I spent the weekend raging. Beginning on Friday night, glued to the links I’d followed from Facebook about the Charlie Hebdo murders, I raged against the simplicity of media analysis, raged against hatred, and then, at midnight, sitting up in bed, I raged against my husband for not “getting” politics and race in precisely the…
My grandfather Robert was a large man, in many ways. He drank Coca-Cola, smoked too much, adored candy, ate liverwurst sandwiches with potato chips on top. He died of emphysema when I was in high school, before I got to the age when I could have straight-up conversations with him about the world. He was…
Yesterday, after my husband and I woke to the sound of our children giggling in their bedroom, but before they came and crawled into bed with us, I turned to him and asked, “What are you thankful for?” He answered, “Pretty much the whole thing.” So there you go. Thank you, whole thing. I guess…
A poem for Flood Wall Street and the People’s Climate March September 21-22, 2014 Today I’m staying in my pajamas because I can. I’m curling back in bed with my computer and checking Facebook, not one time, not two times, but eighteen times while my children are at school. I might bake cookies.…
Forgive me as I work out some thoughts here, out loud. Perhaps some of them may bloom. I woke in the middle of the night last night with a stark, shamelessly Zen poem in my head: No gate. No goal. No high. No way. No one. No how. Buddha beyond and here and now. At…
I have a new love. It’s called poetry. I have an old love. It’s called poetry, too. They are finally meeting one another, in the space of my mind. While cleaning out my computer several months ago, I found a rich text file that held just one poem, with no attribution or signature. I honestly…
Yesterday my parents and I accompanied my daughter’s class on a field trip to San Francisco. The school rented a small tourist bus for the trip. As I climbed aboard and took my seat alone by the window (my daughter wanted to sit with her friends in the very, very back, and my parents wanted…
A few days after I published my last blog post, I met a good friend for lunch. We sat in the creeping April sunshine in downtown Santa Rosa, over a shared plate of quesadillas, and talked about children, school, writing, and degrees of uncertainty. She told me she read my latest post, and that she…
Right now, at this very moment, I am about to type words that I never thought I would put out into the world. Here I go. I feel a great big wave of compassion for George W. Bush. Yesterday in the New York Times I read about an exhibition of portraits by W. that is…
This weekend a good friend and I spent the day together at the coast. As we walked along the marshy trail to the beach, the air was warm and breezy, the sky shifting from silver-cast to blue and back again, the earth dark and pleasingly mucky, and the herbs and grasses and native flowers all…