Trust Her
Call yourself into alignment and everything else will follow.
Roy
I could actually see my seat, 16C, just past the old man’s long right ear whenever he bobbed to the left. Soon I’d be able to unload the backpack that was currently joining forces with my bra strap to cut a groove into my left shoulder. I’d be able to sit down, put my face in my book, and disappear for a few hours into the kind of silence I can almost never find during the semester. But not yet.
Read moreThank you for showing me how to use discipline to grow my practice.
I have a "Best of Linda" loop playing in my mind 80% of the time.
Bless you
“Bless you,” he said, and his eyes filled again and overflowed, and the tears meandered through the crosshatches of the skin around his eyes.
Read moreLet Go
Picking Apples
It hadn’t been her idea to go apple picking at Hillside Orchard at 4 am. That part of the blame definitely belonged to him. It wasn’t really a crime, he’d said. Apples can’t really belong to anyone, can they? And the time was perfect, he reasoned, since he finished his shift at the Circle K at 3:30. His ease and his confidence – unburdened as he was with any kind of moral compass – gave his ideas an old-timey wholesome brand of wonder that was impossible to resist. Pick apples? Sure. 4 am? It’s just a time. Right?
Read moreEvery road leads to the garden.
Bendición
I had resigned myself to a very hot seven days, had cut my hair to boy length even, but was still unprepared for the push of heat as Dad and I walked out of the San Juan Airport to meet his younger brother. Severo greeted us warmly, throwing an arm around Dad and hugging me to his side again and again as we made our awkward way through the breezeway and the parking lot to the tiny Hyundai that would be our transport for the next seven days. “¡Que gorda eres! Aren’t you fat!” he laughed luxuriously, repeating, “Isn’t she fat, Chilo?” and clapping Dad on the shoulder with generous warmth and affection that I had rarely seen from my mother’s side of the family. The only family I had known until that day, my mother’s family communicated most often through sarcasm, impenetrable silences and merciless grudge-holding. I had come to Puerto Rico to meet the rest of my family.
Read moreSometimes 'Now' can feel a little tricky. Try to stay there anyway.
Why do we give this pretend place so much power over us?
The antidote to greed just might be the willingness to feel powerless.
Feel good. Everything else is simply a crossword puzzle, a corn maze, a bone hurling through space.
The Saplings
As always, I was struck by the postcard beauty of her property: the old broad barn, perfectly preserved; the 18th century clapboard house standing strong and straight and prim as its owner, its double chimneys taking no guff from centuries of New England weather. And then, the surprise! The whole scene so overrun with daffodils as to make me forget any other possible use for the color yellow.
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