Browse Topics
Meditation
Sunbeams
October 2013They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
Selected Poems
— from “I Stand in the Doorway” | Sometimes when you say goodbye you know it’s goodbye for keeps. / You touch your lips to her cheek, or you squeeze his hand & walk off. / What else can you do?
October 2013Twilight Meditation Without Dog
Late-afternoon light floods the darkening sunroom. / Looking out the window, not sad, not happy, I / and the ghost of my old dog breathe in, breathe out
October 2013Sparky
I feel when he enters the building. I get out of my chair, stand in the doorway of my office in the English department. He comes around the corner. I put my hands on my hips, like a kid, and call down the hallway, “Hey, you!”
May 2013
Reunion
She was the one who snuggled with my mother every night, the storyteller who was too sick to run away with her daughter and granddaughter before the SS came in the morning, and who chose instead, after tucking my mother into bed the night before, to climb the stairs of the ghetto apartment building and step off the ledge, freeing them to leave, grief-stricken, without her.
September 2012
excerpted from
Grist For The Mill
You are the Ancient One. Everything that ever was, is, or will be is part of the dance of your being. You are all of the universe, and so you have Infinite Wisdom; you appreciate all of the feelings of the universe, so you have Infinite Compassion.
April 2012
January 2012
It took twice as long as I thought it would, and it’s only half as good as I’d hoped, but the first draft of my book is finished. This morning our cat Zooey walked across my desk and vomited on the manuscript. My first bad review.
January 2012In The Air
I opened the fridge, then closed it. I called a friend and told her what had happened, then called another and repeated the account. I paced the small hallway between my kitchen and my office, then walked back and forth in the living room, but everywhere I went, the emptiness kept coming, and the air felt thin. The hot edge of desperation clung to my skin, making my breath shallow.
November 2011excerpted from
Untimely Meditations
No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.
November 2011
Awkward Walks With Unavailable Men
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my wanting became a problem. Sometimes I think it was at seventeen, when I was a Mennonite girl from a dead-end dirt lane, determined to leave for the Big City, for college, for a career and money and high-heeled shoes and shorn hair, and to have absolutely nothing more to do with the hilltop Mennonites.
October 2011
