This year, violets have overtaken my garden. From just a few in one area of my garden last year I now find these seemingly dainty plants with their heart shaped leaves throughout my garden. I have learned that they spread by rhizomes, or underground roots. I started gardening only a few years ago and still […]
The Seasons in our Lives
I love springtime. Ever since I was a child, it has been my favorite season of the year. I recall my utter happiness when the crocuses would first pop up along the roadside on my hometown in Connecticut and I just knew that my heart would open wide and I could soon be running around […]
Another Kind of Diversity
There are many kinds of diversity we have been attempting to appreciate and honor in recent years. First, we have racial diversity, whose challenges and ramifications we are often painfully aware. Then there is the diversity of lifeforms on our planet, including animals and plants of all types as well as the elemental forces of […]
Our Secret Stories
Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and author who was one of the youngest writers to win the Booker Prize in 1991 for his novel The Famished Road. I recently finished reading this book and it now numbers among my all-time favorites and so I poked around YouTube searching for an interview with him. And […]
The Rich Diversity of You and Us
You are unique – there has been nobody like you ever before and there will be no one quite like you ever again. So take a minute (or a few) to rejoice in you. Love yourself completely just as you are with all your (apparent) imperfections and maladies and quirks. This is part of your […]
TRIPLE NEW TIMES
I know our official New Year already happened on January first, but there are several other kinds of New Years’ or, better put it, New Times of varying types and magnitudes that will soon be impacting us individually, collectively and cosmically. I am thinking of three in particular that are at hand, or soon to […]
Clearing and Cleaning for the Year to Come
One of my fondest memories of the year I spent teaching English in rural Japan back in the 1980s was New Years. I was a recent College graduate with minimal preparation for being dropped into a part of Japan that was still quite traditional in mores and cultural patterns. My first New Year’s surprise happened […]
THESE TIMES
Fourteen years ago, in mid-December, I met the man who I am now married to at a Shopper Christmas party. One week later, my mother passed away peacefully on the night of the winter solstice. I nestled close to her now cool body until the ambulance arrived. This year, there will be no Shopper party […]
PATIENCE
When my daughter was in nursery school, her favorite song starred a snail and had the following refrain: “Be patient, be patient, don’t be in such a hurry/when you get impatient, you only start to worry.” These words have popped back into my mind in the last few weeks, as we have been dealing with […]
Allowing ourselves to mourn
Loss is an inevitable aspect of being a human, and the older we advance in age, the more losses we have sustained personally and observed in the world. While we would all prefer to live in a fairy tale land where loss doesn’t happen, we can’t. In fact, learning how to navigate through loss is […]
