One morning, I was talking to someone who said, “I just can’t get out of the teacup.” What I heard was, “I’m stuck in this really small space and when I try to climb out, I just slide back down to the bottom.” The teacup felt like heartache to me, and not knowing how to […]
Tag Archives: pain
Singing As the sun rose, I sat facing the garden. The trunk of the majestic locust tree was on the right, the branches of the stately pines, heavy with newly fallen snow were on the left. Nature was singing. I felt small—not only physically. I felt my incorporeal smallness. I thought about an evening when […]
I’ve mentioned vestibular neuritis before, but what’s interesting is that as I live with this condition, that isn’t life-threatening but is lifestyle-threatening, I think about how blessed I am to have this as my most serious physical disadvantage. Vestibular Neuritis Information about motion, equilibrium, and spatial orientation is provided by the vestibular system which detects gravity […]
This isn’t a “happy” story about lasagna, green sweaters or cloth napkins. It’s a story about humanness and brokenness. I’m not talking about broken hearts but, rather, broken spirits— when you know you have worth, but can’t count it, when it feels like life has been sucked out of you, when you’ve lost, given up, or […]
SURRENDERING SORROW I can be like a hoarder—indiscriminate about what I’m adding to my already full life. Sometimes, I invite hurt and sorrow to take up permanent residence in my heart because I’m unwilling to let them go. Sometimes, the pain hanging in the air is so heavy that it seems I should be able […]
My dreams get mixed-up with what’s real……wait, maybe it’s the other way around; maybe my real life gets mixed-up with my dreams. Is there actually a difference? What used to be curiosities now seem “normal”. What used to be “normal” now seems absurd. I wonder who really fits in anyway? Being like everyone else isn’t […]
The house is quiet except for the dehumidifier running in the background. We had the rainiest summer since 2011 and the rainiest September on record, in 117 years. It reminds me a lot of Portland, Oregon, where I’d visit my daughter, Erin, who lived there for a while. My prayer list is really long right […]
For the second time in a week, I woke up to painful spasms in my left leg. After I stretched and got it to “calm down”, I climbed out of bed, went to the kitchen, poured a large glass of water and decided to go outside. Even though it was only 2:40 in the morning, our […]
Her hands were pressed tightly together and she was aware of the energy between those two hands— hands that worked hard, hands that reached out, hands that held those who were in the dark. Tears started to flow—tears that she was surprised by. After all, tears don’t change anything. She concentrated on being still, but […]
Tears—big, fat tears; the kind that make some men uncomfortable, and many women sigh—rolled down his cheeks. He lay on a hospital bed, his life nearing the end, spending precious moments with his daughter who sat next to him—this daughter who wasn’t his and was always his. He was only in his sixties. He talked […]
Last Thursday evening, on my way home from my daughter’s house, a driver turned left on red and almost crashed head-on into the side of my car. I was talking to my other daughter and her fiancé (through my car’s speaker of course) when I saw that a car was barreling straight toward me. I […]
In the 1993 movie Groundhog Day the main character is a weatherman named Phil who gets caught in a blizzard that he didn’t accurately predict. He becomes stuck in a time warp, reliving the same day over and over until he gets it “right”. There’s a lot of literature about the underlying significance of this […]
Good Morning Beautiful Friend. How are you my Precious Daughter? You are so Creative! You’re a Worthless Loser. You are such a Clumsy Jerk! How can you be so Stupid and Ugly? You did a Wonderful job! How can you always be so Generous? You’re a Valuable team member. You were an unwanted Mistake. Why are you so Useless? Get lost you Freak! Your […]
How often do we give ourselves permission to “be”— to walk past the “to do” list, to ignore the insistent demands of technology, to take the time to be fully with others, or ourselves or God, to be okay, to simply be? One day, when I had no scheduled client appointments, I chose to let the […]
In the quest for peace full living, we have to embrace all of life—not just the parts that are amazing or delightful or make us happy. For some of us that awareness can be a tough pill to swallow. For a long time I believed that if I just shoved the bad away—then buried it […]
Where do you find joy? Why does joy often seem so elusive? What is joy? “Joy” and “happiness” are not the same. Happiness is a response to something. We experience feeling happy when we’re having fun, spending time with people who make us smile, watching a funny movie, taking a vacation in a place we love, or even completing […]
peace full home®—intentional living 