Jun 25, 2026
We live in anxious times. We are, often and often, distracted and overwhelmed. Exhausted. Too plugged in. We, all of us, live in anxious times. Add to that – many of us are, actually, anxious, and for a variety of reasons: the times, our personal histories, work, home, or life stress, or just, simply, our nature, the nature of our essential self and/or the nurture (or a lack thereof) having trained and made us so.
There have been days and weeks and months where my anxiety occupied so much of my energy, controlling and degrading me like water wearing away at a shoreline, I had to find a way out. A fix. A cure. Or, at the very least, a bit of relief. Please. This cannot go on, this permanent shortness of breath, this roiling ache in the pit of my stomach, this low-lying, low-level near-constant panic for no discernible reason except – I have my reasons. But, please, not now, don’t make me look!
When the world does not feel safe, when those who are ‘supposed to’ support and protect, prize and love you betray, undermine or disappoint, when time and again humans hurt and abuse or threaten and harass you – when you are born female and feel like much of the world sees you as prey, can you wonder at a higher level of anxiety, or stress?
It always felt silly to do affirmations, until I realized (I am a slow learner, it seems) that they work. They work. You can call them prayers, but whatever you call ’em, constant, repeated focus on the breath and/or a silent, repeated affirmation can wallop the mean uglies (those demons in my head) right the fuck out of our consciousness. Why oh why would anyone, including slow-learning me, deny themselves that cure, that balm, that hammer of defense against the dark arts being brewed in our malleable heads? Malleable as in we can change this, choosing different and better thoughts, molding our inner monologue into something healthier and better. Prayers, affirmations, breath = all of these work, all of these simple tools help.
My favorite prayer is from Anne Lamott: Help me, help me, help me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
The affirmation I created for myself, ages and ages ago, which I still use, often while swimming laps (lap swimming, another tool for calming the nerves): I am safe, I am happy, I am whole, I am healthy, I am loved, and I am grateful.
For many years, I thought about killing myself almost every day. The primary mean ugly that entered my head, repeated over and over and over was ‘I wish I were dead.’ This started very early, age 6 or 7, and it took me about 30 years to get a grip and smash that negative fucker out of my system. And. It still returns, like the worst ear-worm in recorded history, when I am tired and have a moment of fear, doubt and anxiety. And. There is another way. Therapy, sure – it can help. Friends. Exercise, only – do I have to? Well, yes, dear, you do. It works; it elevates your mood, my darling moody self. A canine companion is good, too; petting a dog is said to be as good for the human nervous system as is meditation. #Truth
We all deserve to be loved, healthy, whole, and safe. Affirmations and prayer can help. Another one I came across recently: I am exactly where I am supposed to be. What is meant for me is finding its way to me right now. Every door that closed was protection.
Every delay was preparation. I am ready to receive everything that has been arranged on my behalf.
That last line annoys me a bit, truth be told. Arranged? Gimme a break. By whom? Imaginary sky friend? Stop. Breathe. Allow yourself, beloved self, to imagine, if not a design, well, how about a cloud of friendliness and good will following you around, enveloping you, a reflection of the good will your thoughts and affirmations create, design. How about that, dear?
Do I have to? Help me, help me, help me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Jun 24, 2026
“Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned makes demands upon us and can often feel
like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position, it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive
or loving act as small as you like, such as reading to your little boy or showing him a
thing you love or singing him a song or putting on his shoes keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says
the world is worth believing in. In time we come to find that this is so. – Nick Cave
We live in gross, cynical, snarkilicious times, where a nah-nah sensibility reigns, a teenaged boy pulling your pants down, ‘just for fun,’ whatever you can get away with nastiness prevails, or seems to. Where the incompetence and greed, careless and lack of empathy on too many of our fellow humans’ parts – especially those in power – can or could fill me with despair, if I let it. I don’t let it. I choose hope. It’s not always easy, but, I choose hope.
As Americans, we are, in so many ways, so spoiled it ain’t funny. Even the small slice of world travel I’ve done – to India, Russia, Portugal, Canada, the Caribbean, and having lived in the UK – instructs me in just how fortunate I am in having been born in the U.S., and even more so when I was born in the U.S., during decades of post-WW2 expansion and wealth; during a time when unions were ascendent, and rights were being expanded to include traditionally marginalized communities.
