Living Well

  • Bird, continued

    God uses images and music to get my attention. When something sticks in my brain, I know I’m supposed to pay attention, like when I was in shivasana in yoga and clearly saw in my mind’s eye two big football players blocking a doorway, and me with no way to get past them. Those guys…

  • Court

    I was making my way round and round the eighth-mile indoor track when a couple of people walked into the empty gym. It was a Dad and his probably not quite two-year-old son, and they grabbed a couple of basketballs and started to play. They were adorable to watch. Dad would dribble, and his son…

  • Heart

    As an adult, I have dealt with heart palpitations on and off for years. It can feel like a racing or pounding in my chest, and the most scary version feels like I’m skipping beats. I have even had a full work up twice to determine the cause, wearing the holter monitor for a day…

  • Inter net

    The internet is a scary place to be these days. I see all too frequent attacks, one “friend” to another, such fierce accusations against character and morality, that it makes you wonder what these same people would say in person, face-to-face with a friend.   It makes me long for a compulsory social media etiquette class,…

  • Road

      Poems, songs, books, and movies have been written about roads. Like shoes, mountains, and valleys, roads are a ready allegory for how we make our way through life. Give yourself ten seconds and you’ll be able to come up with a line about a road that has meant something to you along the way.…

  • Track

    Hot and sweaty while running, I rolled up my tank top and tucked it in under my sports bra. Now, that is a strange sentence to type, but it also was a weird thing for me to do. Not since I was nine or so have I cared so little of what people thought of…

  • Eulogy

    “You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story… “ Hamilton Yesterday, I embarrassed my daughter in the checkout line of the grocery store in which she works, and I left there thinking surely, here is yet another story to tell at my funeral. This is not a rare occurrence. Through the…

  • Lost

      My daughter and I had a delightful breakfast on the water followed by a perfect walk followed by the shock of the realization that somewhere along the way, I had lost my keys. Our sunny, grateful moods turned quickly, hers to panic and mine to gritty determination to find what was lost. We retraced…

  • Like

    If Andrew McCarthy and I were to actually be in a room together, meet, and have one conversation, I am sure we would get married, or so thought fourteen-year-old me after seeing ‘Heaven Help Us’ and ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ within a few months of each other. I saw something of myself in those performances and…

  • Stars

    When my son was two or three, we started playing musical games after dinner. We had a regular evening dance schedule when he was a baby, but the games were a whole other level. We would listen to instrumental music and let it speak to us, imagining the story that might go along with it.…