible to get hold of and carry somewhere that makes sense. It’s a mess for the nervous system too as well as a

It doesn't take much to turn my inner bitch mites (great phrase from my friend Sara) upon myself. Sometimes the smallest error, flaw, or mishap sets them to biting, leaving tiny welts or itchiness for hours. To mix metaphors, maybe you've been in the same leaky boat at times also? I mean, who hasn't been brought up to be exceptionally hard on themselves or otherwise warped by the traumatic or haphazard dangers of their particular life as well as life at large? Having just tur

It's been a rough time, especially for many who had their SNAP benefits and other supports cut off as well as federal workers who faced 43 days of the shutdown upending their lives. Add to this the shock for people I know when they see how much their health insurance is rising, doubling for many people, and there's good reason to despair, freak out, collapse on the couch in exhaustion, or activate fierce hypervigilance. At the same time, I've been seeing unprecedented generos

At the 20th Power of Words conference Oct. 3-5 in Kansas City, I had the honor of giving the welcome talk, which I realized speaks to more than just people engaged in Transformative Language Arts (writing, storytelling, theater and other word arts for social and personal transformation and community building). So I share this here, hoping we all find meaning, stubborn hope, and belonging. At our first meeting, you could see how different we were by our shoes: Birkenstocks, w

Double rainbow in Ennistymon I must have been five or six when I first saw a picture of Ireland and knew I would go there one day. I'm...

I believe this is a story tree, likely 300-400 years old In the middle of the forest, I fell in love with ponderosa pines. For some years...

Mary in front of her home, photobombing the peonies one spring day in the pandemic When our friend Mary died less than a week ago, her...

After the first surgery in 2019 Dear wonderful readers, I've missed you lately and have missed posting as regularly as I wish. There's so...

Hanging out in real time with some of my tribe at Kat's memorial celebration At the tail-end of a bad bout of the flu I realized what...

Between the prairie and the lake I'm just back from Brave Voice, deep in the Flint Hills of Kansas -- here is a piece I wrote there,...

My new book, The Magic Eye: A Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety , is hitting the streets and bookshelves near you...

In the face of so much happening so fast, it's hard to know what to do, especially when cruelty is at the wheel. So it's no wonder that I...

Friends walking in our field In the very long year that was January, Cindy, my acupuncturist, told me a story: another client of hers,...

I've been thinking lately about how we can be refuges of acceptance, calm,and love for each other. After all, it's been and it is a...

One of my favorite pictures of Kat being Kat Determination, kindness, curiosity, and presence. That was Kat, so it was no wonder that,...

"You'll be happy to hear we didn't kill a dear," my son Daniel's friend Dan told me two weeks ago when the two Daniels hauled their bright..

Happy birthday for a 2nd time On Christmas night, the first night of Hanukkah, and my sister-in-law Karen's birthday, we light a bunch of...

Ronda reading at the 2014 Power of Words conference. Photo by Stephen Locke. When Ronda's son Scott called me Monday with the news of her...

Yup, it's a tunnel of light but not that kind of tunnel of light "How are we? How do we think we are? We are just waiting to die," Nanny (my grandmother) would tell me when I asked how she and Papa (my grandfather) were. Never mind that they were in their early 60s (and would live 20+ more years). Immigrants from Poland, they had been through everything from pogroms to losing their young child child to discovering all of their family in Poland were killed in the Holocaust whi

Just about everyone I know is carrying a backpack full of anxiety, dread, despair, or anger, sometimes weighing into terror or rage. We...