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...

On Friday night, I shared this poem at Shabbat services at my synagogue. As I read it, I remembered how, when I wrote this some years...

“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so...

“Don’t read the news, at least not the feeding frenzy of speculation about the election,” I keep telling myself, and for good reason....

One October week: Hurricane Milton, Northern Lights, a colonoscopy, Yom Kippur, Louise Erdrich in town, Comet Purple Mountain, and the...

That's what I say to my friend Joy on the phone while we each surveyed our overflowing calendars for open spaces to meet. Over the last...

There it was -- a very large pack rat Ken was ready to fling with a pair of long tongs into the deep woods, far from where we could smell...

Last week, we signed a pile of papers -- the last of three closings to save the land where we live. The first closing -- Dec. 15, 2020 --...

On the eve of July 4th, I saw what our deeply-divided and pitifully-polarized country could be in a Minneapolis city park. Above, around,...

A few days ago, after 39 years of trying to save the land that we love and where we live, Ken and I spent five minutes signing papers to pro

"So when we look at how a character changes the narrative of her life, we learn a lot about how we can do this too," I told ten people in...

I've increasingly realized how I'm on the lookout for beauty most of the time -- the gaze of my dog Moxie when she raises her head from a...

"It's either an ocular melanoma or a brain tumor," the doctor told me five years ago. Ken, my brother Ravi, and I all gasped in unison....

Right before I was hired to teach at Goddard College in 1996, the then-president, who many believed was set to shut down the college,...

Truly, and usually with steaming oatmeal and iced tea when I'm half awake. Perhaps I should eat the rejections with a chocolate amaretto...

I finally got hearing aids after several years of Ken and my kids repeating things to me loudly and often with a...

Within weeks of my terrifying eye cancer diagnosis in 2019, my friend Harriet brought me this hand-set-type print of my favorite quote...

The elevator door opened on the 16th floor of the Marriott, where I was staying, and there they were: a scraggly bunch, some in oversized...