A Full Life

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Tag: love

  • 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…

  • Mother Shower

    I had a dream the other night about a brand-new mother in some nebulous ancient culture being showered with immense love, affection, celebration, and tender care. Flowered garlands and feet massaged in oil abounded. Certainly, attention was also paid to the small child, but much of the community in this dream was tending to the…

  • And I Will Tell About It

    What do we share when we stop hiding ourselves away? This is, of course, the internet, social media, the shame over guilt culture of appearance and perfection, and in these realms we skirt the truth, muddy it up, maybe forgo it all together. What happens when we decide, I’m going to share it? We’re free.…

  • 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…

  • Eighteen

    fiction short The other girls are smarter. Did you hear that one go on and on about Prufrock? You didn’t get any of that from reading the poem. (You set it down every other line to take a hit, yes, but you still read it, and you still turned in a fine essay. The professor…

  • The Relief of Vulnerability

    Note: As I share this I realize there are multiple layers to the vulnerability I am speaking about, and here are two – the actual act of being vulnerable with my husband that you are to read about read below, and the vulnerability of writing it down and sharing it on my blog and social…

  • 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 Boy I’m Gonna

    .. a (semi) fiction short .. My first complaint was that Jim didn’t hold my hand in the back of the cab. Granted, he had already held other parts of me (and held them pretty well) but we were dressed in our finest – he in a nice grey suit and navy tie, me in…

  • Widening Rings

    When you first start feeling less afraid, you want someone to pinch you. Is this real? And do I deserve it? After the exhaustive stretch of hyper-vigilance and over the shoulder gazing, of expecting lurking danger at every turn, the realm of trust and serene neutrality can feel like a trick. Sleight of hand only,…

  • 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…