Recently, I have been thinking about the power of true kindness, and the profound impact it can have on us. I’m talking about the real thing: kindness with no strings, no ego, no expectations, kindness for kindness’ sake, big kindnesses and seemingly small kindnesses, seemingly invisible kindnesses and blatantly visible ones. I’ve been remembering all […]
Now it is our turn. A shooter came to our town. He killed 10 people in a grocery store we have all been to. The first I heard about it was just that there was an active shooter in Boulder, and my heart dropped because my daughter was out in an exposed public place at […]
There’s a song by LCD Soundsystem called “Someone Great,” about the feelings that come when someone important to you dies. In the last half of the song, he sings “When someone great is gone,” over and over, enough times that it feels like a chant. This part of the song has been repeating in my […]
I like to go walking with my friend who has a dog. We hike on a trail that allows dogs off leash after a certain point, and so we meet tons of off leash dogs on these hikes. It is off leash dog central. Usually, we can tell which dogs don’t want to interact with […]
One day, my husband and I were snuggling on the couch. Something smelled awful, and I confess that I assumed it was him. Much later in the day, I discovered a dead mouse on the floor right under the couch where he’d been sitting. I’d attributed the stench of mouse corpse to my husband, and […]
Recently, I witnessed the start of a dog fight that turned into a human fight. A large dog and a small dog met each other on a busy sidewalk. The large dog aggressively jumped on and pinned the small dog who was terrified, as were its owners. After the dogs’ owners separated them, they started […]
In my twenties, I was involved in an off-again, on-again relationship that I am certain made all who witnessed it feel bewildered and frustrated with me. This person and I broke up and got back together so many times over a period of three and a half years, I lost count. One day, I was […]
A little over a year ago, I stepped out of a rut that I didn’t realize I was in to begin with. I am only now seeing it for what it was, and I am not sure I have a name for the rut yet. What pushed me to take this step was the US […]
We live in a world that values words over most other things, and many powerful moments get drowned in the constantly verbal torrent. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that there is any way to make an impact without using lots of words, and it is hard to understand the impact that can be had in […]
I was once involved with someone who was quite lovely, and who wanted a much different sort of relationship than I did. Our conflicting desires made the relationship unsustainable and rather painful. Unfortunately, we did not communicate to each other what we wanted our relationship to be until we were both too deeply hooked by […]