A Full Life

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Tag: culture

  • West Lands

    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…

  • Sacred

    The little baby boy still growing strong in my belly is due to greet the world in exactly eleven days. He’s kicking me in the ribs as we speak. He might come tonight. Or next weekend. Or in two weeks. (I’m predicting June 8th.) I conceived this child in the middle of September 2017, found…

  • 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…

  • The Loss of Anger

    “I never get angry. I grow a tumor instead.” -Woody Allen As a child in the nineties, I idolized women who were angry and restless and lived to write and sing their fury. Fiona Apple, Gwen Stefani, Erykah Badu, Alanis Morrissette, Lauryn Hill, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Shirley Manson – even Madonna (before she became an enlightened…

  • Disarm

    Dian Fossey, famous zoologist and anthropologist, who spent an extensive amount of time studying gorillas in their natural habitat, came to understand that the best way to approach the magnificent creatures was without weapons of any kind. It was a daring undertaking – gorillas are potentially dangerous; no doubt their strength and size could cause…

  • Another, 1

    “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” Carl Jung You must write every day to save your life. if you do not, your mind will get the best of you. You will think these dark thoughts. You will fall into such despair. You will give up. You are not an…

  • The Circus

    “This is the circus. Everybody’s trying to not go home.”   To be human is to be a social creature, and it is an endless adventure and collection of lessons to interact with other beings and establish relationship. I have learned over time that relationships can work like a drug – we get so high on…

  • Cool Shoes

    Sometimes all it takes is a pair of shoes to shift everything. In fifth grade, my supremely cool step-mom took me to see Clueless and then proceeded to whirlwind me around Westside Pavilion on a shopping spree to mimic the far out fashion of the film. We’re talking plaid skirts and knee high socks, patent leather…

  • Rebel With a Cause

    My first rebellion was at fourteen, and it was all about sneaking out and getting transformationally high. I wasn’t trying so much to be a bad girl (no weird piercings and black lipstick for me, and barely even a fuck you to my folks) as I was trying to connect and feel at one with the…

  • 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…