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A SPACE FOR TELLING TRUE STORIES.
The Words I Used On Silent Day
As I write this I’m in the middle of a week-long writing retreat with my writing mentor for the last fourteen-years. We’re high up in the hills of Topanga Canyon…
Tiptoeing Toward Prayer
Finally you’ve found them, and aren’t they perfect – small, smooth turquoise beads the color of the Mediterranean. You imagine them around your neck, or circling your wrist. You love the way they’ll look on your naturally tan skin. The thing is, they’re not ornamental – they’re not meant to enhance your beauty – you’re supposed to pray with them, just like the hundreds of Tibetan people fingering beads just like these and mumbling prayers as they circle the Boudha stupa each morning
On the Eve of My Ex-Husband’s Second Departure
1. When I was 40-years-old a psychic told me that Mark, my husband of 9-years would leave me, but that he would come back.
2. This wasn’t a total shock because we’d talked about separating a lot over the years and sometimes the idea of not being together sounded good. Sometimes we even joked about it, playing games like “let’s imagine our lives without one another.”
3. It was never mean. We’d talk about the adventures and the new loves we’d have without one another. It helped us blow off steam and bring a little humor to monogamy and the routine of domestic life; our adorable kids, the cooking, the cleaning, the pressure to make a heap of money.
David Bowie: Listening to the Sound of your own Music
This is one of my favorite blog posts from a couple of years ago, and an homage to the man.
Last year David Bowie put out a new record, which is a big deal in the music industry. The man is 67-years-old, a legend, a huge rock star. I’d heard an interview with a member of his band a few days before the record launched, and the interviewer asked, “What earlier record is this new one like?” I found myself hoping he’d say The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust or Hunky Dory – two of my favorite Bowie records from the 70’s. But this band member only said that it was the best record Bowie had ever made.
This is How it Starts
So while it took me 24 hours to physically get home from Bali – to fly from Denpasar International Airport to Hong Kong, and then on to San Francisco – it only took me about 10 minutes in the car the next day to become some wild eyed impatient bitch who was half an inch from leaning on her horn because some dude in front of her wouldn’t turn right at the red even though he COULD HAVE.
“Oh my god,” I thought, slowly pulling my hand back from the wheel, “so this is how it starts.”
The Wide View
Just because I’m 8000 miles from home doesn’t mean I don’t get triggered now and then. Not by Bali, with its fresh bowls of purple dragon fruit, its incense and little paper altars every two feet, a place so peaceful I haven’t seen one cop or heard one harsh word. A world where most people I pass on the street look up and smile, and who are so kind-hearted that today on my run when I almost got flattened by a young man on a scooter, he put his hands together in prayer and smiled when I mouthed, “I’m sorry.”
Tinder in Bali
I was explaining Tinder to Agung, our driver here in Bali.
“It’s this App on your phone,” I told him, “so if you want to meet someone and have a date, you just look here.” I held out my phone to him like it was a genie in a bottle
I lead, they teach
I lead, they teach
This is the line that came to me last week during one of the Wild Writing classes I run.
I have three live, in person, flesh to flesh classes here in Northern California, and four that take place on a video platform, which allows women from across the country to join me at 8am on a weekday morning – all of us in little boxes on the screen just like The Brady Bunch. We can’t make actual eye contact, but we can see each other as we write and read aloud for an hour and a half each week. Given the possible coldness of technology and the occasional glitch where someone gets kicked off their server, it’s a pretty incredible way to do deep this work with people.
For Want of Slow
For Want of Slow is a piece of writing my friend and Wild Writing student, Lori Saltzman wrote in class last week. I asked her if I could share it here.
What I need you to know is
I feel like a temporary survivor of a fatal epidemic
Like walking the set of a horror movie
One of those deadly plague films
where everyone acts as if everything is normal
Suddenly there’s a look in their eye, a subtle change in the tempo of speech
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