We have been here before. The infrastructure of nasty and misinformed might be shiny and new, but it’s the same old, same old, taken in historical context. Radios coming into every home a century ago led to figures like Father Coughlin, a pro-fascist, anti-semitic Canadien-American Catholic priest who – during the 1930s – was a strong anti-New Deal voice whose radio show reached, it’s estimated, one third of all American households at its height, fomenting a white Christian nationalist view of the U.S. and it’s (preferably isolationist) place in the world. Doesn’t that sound damnably familiar? We have been here before.
The majority of Americans are not okay with parents and children being separated for any reason, including unsettled immigration policy. The majority of Americans aren’t okay with voter suppression or a lack of representation for Black Americans who make up a significant portion of the electorate in former Jim Crow states rushing to further gerrymander congressional districts. The majority of Americans want private medical decisions around pregnancy to be just that: private.
The majority of American want more gun control, including a ban on automatic weapons of war in private hands, and a national red-flag law protecting families and law enforcement in a country awash in guns. The majority of Americans want kids to be fed, single parents assisted, food programs plentifully stocked and funded, and the elderly poor to be supported in what is the richest country on earth. The majority of Americans want our schools to be well-funded, and to remain a bastion against the integration of church/synagogue/mosque and state.
The majority of Americans – however low our expectations might be at this point – are not comfortable with the open corruption and incompetence now occurring at the highest level. Ditto being uncomfortable with our tax dollars to bomb citizens in a country I doubt You-Know-Who – or any of his grasping, gross children – could identify on a map.
Vote. Know, reach out to, ask questions of and support your local League of Women Voters or Democratic party committee. Ask informed or better informed friends who, in a primary or general election, they support. Ballotpedia is a great source for all things voter-y, as are state boards of election sites and offices, which are staffed by usually underpaid, under-recognized warriors serving on the front lines of our democracy, most of them women.
This is not a time to be cynical or hopeless; it’s a time of action, and of waiting, while taking small steps to help preserve our democracy. This world is beautiful and worth saving, as is this still young and often very dumb democracy. Small steps while waiting, because waiting is hard. But, and, however, small steps will get us there, and as the old fable tells us, the turtle crossed the finish line first. Remember?
Jun 23, 2026
What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. – Carl Jung
What is hell? Is it being inauthentic, living a lie or lies, at the mercy of others or an other whose will is stronger than our own, or upon whose good will and pocketbook we depend? That burning pit of fire never seemed real to me as a child; it seemed silly, and overblown, perhaps because in my childhood home I was so often cold. But it was much harder, as I experienced it, to live with people who did not (or did not want to) understand me, and love me. It was a kind of hell to drag my feet up that dirt road after school every day not knowing what awaited me at the end.
I’ve also always thought that hell was, perhaps, not being able to read, sitting in a classroom or an office or anywhere that reading is required and for reasons undiagnosed or ignored, each day turns into a humiliating torture. Hell is prison, stuck in a box – especially for those whose only crime is or was being Black, or poor, or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or female. Women who kill their partners are given sentences that are, on average, 10 years longer than men who kill their wives, exes, or girlfriends.
Chronic pain seems like hell to me. A bad marriage or a job you hate that you must hold on to for reasons unknown to those around you, including perhaps, your children, is hell, too. Hell is being sex trafficked, or physically, sexually or psychologically abused by anyone, but especially by a family member. A child dying young, or at any time before their parents is hell. War is hell. 25% of the entire world’s population is being directly affected, living in or close by a war zone or conflict, at present. This is unacceptable, and is a massive increase from just two decades ago.
Hell is knowing someone will burn whatever it is down before admitting they were or are wrong, refusing to acknowledge that things must change. Hell is hopelessness. Hell is not being loved, especially not loving yourself. Hell is right here on earth; there is no need to imagine another one.
I was never afraid of hell. I was afraid of my mother, and of always feeling so alone. That doesn’t bother me any more, and hasn’t for a long, long time. It helped to find my tribe, my true friends, and to burn away literally and figuratively the ties that bound me. It helped to burn her. She died in 2007, almost 20 years ago.
Once upon a time a wise woman told me to let go, to speak over and over the words ‘I let go, I let go, I let go’, and to avoid all contact with the momster for at least 6 months. I was in my mid-thirties and was still struggling with a desire to end my life on an almost daily basis. Slowly, slowly over time, the invisible, burning strings of that relationship and its many complications disappeared entirely (think Wonder Woman’s sparkling rope of truth, only working the negative, I guess?). She left messages, one of which – months and months later – said that she didn’t know why I had not visited, called, or been in touch, adding that she’d been feeling so guilty about me, toward me, although she could not say why.
