Once I get started, writing is like swimming, which is like flying. But I have to get started. Dive in. Lift off.

This fancy keyboard is a dream: backlit mechanical staccato click click click. I'm writing this from my office downtown, with the fancy dimmer lights and couch and space age bendy chair that's worth more than my car. The standing desk ( Read more... )

I made cornbread. Sweet in a skillet. I think I am on the other side of something. Sometimes it is just enough to know that you can turn together cornmeal flour butter salt soda buttermilk egg. How could I judge someone who bakes like this? Surely we can work something out, myself and I. 

The opposite of depression is self expression.

I recorded 20 little audio files for my students, with feedback from their last assignment, and now I must upload them. This will take significantly less time that I've already spent recording them, say 20 hours vs 20min. And yet it's a wall, seemingly immovable from my tense rigid agitated overwhelmed ( Read more... )

How many different ways there are to know you love someone. A friend's embrace. A smile from a stranger. Heart warms, shoulders relax, belly open. My heart and your heart, generating energy in the crackling fall air. That feeling before you kiss someone, limerence, weightless. Peace and protection to the someones that I love.

Please brain just let me work. Or sleep. Or take care of myself or relax. Anything but this anxious stuckness. Inside my head, sponsibilities and priorities declare themselves on multiple simultaneous radio stations ( Read more... )

All summer finding a bright spot to sit down. Driftwood logs on the beach. Jericho, Squamish, Wreck, Kitsilano. Sun beaten docks on the Fraser River. Let's bring snacks and tell stories.

A sunset, a measure of days, overhead, lurid yellows and amber. The ocean darkens to the night chorus. You watch the colours bleeding over the crickets' crescendo, ( Read more... )

"All of my pain is a spider
I've learned not to crush with
the heel of my shoe
but to guide with the page of my journal
to an empty glass
Asking questions about its life, its purpose,
as I walk careful out to the garden
and rest it down on the earth.

My pain,
how happy it is to leave me whenever I treat it kind"

- Andrea Gibson

***
How to capture this ( Read more... )

...and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Kurt Vonnegut was 47 years old in 1969, when he gave us Slaughterhouse-Five. His first bestseller, celebrated and censored and wholly original, unstuck in time. It seems impossible to me that the man was fairly unknown until his 50s, given the millions of us ( Read more... )

Inner family systems, from my limited understanding, is a model of psychology that can help you see the "parts" of yourself in a new light. What is the function of shame, if not to lead us toward empathy, suggests Brene Brown. How does fear and anxiety keep us safe? When has your grief created space for your love, your wisdom? And so on - asset- ( Read more... )

Albeit singular, mysterious, delicious - joy is an appropriate reaction to the gift of aliveness.

If we stop for just this moment, take in the wonder of where you are, the signs of other worlds. This bedsheet, this window, fresh air. Our brains tune out so much life, understandably. Give yourself the chance to see it, I tell myself.