Beginner's Heart

This is by way of good news. It’s also a counter-narrative to all the horror stories about the Affordable Care Act.Because once a journalist, always a journalist, I guess. And someone needs to put some honest facts into the conversation, so far dominated by scarey demagogues. To the left is Jonathan Gruber’s pie graph about…

I rescue wasps.  Even the big ones. Even yellow jackets. Even though a nest got in to my hair when I was a child & stung me sick. I also brake for squirrels, mice, and anything running across the road. And I’ve been known to fish spiders out of shower stalls, various bugs out of…

Since my earlier post on the Daisy Coleman case, I’ve received many emails from women (& men) who wander — as I do — how to undo rape culture. How do we fight it? And I confess: I don’t know. The Buddhist in me does know that only compassion works, ultimately. Wrathful compassion is a…

When I was young, and my dreams as new-bright as clean copper, I believed I would set the world on fire. Somehow I would change what was wrong — poverty, ignorance, social injustice. There were, after all, so many of us who thought that. Surely we couldn’t fail. So the fire of the candle —…

This is my dog, Pascal, wearing the devil horns my niece Sandra bought him. It’s appropriate — Pascal is rascal of the first order. But it’s a far cry from what I grew up thinking Hallowe’en meant. Sure it meant trick-or-treating, and candy. And decorating the house — more as my mother collected stuff, once…

It’s not a big deal, really. Just email. Not my life. And yet…. I HATE it when my email screws up! Allll my hard-won calm goes right out the window. And it doesn’t help that today is the day I’m readying for a routine colonscopy tomorrow. Hence, NOTHING to eat. First world problems, huh? They…

I love the idea that there’s a civil conversations project. Officially, I mean. Because it’s what I’ve been trying to foster — despite my lapses into ranting about racism & social injustice — on my own FB page. Today, I had a glimpse of how that’s born fruit. A former student, a former colleague, and…

Sometimes, when it’s grey and what my grandma would call ‘dreary,’ it’s hard to get motivated. While I don’t mind rain at all — especially when it’s been a bit dry — I make sure that we buy the ‘daylight’ light bulbs. I HATE dreariness. It didn’t actually rain today. At least not yet. So…

If I was a cat, this would be how I appear to most folks. Seriously. The thing about being an aging blonde, w/a strange sense of humour, is that no one TAKES you seriously. Of course, that was true when I was 20, 30, 40, and since, as well… Hmmm. My own sons seem surprised…

This is a picture of the last day of the last undergrad class I taught at OSU. You won’t get the joke, so I’ll tell you. Bear with me: 🙂 Every day there was a note in our classroom saying, Please put the chairs back in rows. And every day my students left them in…

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