When I sit down to write fictional stories, the setting is always the same, and the setting is way out west in California. I don't know other places well enough, and even if I grow to, which I might now that I live in the Midwest, my bones quite literally grew to their capacity in…
Tag: acceptance
Could You Be Loved
George Bernard Shaw wrote, "if you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you best teach it to dance." Oh how some of us toil to be rid of our pasts or our character flaws or our deepest, darkest secrets. Maybe instead, we ought to hang out and have a little fun with…
the story and The Story
Long before I set out on a spiritual path of recovery, I felt some sort of kinship with some great beyond. Even as a child who had little interest in Sunday school and no discernible relationship with God in a religious sense, I prayed all the time. I prayed out loud before I went to bed…
love, enough
[fiction short] An hour before I am supposed to leave, I start crying. I've had that fluttery, controlling, rigidity-soaked fear for two days now, and underneath that there are always two forms of grief - the actual grief, which hurts, and the tender grief about being so hard on myself, that the New Age Buddhists call radical…
Squeaky Clean
I can remember the first time I felt truly clean, and I think I went off and wrote a poem about waterfalls and the color blue. Nerd. I was trying my best to express what it meant, that feeling of a freshly scrubbed inner space. Like linens washed in lavender water, or what I imagine a…
The Power of Gratitude
It's that time of year again where we practice giving thanks and reflecting on all that is blessed is in our lives. For some, this can feel like a shallow undertaking of mumbling predictable niceties, and others may not be able to feel any thanks, bombarded with problems and pains as they are. Understandable. We…
A Full Life 