Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Viva Haiti

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I have just spent an hour watching the excellent Rachel Maddow interview people about the public health disaster unfolding in Port au Prince. Once the visual shock of some of the images registered—the wounded lined up in the hallways and parking lots of barely functioning hospitals, the man lying on the ground whose IV had [...]

How To Survive A Divorce

Sunday, January 10th, 2010

I did not buy my home on my own. It was bought several years ago by my then-husband and me, as we looked to the future and decided that we wanted a house on the California coast to retire to. We got a fixer for a great price, and spent the next couple of years [...]

On Spiders, Painting, and the Power of Story

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Saturday I spent a few hours prepping my hallway for painting. The color had been chosen over a year ago, the paint bought back in December, but for some reason I had not yet gotten around to the project.
It is a small T-shaped hallway, no bigger than a closet really, with a total of four [...]

Diving Deep and Surfacing

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Oh, it has been a long time since I last posted—my apologies to regular readers who were hoping for a little more blogging between the end of April and the beginning of June. I had to take time out to host another wonderful May Day party, my 20th year of doing so in Sonoma County, [...]

The New Normal

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Talking with my good friend Dawn on the phone last week, I asked how everything was going. She hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s the new normal.” I understood exactly what she meant.
Everyone with a job was still employed. No one previously healthy had been diagnosed with anything. Our friends were carrying on, the children [...]

Oh, Life!

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

I have been having a wonderful holiday, with my daughters around me and the house full of colored lights. Last weekend we gathered with so many friends in San Francisco and celebrated the Solstice in style. Two days later Jojo turned 16, the next night my family came up for a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, [...]

How Far We Have Come

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Friday I went to the opening night of my daughter’s high school play. They were performing The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s brilliant play about the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 in Massachusetts colony. There she was in the opening prologue, dancing and singing with friends in the woods like any good Pagan child. There she was a [...]

Things that Shift in the Night

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Like so many others, I have been glued to the screen over the past few weeks. Debates, opinions, news of the economic collapse, cowpies from the election trail—it is all so important, and so crazy, that I consider it a survival skill to understand what is going on as best I can.
Along with this, coming [...]

Going With the Floe

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

This weekend is, or has been, the equinox. I usually love the equinox. My old circle had a wonderful group journey we took every Spring and Fall, because the balance of the seasons enabled us to go farther along this one road between the worlds than we were normally able to. I savored the feeling [...]

Notes on Going Forward

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I remember one summer day when I was about 12 years old, walking home from the closest store to our house. It was a two mile walk along the hot, dusty ridge trail that wound like a ribbon of young pines and dry grasses between the north and south lanes of Skyline Boulevard in Oakland.
I [...]