Front Page - Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

I believe in the transformative power of our stories and in our innate ability to write toward greater courage, resilience, and creativity. As a writer, educator, creativity consultant and coach, and the former Kansas Poet Laureate, I work with individuals, businesses, and communities to live our truest stories. See my books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, and more here.

Walking With Courage, Vulnerability, and Tenderness: Everyday Magic, Day 1,001

March 31, 2020

Amazingly enough, we are arrived at the last day of March, a month that has lasted at least 1,283 days in fear, panic, and dread years. But here we are, and as April — what T.S. once called the cruelest month — approaches, we know we’re in for a far longer, harder, and more unimaginable

Listening to History, Looking Out for the Herd: Everyday Magic, Day 1000

March 19, 2020

It only took a few seconds of looking at the NYTimes map of the pandemic Saturday night for me to start hyper-ventilating and crying. At that moment, I didn’t yet realize I needed perspective, big-picture, deep-time, and wide-angle views to not just calm myself at the moment, but forge a more informed path forward. After

Dear Me: Stop Freaking Out: Everyday Magic, Day 999

March 12, 2020

Dear Me (and Dear Me!), I know you’re crazy-scared about the coronavirus. How could anyone paying attention not be when the closings and cancellations fall like dominos. Just in the last day, many universities in your state cancelled in-person classes, events on your calendar vanished in a wisp of precaution, and your synagogue called off

My Life Has Gone to the Dogs: Everyday Magic, Day 998

March 3, 2020

“It’s like an animal daycare here,” said my friend Laurie, here to give Shay some doggy acupuncture today. She was right, and with two dogs and two cats, it’s also a canine and feline exercise and mindfulness training program, continually interrupting what I thought I was doing to point my attention toward a higher power.

Teaching With Big Sonia: Everyday Magic, Day 957

February 21, 2020

The tagline for the film Big Sonia is “Holocaust survivor. Grandma. Diva.” True that, but she’s also quite the Holocaust scholar, fluent in a dizzying amount of books, films, articles, and other accounts of what Sonia repeatedly and accurately calls “unbelievable.” Like many of us but even more so, Sonia Warshawski has been grappling with

Scans For Life: Everyday Magic, Day 956

February 6, 2020

Years ago when I was in the oncology center waiting room for an appointment following my bout of breast cancer, two women made me cry. One was in her 70s, and the other was her middle-aged daughter, both clinging to each other and having a hard time answering questions because of their sobbing while they

Are We All Just Dust in the Wind?: Everyday Magic, Day 995

January 30, 2020

That’s the question I kept asking myself as I replayed “Dust in the Wind” on my quickly-wearing-out but relatively new copy of Point of Know Return. I was a 17-year-old Jersey girl, commuting two years each way because of a wacky bus schedule from my home in Manalapan to Brookdale Community College, just 10 miles

In the Cave of Winter: Everyday Magic, Day 994

January 23, 2020

Each day I crave a clear view of a clear sky, but fog, snow, sleet, rain, freezing rain, and variety packs of all this percipitation at once fills the well-hidden vistas. Narrower perspectives of what’s out there push me inside and inward to what’s in here. My technicolor dreams, on the other hand, go go

Prayer for the New Year & Bonus Posts: Everyday Magic, Day 993

January 12, 2020

Although 2020 is already underfoot, this is my first blog post of the year, and it’s the first post that will go out to all of you who are subscribers since sometime in October when my website had some issues. Thanks to my soul brother Ravi’s generous time and ample wisdom, the sight is fully

In the Last Hours of the Decade: Everyday Magic, Day 992

December 31, 2019

But that's how time is: a human invention although the seasons born of the turning of the earth, the growth of the trees, and the motion of rocks moving slowly across oceans or fields keep their own kind of count.

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

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