(Here’s another excerpt from my most recent essay collection Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness.) I sat cross-legged in my desk chair early one morning on the cusp of the summer solstice trying to absorb the meaning of real compassion, relinquishing my neediness in my relationships and learning to “make it about them” as Ken Wapnick […]
We go toward love still hating it
In my sleeping dream I am visiting my daughter in Seattle, although the city looks nothing like the real thing. Instead of a 19-century logging port today buzzing with construction fueled by a burgeoning high-tech industry, it is very old, its ancient buildings furry with moss, its cobblestone streets, cold, slick, and largely deserted. I […]
When lilacs last in the dooryard did their best to bloom
It all started with the lilacs, with leashing up my little dog and heading out into the cinematic glare of Denver’s bipolar weather on a manic, spring upswing to clear my head of a special relationship’s continuing, apparently unrelenting problems that seemed so threatening to him, and, well, me. Temperatures soaring in late April to […]
Hell no, I won’t go!
(Here’s another excerpt from my most recent essay collection, Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness :)) Hell No, I Won’t Go! “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he repeated, stomping his little, bare foot. I ignored him. “I told you to get dressed.” He stuck out his tongue. “Now,” I said. He was wearing what appeared […]
There is a place in you
“Jesus,” I whispered, as I stood at the threshold of my imaginary inner professor’s office door, still anxious from yet another dream involving another life-threatening road trip, mirroring the seemingly perilous highway my waking dream appeared to have become. He glanced up from the papers he’d been reading and smiled. “Long time, no see with,” […]
Future loss is not your fear (but present joining is your dread)
I sat at my desk following Presidents Day weekend on approximately the ninth day of my captivity at the hands of my ego. As opposed to the ego I more accurately perceive when choosing to look with the fearless inner Teacher of common interests. Who takes nothing personally, realizing, as he always has, that there […]
It’s only a movie
I sat in the movie theater at the local multiplex with my husband watching The Big Short, a film about movers and shakers in high finance who foresee the housing bubble collapse that preceded the recent recession, fighting back dizziness and nausea that had nothing to do with the exposure of fraud and greed but […]
Surrender Susan
(Here’s an excerpt from my latest essay collection, Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness—hope you enjoy!) I was just so frustrated again. Still nauseated, in fact, by the seeming stupendous insensitivity of a costar in the movie of my so-called life, a special relationship I thought I had forgiven once and for always that nonetheless seemed […]
Be still (just) an instant and go home!
Drat, it was just no use! I snapped off my car radio, delivering non-stop updates about the latest ways humans have destroyed themselves and others interspersed with coverage of the latest Republican presidential debate, hoping to return to the quiet center within, only to discover that Oreos TV commercial stuck in my head again. The […]
Without forgiveness I will still be blind
(Here’s an excerpt from my latest book, Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness, now discounted for the holidays on Amazon.) I lay awake in the middle of the night as I sometimes do, adrift in that yawning chasm of lonesome silence in which my ego thoughts spring to life like taunting little toys, raucously reviewing problems […]