What I Know For Sure     Yesterday, on my bike, I was on a desolate trail with no one around for miles—except for a man on a mountain bike who said he needed directions. He looked like he could be anyone’s husband—late 30’s/40ish, fit, nice-looking, dressed the part (decked out in his bike wear),…

Iteration   The first time I experienced this loss was in my role as an aunt. I can pinpoint the moment with Mindy when I felt the “iteration” sting begin. And that’s not even the right word. I haven’t found one yet for this slow process of a child morphing into an adult. For years…

This Close There’s a song on the current playlist on Sirius Coffee House Channel and one of the lines is, “I wish I could un-love you.” It made me think of things I regret, wish I could un-do, and various ways to tweak that line in the song—one was, “I wish I could un-say that.” (In…

  Intent This is Jared. He’s one of my handsome nephews. Do you see how white the whites of his eyes are? That’s the real deal, no photoshop, folks. I think that white reflects his good insides, his intent. Here’s an excerpt from The Little Love That Could where I mention clear-eyed, Handsome Jared: “At…

Color Thankfulness   These are bell peppers grown in my parents’ garden. I fried them yesterday to have with our dinner and I drank in the color as much as I did the taste. The visual alone is intoxicating.   I did the same thing the day before, as I drove up the 99 highway…

  Twangy Wedding Night Music   I’m not really a country music fan, per se. I love most all live music and there is some country I like, (I even have some in my iTunes library) but as a rule, I’m straight up tuned into Sirius XM Coffee House. So it’s safe to say—until now—…

  A Little Bird Told Me   What a liberation to realize that the “voice in my head” is not who I am.—Eckhart Tolle    When I was a little girl and a bird pooped on my head, Grandma Josephine said it was good luck—she said this via our Italian-to-English translator, my mom, Grandma Josephine’s…

Pushing Pamela   The last four hills on the West Ridge Trail leading to the “Top of the World” (Laguna Beach) are the hardest. I should say, the last “middle two” of those four are the hardest. So #3 and #2 are real beasts. #4 is no biggie and #1 is also a relative peace-a-pie,…

The Call of the Wild   I hop on my mountain bike and my suburbia becomes my “Animal Planet’s Wild Kingdom.”   It’s my call of the wild. Queue Rainforest Café sound effects.   Today it was a pack of bobcats. I saw three bobcats, but to be fair, I only saw the tail end…

Want Need     It was like déjà vu reading Jeffrey Tacklind’s book, The Winding Path of Transformation on my Delta Flight to Portland last week. I was transported back to 2008 Haiti, a few months after the massive earthquake, when I read Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet. In Gibran’s passage, “Joy and Sorrow,” I was…