Faith Gong: Reflections on New Year’s fireworks

The noise — those booms and pops and sizzles — may ward off evil, but it’s also a perfect, primal way to commemorate all the emotions of the past year.

As I am writing this there are nine days left until Christmas, and we still don’t have a Christmas tree.

About partway through I realized that it wasn’t just a film. That’s when I leaned over and whispered to my husband, “This is the perfect metaphor for perimenopause!” 

Three-year-olds and teenagers, as it turns out, aren’t all that different.

Now, my experience of middle age may not be universal, but in my experience middle age is when your heart breaks and stays broken.

This morning, my 11-year-old daughter said, “I don’t know why, but I’m not really feeling excited about anything right now,” and I thought to myself: Me, too. 

Perhaps because I’m a writer and a lover of literature, it’s been helpful for me to view life in terms of story.

“Mommy, what do two lines mean?” my nine-year-old daughter called across the kitchen. And just like that, the Bad Thing entered our house

It’s an obvious metaphor, but it’s true: Where you look is where you’ll go.

I need to come clean: Although I’ve written on this topic in a variety of ways before, I’ve always beat around the bush, obscured my true feelings, tried to be polite. But I think it’s time to be honest, to come right out and say it: I don’t like summer.

I am typing this from a desk in our Airbnb rental house in Huntington Beach, California: a beige stucco bungalow in a residential neighborhood of tightly packed stucco bungalows surrounded by high walls. There are three palm trees in the front yard. The b … (read more)

At the end of July, I attended a friend’s wedding in Indianapolis. Sounds simple, right? Friends, if anything was ever simple, these days nothing is simple.

We may not be able to stop the end of the world, but I don’t believe for a minute that we can’t make the world a better place in the meantime.

Just like that, time moves on. The leaves cover up the evidence of a pandemic that shook our world for over two years; a dump truck carries away the last remnants of the tornado that rocked our neighborhood.

It wasn’t the first time a bird had become stuck in our woodstove; this had happened twice before.