I kept away and incommunicado for several more months. I allowed myself to be at peace. I allowed myself to heal. I lived.
The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul. If you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. If you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. – Meister Eckhart:
Jun 22, 2026
“Women without children are also the best of mothers, often, with the patience, interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parents, by another adult.” – Louise Erdrich – The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year, 1995
I owe so much to my aunties, those women connected to me by birth and blood as well as those whom I met independent of those ties; several of the women who became my non-blood aunties were even friends of my mother; these women, despite whatever she said about me (not much that was good), stayed objectively kind, and warm toward me throughout my childhood. Their kindness and warmth was a saving grace, although once we moved to the farm, eight miles out of the small rural village where I’d grown up, it became harder to see and be around those good humans, other than at large parties.
No more comforting presence around the pool, or kitchen table, no coffee and chat at the picnic table parked under the kitchen windows, when at least I could depend on a warm smile, a friendly word. None of that. Plus, mother was made miserable by the purchase and move; a permanent black cloud hung about her head. Watch out, kid.
Psychologists maintain that having one adult who is a supportive, mentoring or loving fan – can change the trajectory of any individual child. I believe this to be true, to a point. I certainly had adults who believed in me, but unless there is a direct intervention of some kind, a push up or down this or that road, a real recognition and action taken in support, stumbling blocks remain. Warmth and kindness, in other words, are not enough; they must be accompanied by acts, by action.
I have loved being an auntie, although it is challenging when there is conflict between myself and the parental units (a.k.a. my siblings), as there has often been. Constant, powerful consolation comes in the form of auntie status to my BFFs kids; now there is joy; now there is ease and loveliness; now there is a lack of complication and narrative jostling. There I have held a hand or given advice without fear of awkward silences and snide commentary, nasty consequence, or raging judgement.
Good gawd, how I have learned to not ever tell actual blood nieces and nephews what went on from my perspective, or how specifically difficult it was, because I am not the parent; thus, in my direct experience, I have ben deemed not entitled to the events and perspective I have regarding my own childhood or to tell the tale of same. I don’t, as the courts would say, have standing. I risk arousing the ire of the court. Big time. Sigh. Discretion may be the better part of valor, but having to stifle oneself and dance around ones own lived experiences is a bore. A chore. A bridge too far, often.
Being designated early on by nieces and nephews as ‘the cool aunt’ was also, at one point, a challenge. This was not, and never could be, a competition. But there it is, that sense of running a race I never consented to, signed up for, BAM! The starting gun. They are your children, and I expect them to honor you first and foremost, and – if they come to me for input, I will give it. Please don’t punish this loving auntie for so doing. Please?
However we have younger persons in our lives, they are – as are we to them – a gift. Whatever the complications (and there are always complications) women without children are a blessing in the lives of young people, presenting other options for how to be outside the societal norms that, in some cases, don’t fit, can’t fit, won’t fit or can even oppress. Plus, at their best, aunties are fun, slightly subversive, so like our moms at times (or unlike) it can startle; non-blood aunties can be so like their best friends energetically, intellectually, and otherwise, kiddos get why and wherefore on a deep level, learning that will pay them forward in their own lives.
How so? Why and wherefore? Because. The ‘why’ mom is BFFs with so and so instructs us, and the wherefores of long-term friendships, which support and sustain us in our lives, do so as well, helping us find our own peer friends for life, if we’re lucky. And even, if we’re luckier, other aunties, knock wood, whose wisdom, support and friendship is a gift, a gift, a gift.
Jun 21, 2026
Even now, when the plot
calls for me to turn to stone,
the sun intervenes. Some mornings
in summer I step outside
and the sky opens
and pours itself into me
as if I were a saint
about to die. But the plot
calls for me to live,
be ordinary, say nothing
to anyone. Inside the house
the mirrors burn when I pass.
*a poem from Lisel Mueller – no relation but very relatable, especially as the rural place I live in has slowly warmed these past weeks following a winter in which any day I could step outside without layering up was a rare gift. Spring into summer with deep breaths in life-affirming fresh air. Have you ever felt as though your inner fires might set the world – or some part of it – ablaze? I have. Mueller died in 2020, and if you are interested in doing a deeper dive on this talented German-American poet, translator and academic her wiki is linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisel_Mueller
