After suffering a stroke and consequent fall, I have been in ER, in hospital, in rehab, and now home.
My brokenness was profound – right leg and foot frozen, broken bone in my back, slight loss of fine motor movement in my right hand – my art and writing hand.
My degree of healing since then seems nearly miraculous and has given me new appreciation of my body and my “village.”
But nothing could have prepared me for the indignity of being “patient-ized.”
The hospital was a madhouse in the...
I envy Alaskans. They find meaning in place. I live in a place that has never felt like my own, a city I am often at odds with, a climate that aggravates my sinuses, under a sky that has never made me giddy.
Under the Northern Lights and the brilliant shadow-casting sun, Alaska might have been my place.
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They say people go to Alaska looking for something. Gold. Oil. The Wild. I went looking for love.
It didn’t begin in Alaska. It began in Ohio one winter when a boy I knew...
I don’t know that I felt my true soul until I got off the airplane at Shannon airport, Ireland, and stepped into green – emerald green, mint green, cats-eye green, just-budding-tree green. Like Oz. Though I was 40 years old and this was my first visit, it felt like coming home.
I sensed at once how the culture I’d grown up in no longer fit. A culture born of Yankee adages. America writ large. Build businesses. Get on with it. Get rich. Follow the rules. Don’t cry. Get a move on. Something new...