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Beginner's Heart

Today my state House of Representatives passed two bills that will cause only grief & pain for as many as 1,000 young Oklahoma women. The state House has seen fit to make judicial bypass — the avenue by which minor women may petition to have an abortion w/out notifying their parents — far more difficult,…

I’m sadly short on patience. I kept thinking that age & maturity would make it bloom in the totally inhospitable garden of my now! now! now! personality… Well, I’m older, but NOT a  lot more patient. Sigh… There are certain to be great benefits to being patient. If you are one of those wonderfully patient…

I hurt my husband’s feelings tonight. In return, he hurt mine. None of this was intentional. It was, in fact, an object lesson in avidyā, the misunderstanding of reality, or even the self. It doesn’t matter what actually happened. Suffice to say I wasn’t precise about what was happening, and my husband — who doesn’t…

Music, poetry, art ~ they have (at various times) saved me. Sometimes quite literally (really). Kept me from driving my car off the bypass. Kept my heart from breaking and my breath from stopping. Now that my life is gentler, kinder (& infinitely better), music is mostly about inspiration & enjoyment. I can’t imagine a…

My sister is very lucky. She has been in two abusive domestic relationships, and she survived each. Once, when she ran across the street to my grandmother’s, crying & half-dressed, my great-aunt Bonnie attacked her pursuer with a broom: this tiny, (literally 90 pounds soaking wet) blue-haired old lady beating this huge crazy drunk w/…

A friend introduced me to a new term: the adjacent possible. What a rich phrase — a field for dreaming. The term comes from theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, who talked about what might happen in biology to precipitate life. But the way Steven Johnson explains it in a Wall Street Journal article, “The Genius of…

It’s a bit more than a week since Lent began. But the vaguely lighter feeling that modest sacrifice generates is still warm. And I don’t feel particularly ‘without.’ Perhaps I should have picked something more important… In the past, I’ve given up most of the things listed: chocolate and coffee more than once. Since I…

Sometimes I have a hard time understanding the difference between detachment & non-attachment. Detachment is not a Buddhist virtue; non-attachment is. But when technology becomes my framing metaphor? I get it. Believe me, I get it. I had an important conference call today. A meeting of a group of people I respect & admire, doing…

This is a photo (of me) that one of my students photo-shopped a couple of years ago (no, I wasn’t really wearing a troll mask…). It went out on our class listserv. A private joke — well, not toooo private, I guess, if the whole class is privy. It represents the best things about teaching:…

When you think of people who are useful, poets probably aren’t high on your list. After all, who needs poetry? (Well, I do, but that isn’t typical, I realise 🙂 ) And yet, when there is sorrow, or great joy, or tragedy, or high emotion of almost any kind — a birth, a death, a…
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