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Showing posts from 2014

Travel Tuesday: Philadelphia

Sometimes there is sun; other times, you have to create your own light.

Travel Tuesday: New York

Train bridge, Letchworth State Park

Travel Tuesday: New York

Graffiti

Travel Tuesday: Philadelphia

Eastern State Penitentiary

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Charged

Rye, NH

Cradled

From the minute your feet swing out of bed in the early gray light, your muscles begin a dance with what's below. Heel rolling, toes flexing, weight shifting from side to side, there's a subconscious push against what's underneath: carpet, wood, grass, dirt. You spend your days walking upon the earth -- desk to chair, bedroom to kitchen, stairway to floor, one place to another -- with muscles stretching and pulling, each footfall pushing down then springing up from the solid ground. You are secure in the knowledge that you are strong. Your skeleton and muscles and nerve endings will work together. You are in control. But then a day comes when you don't feel quite so strong. You are tired. You are sore. Instead of holding yourself against the earth, you let the earth hold you. Bones and muscles relax and sink downward, and you feel grateful that you are cradled by something larger, something much more expansive than your own will, your own might.

Travel Tuesday: Yoros Castle, Turkey

Head, Hands, Heart

Hands: Your hands are firmly placed on a yoga mat these days. After a hiatus of nearly two years (during which you injured your sacroiliac joint twice, had one bout of the flu, and two tussles with bronchitis), you are stable enough in body and mind and lung and muscle to return to your practice. Twice a week, sometimes three times a week, you drive to the next town over, park in the lot, and make your way to the studio, mat in hand. Though you've only been to this studio a handful of times, you feel at home on your mat. And really, all you need is a floor upon which you can place your mat, something solid to push against, a small spot on the earth to hold you up, and the air around you to breathe. There on the mat, you are balance and strength and clarity. You are connected there, whether mountain or tree or warrior or crow. You become one with the world around you, even as you stretch your boundaries while stretching your body. It feels good. Head: Paint is on your head,

Dipping and Crunching

When you were eighteen, you applied for a study abroad program in Italy. On the day you received the acceptance letter, there was no one home. You wanted to call someone to celebrate, but couldn't reach anyone. All that excitement and anticipation was bottled up inside, and you felt like you could fly. But this was long before the days of social media -- long before the days of email even. So you sat at your desk in the dormer of your attic bedroom, with tortilla chips and salsa, dipping and crunching, dreaming and planning, having a celebration solo. This morning, twenty-some years later, you complete a big thing. A really big thing. And you feel like celebrating. But there's no one home. And though you could shout it from the rooftops at any number of social media sites, you think you'd rather celebrate solo. So you sit at the kitchen table with some homemade pita chips and tzaziki, dipping and crunching, dreaming and planning, and feeling very much like y

Head, Heart, Hands

March Head Wanderlust. Each spring, your mind shifts to Italy, to Roman skies, to marble mosaics, to churches and monuments. You itch to fly away, to see something exotic, to walk upon ancient roads, to breathe in air that has wound its way in and out of spaces for millenia. You check airfares. You check vacation schedules. You think in Italian, in Spanish, in the words of any other language you can conjure up, though not much remains of anything but English. When you were thirteen, your grandparents took your sister and you to England for a summer. It was a celebration of their 40th wedding anniversary, and they let you join in. They rented a flat in Surbiton, Surrey, the upstairs of a beautiful house. It seemed palatial to you, coming from your 900 square foot post-WWII urban home. You lived upstairs from a single mother and her three boys, who must have thought you were terribly American. You suppose you were. You navigated London and its surrounds via bus, tube, train,

Travel Tuesday: Changdeokgung

Never worry about the delay of your success compared to others, because construction of a  palace  takes more time than an ordinary building.

Words

Words, words, words. Normally you would post a photo today. A photo of some place you'd been, some place you'd lived, some place you found beauty or pattern or shape or color. But today is a day for words. Today you will finish a draft of a third novel. It's a good novel, a funny novel. It is not finished yet, but it's getting there. And you want to finish it, so today is a day for words. You will sit at your desk, working in twenty-minute spurts until the bus comes delivering the gingerbread boys, and you must stop. You will sit, rewriting the ending, deleting and adding and tweaking as the snow comes down outside, swirling through the treetops, landing on pillows of snow. And all will be well, for the end is near.

Travel Tuesday: Bermuda

"It was a great cave in the midst of a city; and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactites, into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought?" -Henry David Thoreau

Travel Tuesday: Ellis Island

“Even   After   All this time The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the whole sky.”   -Hafiz

What Is on My...

...February... Agenda If you know me, you probably know my deep and abiding love for the most important holiday in February. It's a day that we anticipate year round at the Gingerbread House: "Wake up, woodchuck chuckers! It's Groundhog Day!" The gingerbread boys don't share our enthusiasm, but they will someday. How can they not? BING!  Winter has always been a very long season in the places I've lived. Not perhaps Russian-long, but long enough to suspect that there is nothing under the two feet of crusty snow but more ice. Long enough to have forgotten what sunlight feels like. Long enough to think you're bound for the same destiny as the dinosaurs. Truly there have been some years when I felt Phil Connor's words shoot like an arrow into my soul: "It's going to be cold. It's going to be grey. And it's going to last you the rest of your life." Icy slush, cold toes, leaking boots, frozen windshield wipers, runny no

Travel Tuesday: Athens

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." -Anais Nin

Travel Tuesday: New Hampshire

"I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person." -Sylvia Plath

Travel Tuesday: Insadong

A Korean tin man? "When a man's an empty kettle, He should be on his mettle And yet I'm torn apart Just because I'm presumin' That I could be a human If I only had a heart..." - The Wizard of Oz

Travel Tuesday: Athens

"God enters by a private door into every individual." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

What Is on My...

...January... Agenda Nothing yet. Hah! I love New Year's. I love the open, empty expanse of a brand-new page in life. I tend towards synesthesia, and visualize the year sort of like a ladder. December is very far from January--visually, as well as emotionally and socially. I anticipate hibernation: days spent revising in front of the fire, lemon-poppy seed muffins just out of the oven, a pot of herbal tea at my side, snow falling. It's nice that I live in a fictional world, isn't it? More than likely, I'll be pulling my hair out about  a scene, scarfing leftover Christmas chocolates, drinking day-old bottled water, and pulling a wool blanket tight around my shoulders because I'm freezing. However, hope springs eternal. Maybe there really will be lemon-poppy seed muffins. Back An ice pack. A year ago, I sprained my sacroiliac joint after a weekend of thinking I was invincible: running a 5K, shimmying up a rock wall, heaving 50 lb bags of grain over my shoulde