Mark and I slept curled up together on a single-sized bench bed in my mother’s hospital room last night. We were up and down quite a bit with her in the night and fell into a deep sleep by morning when things finally settled down. Between snores, he murmured, “You know what this means, right?”…
Life isn’t passing you by. The circus is passing you by. Don’t join the circus.
Teach your children to value the people in their lives. The people who came before them. The people who taught them. The people whose blood runs through their veins. The people who invested in them, even from a distance. If you teach your children to value only people exactly like you—exactly like them—you raise narcissists….
Political and economic theories and systems focus on and are designed to protect the mechanisms of power and influence as well as economic growth and development for its own sake. They are not and should never have become our highest values, nor are they substitutes for moral analysis and action.
There’s a fine line between having courage and having no choice but to press on.
When you’re young, grief is intense and internal and blessedly brief. When you’re old, it’s profound and enduring and all-consuming like gravity.
We cannot and need not clean up history. Our responsibility is to clean up the present. Whatever circumstances we’re saddled with as a result of past choices and actions by ourselves or others, they are now our current realities. The only way to move beyond them is to do our best living now and empower…
I care about koalas. I care about orangutans. I care about Republicans and Democrats. I care about people who care about others. And I care about those who don’t. I care about people who care about the environment. And I care about those who don’t see the point. I care about people on trains and…
Empathy is the act of putting yourself in another’s shoes. Sometimes those shoes are uncomfortable.
The days just came and went until May of 1980. That’s the year I first noticed spring. I sprawled in my red PE shorts on a patch of soft green grass and thought about how good the sun’s warmth felt on the back of my neck. In November of 1989 I noticed snow—really took note…
I wonder sometimes whether we have become victims of our own definition of story, which always includes conflict and expendable characters.
When I was little and felt like running away, my dad would grab my hand and say, “Here…I’ll go with you.” Together we’d wander through the mists and ponderosa pine forests of California’s foothills until there was nothing left to do but go home. Today is one of those days. Not so different from any…
Fragmentary Life 