On the last day of 2018, I attended a a spiritual gathering of women at a friend’s home. After we had each shared what we were glad to have shed in 2018 and then what we hoped for in 2019, my friend directed us to stand in a circle, hold hands, and yell. Yell. Out loud. For no reason other than to raise our voices. No words, just noise. We started low and then raised...
Read moreDuring my trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, I took lots of bird photos – my own version of Zen meditation. I went through the pictures and deleted all the blurry ones, as well as the ones where I completely missed the bird; I don’t keep photos of empty branches anymore, no matter how interesting they are. I have some great shots of brilliant blue Stellar Jays, a majestic Peregrine Falcon, and intricately winged dragon...
Read moreIn our cloud of euphoria, we don’t stop to think about the fact that it’s after 10:00 pm at this point, and the metro clientele has probably changed from earlier in the day. I look around uneasily. My daughter chooses a seat across from me. At the next stop, a young man gets on with a white leather satchel, sits down near us, and pulls out of the satchel a huge – and I mean...
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My daughter needed to be at college for team tryouts on a summer Tuesday from 5-9. Her college is not that far away in terms of distance, but is light years away in terms of traffic. I hate to drive. So I looked up the train schedule, the metro schedule, and installed Uber on my phone just in case. I figured out that we could make the tryouts easily without leaving too early in the Read more…
I need to get rid of a desk. It’s a very large desk, and it’s handy for storage. But I have too much furniture and too much stuff; it’s got to go. I’ve been planning the desk’s exit for months. I’ve had a new, smaller piece of furniture sitting next to it in a very inconvenient spot, waiting to take its place. It’s making all of us nuts having to navigate around the two of Read more…
As part of my new business as an Akashic Records reader, I was struggling to create an online presence. Most people in my life had no idea what “Akashic Records” meant, so I was getting used to giving a quick definition: the Akashic Records are the vibrational records of every soul’s journey, and in reading them, one can learn about life’s lessons and purpose. I was also finding that while I was able to read the journey of a soul, I couldn’t for the Read more…
Passing through the blackened ash scene of the Creek Fire in the foothills along the freeway, I spotted some treelike plants that stood out against the grayish landscape; they weren’t very tall, and they had reddish-brown trunks and branches, some slivers of green, and little white puffballs. They really stood out among the charred stumps of other trees in the bleak terrain. We’d gone by at over 70 miles per hour, so I hadn’t gotten Read more…
I got this fabulous deck of Animal Spirit* cards for Christmas, and I was really excited to start using them. I began pulling one out of the deck each morning as I asked the cards what I needed to be mindful of. Then I would look up the meaning of the card of the day in the deck’s handy-dandy reference book, and determine what insight the universe was sending me. But then somehow I broke Read more…