Living Well

  • Morning

    apple green kitchen walls pinecones that smell of cinnamon bare feet walking on smooth floors   tangy greek yogurt and icy blackberries lungs that fill and empty sun shining through windows   mushy dog who holds my gaze flannel and fleece quiet and calm   hot coffee and cold milk honey yellow pillow, sky blue…

  • Saint Matthew

    I asked God to help me to see my life the way He sees it, so He brought me to Mass and Fr. George, who talked about a painting and so I looked it up and there I am. The painting is ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ by Caravaggio and it depicts the moment that…

  • Yarn

    It seems to me that a life spent with young children is made of varying textures and materials. There are the structures that give shape to your daily life, like the school day and activities and sports. These provide the skeleton of a schedule and also tend to dictate your community. These structures are brick;…

  • Feed

    Once I was a baby who lived inside my mother’s womb. There, she housed and fed me and provided everything I needed, but I didn’t know that. I just took what was offered without regard to the source. Later, I was born and sought nourishment, protection and safety from her in other ways, again completely…

  • Sentence

    My daughter’s AP English teacher gave his students five minutes to describe themselves in one sentence. The idea was to help his students to comprehend the power of language to communicate ideas but also to help them understand themselves while making themselves understood. Her teacher said that most people are strangers to themselves, which as…

  • Cart

    I watched my groceries as they traveled down the conveyor belt and thought of what an impressive bunch of stuff it was. Greek yogurt, almond milk, feta, hummus, pita, avocados, spring mix lettuce, English cucumber, apples, butternut squash, cremini mushrooms, yasso bars, pasta, sliced ham, cheddar cheese, frozen blackberries, frozen spanakopita, dark chocolate with almonds,…

  • Son

    A few nights back, my daughter, Maura, and a friend saw what appeared to them to be a supernova, a star that grew bigger and brighter and then was gone from the sky. Both she and my son were fascinated by the idea that if it actually was a dying sun that they saw that…

  • Unsung

    Attending the funeral of someone who lived life well is like completing a masters-level course in an hour and a half. Lesson after lesson flies at you and you can’t quite catch each one, but you want to hold on to all of it if you can. I attended a funeral like this today for…

  • Joseph

    Today I met three Josephs, and each of them, as Josephs will do, pointed me to God. I met the first Joseph at his funeral. Well, I guess you could say we didn’t meet exactly, but I sang for the Mass, and got to know him a bit from the words and presence of his…

  • Christmas, Death, Birth revisited

    Earlier, I wrote about a pattern in my life that keeps coming up, and it’s modeled after three days in November of 2012 in which we celebrated my Mom’s last Christmas, mourned her death, and focused on her new life in Heaven. Now I find I go through these seasons over and over; times of…