Little Miss Figgy Withit is having a growth spurt. At 6″ tall at the tip of her one and only leaf when she arrived in our mailbox, she shrunk a little within a few days. The leaf, dry and crisp, fell, and suddenly our little fig tree was bare. A sign of hope, however: one tiny green nodule about halfway up. And within a day, another where the leave once was. Less than one week…
Introduction This project will not be linear. It will likely not make sense at points. It began (creatively) ten years ago and (personally) when I was nine years old and discovered that the family I had grown up in was not my family of origin. Writing about adoption has been a very unpredictable tide in my life. Sometimes I get close to the shore, and others I’m pulled out to sea. The spirit of this…
Sometimes when I’m struggling with less than stellar mental health, I hear a gentle voice talking me through it. Usually, a simple sentence or two nudges me enough to break out of the mental loop. Over the years, I’ve tried to capture those words. The final section of the Look Here document, titled Remember, is a collection of those messages. When I’m struggling, I’ll read them as part of the Look Here exercise. Occasionally,…
At first, I had the Trinity: three habits I treated with a sanctity warranted by the level of importance to my life. Write Read Spend time in nature Then I had the Core Four: Connect with others The list grew from the Sacred Seven to 11 to 12 to 15. I relied heavily on routines to accommodate the increasing behaviors I wanted to integrate into each day. My mornings were synchronized to an app designed…
When environment activism took root in the 70s, one framework it created was the Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Those three words and the iconic three-arrow symbol became ubiquitous and contributed to a cultural shift. Albeit in the reverse order of what was presented. Folks focused on recycle and often skipped the first two. To be clear, it isn’t that recycling and reusing didn’t exist prior to the 70s. The ethos of repairing and repurposing has always…
Harry has kidney disease. He is still eating. Still running around with joy. Super loving. He is also turning into skin and bones right before our eyes. He is so skinny. And thirsty. The vet says he could have two months or two years; hard to know how it will progress. He turned 14 this year, and I was hoping (but knowing otherwise) for him to make it to 20. Or 100. You know, whichever.…
The Look Here file was initially created because my perceptions can be unreliable when I’m struggling with mental health issues. I need an outside influence to tether me to reality when I can’t trust my own brain to do so. And it needs to be something specific to what happens in my world when things are starting to untether. The tool needs to be available 24/7, so it can not strictly rely on talking to…
In her sermon titled We Shall Go Forth, Reverend Lo from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene speaks of wanting to build a wall of lamentation, a place to help with “the inlay of compounded fractures and compounded grief in our lives. There’s something about that ritual of writing down one’s prayers or wishes, or even the things one wishes to let go of or release, and placing them in the cracks of a wall.…
One of the mental fallacies I’ve worked on reframing has been the idea that every change I make must be all or nothing. I’m either sedentary or I’m walking for 30 minutes every single day. Eating fast food or cooking wholesome healthy meals three times a day. Not drinking any water or drinking some complicated formula’s worth of ounces each day. This approach has never worked for me. Not once. And I tried for decades.…
Suzuki Roshi once said about questioning our life, our purpose, “It’s like putting a horse on top of a horse and then climbing on and trying to ride. Riding a horse by itself is hard enough. Why add another horse? Then it’s impossible.” Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg While this quote is usually placed within the context of questioning oneself, I’ve found it useful when expanded out to anything that is already “hard enough”…