It doesn't feel right to leave her passage unmarked here, where I first met her.  Fawn, curmudgeon (her LJ name from many years ago), died on Saturday, December 16. She lived on her own terms, and I will always be inspired by her. Go well, rest well.

From Rob Brezsny’s newsletter this week:

“To a brave person, good and bad luck are like her left and right hand. She uses both.”

-theologian and philosopher St. Catherine of Siena

This feels extremely relevant, and I love it so.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Teacher and author Byron Katie claims, "The voice within is what I'm married to. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes and no come from." I happen to know that she has also been married for many years to a writer named Stephen Mitchell. So she has no problem ( Read more... )

I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU - by Tony Hoagland

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood

and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures ( Read more... )

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, ( Read more... )

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This is one of my favorite sad songs of all time. And here's a genius sad-song-singer doing it marvelous justice. 

I think I dreamed about someone coming from downstairs and stabbing a person.

Nino dreamed that a man with long claws from under the couch scratched him. I dreamed about a family whose child was hurt by a man who came in from the street, maybe a neighbor?

"The Two-Headed Calf"

by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, he sees

twice as ( Read more... )

"The Woodcutter Changes His Mind" by David Budbill from While We've Still Got Feet. © Copper Canyon Press, 2005

When I was young, I cut the bigger, older trees for firewood, the ones

with heart rot, dead and broken branches, the crippled and deformed

ones, because, I reasoned, they were going to fall soon anyway, and

therefore, I should give the ( Read more... )

I remember reading this letter soon after she wrote it back in 2003. Someone around here posted it, I think. It was a huge balm to me in those difficult times -- the first rocky national and global period I would experience as an adult living on her own. Now, those difficult times are 16 years in the past, and we have come upon many new ones since ( Read more... )