by Elizabeth | Jul 24, 2020 | Uncategorized
Start by telling yourself this is it. This is the last time you will break up. It will function the way it did at the end of the last marathon you ran when you told yourself, “this is the last mile you will ever have to run in your life.” Then, you were able to give...
by Elizabeth | Mar 27, 2020 | Uncategorized
My son was delighted to figure, as we walked, that he was not only five, but five and a half, and like only a person that age can genuinely do, he sang a song about being five and a half. Wearing waterproof boots, he greeted every puddle with enthusiasm. The deeper...
by Elizabeth | Mar 12, 2019 | Uncategorized
I’ve often thought about the eternal round: of patterns, of cycles, of time and space, of existence as we know it. Like a snake swallowing its tail. Pain kisses the sole of pleasure. Hate and love are the same animal. I’ve built philosophical arguments in...
by Elizabeth | Dec 30, 2018 | Uncategorized
“White Tantric Yoga is an ancient group meditative practice that works on clearing out the deepest corridors of the subconscious mind.” –3HO I found myself, for the third time in my life, cloaked in white, sitting shoulder to shoulder with other people in white who...
by Elizabeth | May 1, 2018 | Uncategorized
I’m back to treating the open wound on my thigh—the final vestige of unhealed skin. Certainly, there remain unhealed parts under the surface. Scar tissue, swelling, pinching. Deep in my left butt cheek is an abiding pain that I suppose is my sciatic nerve but it’s a...
by Elizabeth | Dec 21, 2017 | Uncategorized
1. [The day before white tantric: one 62-minute meditation] SA-TA-NA-MA over and over again for 62 minutes. The chant hijacks my voice about halfway in. My mouth goes on chanting, sounding it out, without my conscious participation. I lift up through the sound to...
by Elizabeth | Jul 5, 2017 | Uncategorized
When I was a kid, I remember coming downstairs for breakfast more than one morning to find only crumbs left in the cereal box. Being the youngest of 5, I was often the last in line for distribution of resources. What I didn’t realize was the depth and density with...
by Elizabeth | Mar 25, 2016 | Uncategorized
I had a dream once about having my house broken into. In waking life, I had just been dumped and was broken hearted. The dream happened while I was away on a spiritual retreat and nursing my pain. In it, I came home and heard the rustle of an intruder in my bedroom. I...
by Elizabeth | Apr 29, 2014 | Uncategorized
I had fantasies about how hugely creative I would be while pregnant — my body’s creation of a new person would ignite unprecedented levels of inspired creativity for my brain. I never expected how appallingly far off that was. My brain had never before...
by Elizabeth | Oct 1, 2013 | Uncategorized
1. It’s never neat and tidy. It doesn’t feel comfortable in clothes. While it hurts, it doesn’t hurt in the typical way but is heavy and low and pulling, like roots — not pleasant but real and necessary and satisfying. 2. It doesn’t ask...
by Elizabeth | Sep 10, 2013 | Uncategorized
On our first date, Lucy told me that she was attending couples counseling with her husband. They were separated, but when they were together their marriage had been open. Recently healed from a broken heart—another married woman who, in the end, did not leave her...
by Elizabeth | Jul 23, 2013 | Uncategorized
There is a common ingredient to all writing I find most compelling: soul-baring honesty. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction. Most of what’s considered nonfiction is actually fiction, as it’s necessarily filtered through a perception shaped by...
by Elizabeth | May 3, 2013 | Uncategorized
The accepted convention of what makes a good story is what Joseph Campbell outlined and called The Hero’s Journey. Granted, Campbell argued that this story line, having been mined from the history of world myth and theology, is something hard wired into the...
by Elizabeth | Mar 14, 2013 | Uncategorized
The other day, I was in a meeting speaking with someone who does not know me very well. “I’ll have to come over sometime and meet your partner and your dog,” she said. Three things occurred to me: First, I winced at the word, partner — the sterile...
by Elizabeth | Nov 7, 2012 | Uncategorized
I’ve historically kept to safe, although sometimes deeply personal topics here on my blog. But lately I’ve been much more political in my thinking than ever before. And although politics is not a safe topic, it suddenly became much more personal these past...
by Elizabeth | Oct 22, 2012 | Uncategorized
I’ve come full circle. Somewhere in my twenties, I read something that made me believe in manifest destiny. Over the past decade, a combination of jilted plans and fruitless wishful thinking — plus, perhaps, a measure of emotional maturity — changed that for me....
by Elizabeth | Apr 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
It’s been one year and five months since I wrote the first page of my current novel. That happened in December of 2010. Granted, that first page was more the expanding on an idea than an actual start to the thing. It came to me right after a surgery I had and I...
by Elizabeth | Feb 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
Getting candy in a family with five kids when you’re the youngest is a rare treat. For me, it was all about Mary Mare. Mrs. Mare was an old woman on our street — she lived in the smallest house at the end next to Electric Boulevard with a cherry tree right there...
by Elizabeth | Feb 3, 2012 | Uncategorized
Do you ever feel like you’re reliving a similar experience that you’ve had before, but this time with a new twist or added element or slight or not so slight variation? It happens to me fairly often. Perhaps it’s because I carry certain past...
by Elizabeth | Jan 1, 2012 | Uncategorized
I don’t know how to articulate this, but I’ll give it a shot. Recently, I was standing in my sister’s kitchen and she was cooking something for her family for dinner. There was no part of it that didn’t include animal protein. She asked me to eat (like she...
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