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Elegy for a Heart Worn Smooth by the River
I knew my mother-in-law for twenty-eight years before she died this October of respiratory failure at 95 years old, presumably as a complication of the colon cancer surgery she’d undergone two days before. The procedure had taken twice as long as anticipated due to numerous unforeseen complexities. A tumor the size of a plum required…
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Meditation
It wasn’t a resolution so much as a coincidence, but early in 2022 I decided that since I’d spent three years now putting sustained energy into improving my physical health with some good results that it was time to attempt the same for my mental and emotional well-being. I’d avoided it partly because it was…
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Getting Rowdy
Lost It’s been almost a year since we lost our much-loved boxer mutt Guinness, and I remember it with the chill clarity of today’s winter morning. We’d been keeping her kidney disease more or less under control for a long while by then, and though we weren’t measuring the remainder of her life in years…
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Another Pandemic Year
I’ve been plinking away at this pandemic essay since April, in and around routines and the occasional upheaval that, if it wasn’t a proximate cause, Covid-19 always seemed to complicate. Tending an expanded vegetable garden. The weekly CSA/FSA/butcher box jigsaw puzzle of meal planning, with the added wrinkle of our own produce often ripening at…
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Notes from Isolation: Living
God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me. The Liturgy of the Hours comes to my mind often these pandemic days. Not the particulars, but the concept: structuring one’s time around periods of mindfulness and meditation. Structuring them around anything at all. Almost twenty-five years of working at home have taught…
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Notes from Isolation: Planning
For about a week after the Emergency Services director issued a shelter at home order for San Luis Obispo County on March 18th, 2020, my predominant emotional state could best be described as…manic. Before that I had been preparing for the possibility of things going pear-shaped and COVID-19 causing widespread social and economic disruptions. But…
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Notes from a Pandemic
When I was a child, the first time I realized that the comforting routines of daily life were capable of perturbation was during the oil embargo of the 1970s. My father’s avid planning of weekend trips came to an abrupt halt, as did my brothers’ borrowing of the family car. I was occasionally dragged out on an…
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Well Being
2019 was supposed to be the year I rose like a phoenix from the ashes. I was coming off almost a decade of nearly continual stress as my parents’ health failed, and four years of frequent, often abrupt travel between Atascadero and Los Angeles that left me the Marriott Gold Elite member I never wanted…
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The Solar Saga
We thought our solar journey had begun and ended about twelve years ago, when REC Solar – who has since left the consumer market to focus solely on commercial customers – casually mentioned that as part of the installation process we would have to remove two mature oaks and a twenty foot tall redwood. Our…
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The State of the State
The year in politics, for me at least, has been largely a year of breathlessness and angst. I cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic because I couldn’t read One More Article about Donald Trump. At some point the endless drumbeat of the damage that he’s causing to the environment, to civil rights, to our international standing (with…
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