Audria is a massage therapist and a painter. She’s well-known for her lovely cloudscapes, having studied clouds closely and painted them for years. She’s painted clouds on the ceiling of her massage room in greys, yellows, browns and blues. It’s one of the favorite...
A couple of Saturdays ago, I unintentionally went contra dancing. And though I’ve been before, I never understood the appeal of it. This time, though, I really enjoyed myself. I needed to get out of my head for a while, and while I’m not sure why this time was...
In our family of girls in the early ‘60s, my two sisters’ and my primary jobs appeared to be staying clean and staying safe, not necessarily in that order. In my mother’s defense, these two principles – cleanliness and safety – were deeply embedded in the culture of...
“The true antidote for greed is contentment.” The Dalai Lama The yard demands my attention. A neighbor walked by as I was gardening last weekend and said, “You’re doing the meditation of one thousand dandelions.” In my case, it’s more like one hundred thousand...
A vague sadness seems to be endemic in my circle of friends these days. No one’s really talking about it, but there it is, just under the fabric of our daily lives. It’s not suffering we want to make public. At its worst, tears stream down your face, mascara runs, and...
I believe that – if we’re lucky – we’re always in the process of becoming our true selves. Sometimes it happens slowly, with baby steps, then, suddenly, by giant leaps, like some weird game of psychic “Simon Says”. This is the story of how a red leather purse could...
In my album of baby photos, there is a photograph of my granddaddy taken sometime in the 1950s. He’s standing inside a rustic cabin, holding up a fish that’s about two feet long, and wearing a plaid flannel shirt underneath a canvas jacket. The jacket was probably...
The noise from my roof sounds as if it’s either hailing or a herd of small rodents is running across it. Neither is true: A single yellow aspen leaf has landed on the skylight above my head, backlit by the mid-morning light. The next second, it’s gone. The wind is...
I am living on the edge. No, not that edge. My edge has a chain-link fence along it, so I won’t walk over the cliff in the middle of the night, I guess, and sue the State of California. We are at a state beach in southern California, living both the paradise and the...
A few years ago, I spent the month of March strolling around Santa Fe, camping on the beach in Baja California, then trekking through Araviapa Creek on my first-ever backpacking trip. In Mexico, I slept on the beach. The night sky was at once astonishing and...
