The wind is wild outside, though it was a quite perfect day, warm and breezy, the cottonwoods starting to turn yellow, the formerly muddy paths now dusty and easily navigable. I’m at the Ucross Foundation, a writing residency in Wyoming, back after a year and a half when we all had to leave due to this mysterious Covid thing that was just beginning to make a name for itself. My fellow residents and I, gloved and masked to the hilt, braved the airports and the long journeys home—we had to, as Ucross, along with everything else, had closed down.
Read moreNO EASY ANSWERS
Were there ever?
Yes, when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, there absolutely were. Abundant in our catechisms and missals, the Sunday sermons, the Catholic school classrooms where we knelt by our desks for prayers several times a day, the pronouncements about what was right and would get us to heaven, they gave us a facile map to follow. “Sister says,” was a common mantra we learned to accept because our parents insisted we must. Questioning the priests and nuns who ruled our worlds was bad, maybe even sinful.
Read moreDISENTANGLING THE TANGLE
The weight of the world feels so intense, and I am so tangled in it.
I just completed a half-day online mindfulness retreat and boy, did I ever relate to that reflection. I’d recently finished Ben Rhodes’s After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, described by The New York Times book review as Rhodes “going out into the world to understand how it has become such an illiberal authoritarian mess.” He feels we, as a country, particularly due to the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 banking collapse, are largely responsible for “disseminating the toxins that now infuse the world.
Read moreCOMING OUT
It’s been awhile.
I wrote a whole blog post before we left on vacation, wanting to feel the sense of freedom that a completed task list could offer for the next two weeks, but the narrative just struggled too hard to make its point or tell the story I wanted to relate.
My husband, best reader and critic, shook his head after reading my third attempt. “It’s just not your usual good writing, Sharon.”
Read moreSYNCHRONICITY
I should be watching the Derek Chauvin trial. Reading today’s New York Times, answering multitudinous emails. Taking a hike with Stella up the trail near my home. Vacuuming. Closing the door to my study and reading the new poetry books on my shelf, writing a new poem. Choosing the cover art for my upcoming collection of poems. Meditating, definitely. Doing a yoga video. Cleaning the toilets, or finally tackling the pile of New Yorkers on the dining room chair, cutting out all the good poems as I’d promised myself I’d do for the last year.
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