Ginger Snapped

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, ...

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...

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...

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. 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.

"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

“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