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Beginner's Heart

So here it is the 1st week of January, and already I have…schedule conflicts??? I’m retired, for pete’s sake! How can I have THREE happening on the same weekend next JUNE?? But I DO. And each of them dear to me, although obviously not of similar importance. First (and certainly most important!) is staying w/ my…

New Year’s Day is an odd construct: the year ‘begins,’ although we know that one day is much like another. Change is almost always far more gradual than 1 nanosecond. And yet, constructs have great power. This fence marks borders between farms, between ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ Many of my writer friends are reflecting on the…

I ‘borrowed’ my New Year’s Resolutions. The inestimable Pema Chodron wrote them up, in her book ‘The Places That Scare You.’ I’m going to try to live up to them. I thought you might like to see what they are, so here goes: My New Year’s Resolution(s): THE SIX WAYS OF COMPASSIONATE LIVING ~ courtesy…

  My DIL is packing for the trip early tomorow morning that will put her, my son, and my beloved grandson on a plane back ‘home’ to Blacksburg. The idyllic days I’ve spent tickling, hugging, feeding, holding, and inhaling my grandson — and trying to refrain from doing the same to a grown man &…

I’m hoping you can see all the cardinals in the tree off the deck. Since today is the day my entire extended family is getting together to celebrate Familial Festivus (Christmas/ Hannukah/ Solstice), it feels very much like a white Christmas to us! The English have a legend that if you feed the birds on…

As a child, I watched the monks come to the house each morning, as the sun rose in the sky. Sometimes the clouds were the same saffron color as the monks’ robes. The monks would pass their wooden begging bowls through the iron bars of the villa gate, and the cook would place rice, some…

Our younger son phoned home! Since he’s halfway around the world (literally — 14 hours ahead of us here), this reassures his mother, who — as he notes) worries… Please understand that I understand how pointless it is to worry about an intelligent, grown man. I’ve written before about learning to let go of the worries that mothers (and…

1. Music One of the best things about the holiday season is the music. I have a Spotify Christmas music playlist of almost 500 songs. And there are even more on my iPad! So that would be the first totally non-secular thing I love about this time of year: music. Everything from hammered dulcimer playing…

You will notice, if you look at the picture, a dearth of men. There are the outlaws, w/ the exception of grandchildren, and a cousin. That’s it. Mine is a family of women, mostly. We talk about ‘the aunts’ — my mother and her three sisters — and ‘the sisters’ — my three sisters &…
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