A friend sent me a quote yesterday morning and I experienced so fully and completely facets of myself, I was moved. Since I was a child (my first memory of this happening is at around six years old), when I saw what felt to me to be an injustice, another child being yelled at by the teacher for example, I would cry. It was not happening to me and yet, it might as well have been.

This ongoing aspect of my character frustrated me and felt like something to be guarded against as ‘I did not know why I was like this’. …

As we well know, I struggle to meditate. I am proud though (and a little bit shocked!) to say that I am now doing so regularly. Each day, since late Fall, sometimes a couple of times a day, I slip into a nice warm bath for my soul and I lay there. I drown in it, and, on some occasions, I go to places I don’t want to come back from they are so expansive and loving.

They are places that can’t be named but places that are so…..knowing, you know? Places where everything is certain, quiet, peaceful, and calm. Still. As much as I feel that don’t want to come back from those places, I do actually want to, because, that’s living and living is fun. It is also messy, complicated, sad, and heart-wrenching, as well as, easy, enriching, heart-bursting, and joyful, basically, in equal measure. …

Author’s note: This piece was written in nearly real time on January 6, 2021. The day we witnessed an insurrection in the United States of America.

It has been a devastating and heartbreaking day. A day that will live infamy for all of the wrong reasons. The day a President of a democratic country urged his supporters to engage in anti-democratic and violent action in his name while continuing to propagate the lies that incited the violence in the first place.

Armed Trump supporters dressed as though in a militia stormed the U.S. Capitol, breached barriers, got inside and destroyed the U.S. and all that it stands for from the inside out. …

2021 has dawned! Happy New Year! How’d you spend the Eve? Dinner, dancing, social distancing (aka not socializing at all)? Author’s note: it’d better have been that last one. Oh man, 2021 feels…..I don’t know…..oh wait, yes, I do know: 2021 feels exactly like 2020.

Turns out an arbitrary date, on an arbitrary calendar and arbitrary time meted out by arbitrary time pieces didn’t change a damn thing about reality. A pandemic raging on? Check. A pandemic of misinformation? Check. A disastrous vaccine rollout? Check. Government officials behaving badly on both sides of the border (worse on the Southern side)? …

In Season 2 of “Mad Men” Don Draper goes to visit Peggy Olson who has suffered a breakdown after surreptitiously giving birth to a colleagues child and then giving said child up for adoption. It is Peggy’s boss/soulmate, Don Draper, who ends up at her bedside. While there, Don gives Peggy a pep talk; encouraging her to move forward with her life and delivering a line that sums up Don’s life and perhaps the life of the entire series. Don tells Peggy: “It never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

It is a chilling and unforgettable line not just because it rouses Peggy from her psychological slumber, but also, because of how it has shaped Don himself. A man who has built his life around deciding that he is not in fact Dick Whitman, born to a prostitute and raised in a brothel in poverty. It is shocking how much none of that never happened. The myth maker, the ad man created his own myth, his own advert and anything that came before his act of self-creation never happened. …

We each have a giant within us. Not a sleeping, scary giant as the idiom would have us believe, but a watchful giant. A giant of wisdom, patience, intelligence, knowingness, substance, grace, competence, and calm. Yet sometimes our big, beautiful giant inside seems asleep. For example, my giant can be awake but then seem to slumber like an idiot, half-woke, unable to stay conscious to the truth of what is and what it can do. I can look in mirrors held up by those I love and trust and be like: ‘I hope that the real deal I see is me?’. And that doubt leaves me punch-drunk because my decisions bear fruit of being good ones! I behave competently and do things confidently. I’m brave when afraid. Other people see it too. So why then this disconnect? Why the shock when someone sees my giant? Turns out, the real idiot is the tiny yet powerful trickster of the ego that runs amok now and again while the knowing soul of the giant waits patiently to be like: ‘are you done? I’d like to get up and have a stretch.’. Well, here’s the news AND the weather: I am done. …

Barack Obama’s much-anticipated memoir, “A Promised Land” is emblematic of the man himself in that it is most unusual. I don’t mean unusual in the way conspiracy theorists or Fox News fanatics mean unusual when they describe Obama. I mean unusual in the sense of his life story, his meteoric trajectory, and how a man like him — not from money or a dynastic family; not white, an unusual name and raised by a single mother — ascended to the Office of the Presidency. So, I guess, in a remote sense, I do mean unusual the way a conspiracy theorist or Fox News fanatic might mean such a word. However, unlike them, Barack Obama’s unusualness, his peculiarity, signified, and continues to signify to me, a world wide open. One of potentials and possibilities. …

In the movie “Juno” there is this great moment when the titular character’s stepmother, after finding out about her stepdaughter’s pregnancy, asks “is that the kind of girl you are?”. In response to that question, the usually (at least on the outside) cocksure Juno quietly and softly and vulnerably replies, “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”. That moment has stayed with me nearly fifteen years since that movie came out and it is, still, a question I find myself pondering. …