Brave New Year

Happy New Year, everyone, and here we all are once again. You might notice that I've made some changes to this blog. I'm not yet done. Perhaps I'll never be done, but I needed a change, and I needed it before the new year started. As many of you already know, the last six months…

One Day in the Life of Me #socialanxiety #9to5life #yoga

Please don't doubt that I know I'm lucky to have a full-time job with benefits. Still, my fuse is short and my sensitivity to principle is deep.

Reaching for the Stars: Prose Poem? #MondayBlogs #yoga

I felt the staccato snap of each vertebrae in my spine as I lengthened and then twisted my torso in Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) and wondered how much longer I could keep looking up at the ceiling before I lost all feeling in my neck. The yogi urges me to take two more waves of breath…

Ruminations #MondayBlogs #acceptance #forgiveness

Some of you know that I practice yoga at a studio. A few weeks ago, a student I didn't know started attending the two classes I take each week. I found her presence to be a little unsettling. She was ... to put it delicately ... expressive with almost every pose she made. Her rather…

Living in the Moment: Trinidad, Santa Fe and the drive from Hell #MondayBlogs #travel

If you’re new to my blog and want to know how this road trip began, click here for the first post. For our time in Casper, Wyoming, click here. For our experience with the Total Solar Eclipse, click here. We left Wyoming in good spirits. Interstate 25 was a pleasant drive, even if the speed…

Prose Poems: A Question and An Answer #poetry #MondayBlogs

For my online poetry class last week, we discussed the "prose poem."  Now I remember from (way) back in the day when I was intrigued by prose poems because they seemed less intimidating than the usual poetry forms.  Prose poems seemed more like writing flash fiction or flash nonfiction.  Something I could do without having…

The Plan, From Someone Who Hates Planning

I hate planning because, more often than not, my plans get upended by unforeseen circumstances.  For example, ... I plan to finish a painfully detailed and tedious project at work by week's end only to find an error in my SQL query which means I will have to fix said error and then redo several…

I Really Should Be Writing, But …

"But a good writing day ought to be simply any day you worked. ... The hell with all that anxiety about what may or may not come when you do work. Quit expecting it to dance for you. It's not about you, finally. It's about itself."  Richard Bausch, The Writer's Chronicle, March/April 2014, p. 20…

False Alarm and a Thousand Mea Culpas

Yesterday (Wednesday, July 16, 2014, to be exact and to be ever etched on my mind), I made a mistake.  And not just one mistake.  Actually, I made several.  And all of them in public.  Vis a vis my blog. Mistake #1:  Multitasking.  I've never ever been good at multitasking.  In fact, I hate multitasking…

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

One of the fun things my husband and I did while off-the-grid was a bike ride on the Gainesville-Hawthorne Bike Trail.  My husband is a long-time bicyclist and a proud owner of a 1974 Carleton Raleigh International.  He's been carrying this baby around with him since 1975.  Some restoration was called for at times, but…