ideas

There’s a last time for everything. Sometimes, but not always, we get to choose when that will be.

In the 1970s, I lived in Venice, California. Even then, it was a weird and strange place, some of which I loved, and some of which I didn’t. We lived only a block from the beach in a courtyard, which meant all the houses faced a common sidewalk. We knew our neighbors. Some of us [...]

Shifting Stories: Sampling Books, One (or 2) Chapters at a time. Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it. —Colin Wilson Shall we begin? Let’s create a new reality together. But first, let’s talk about a few of the essential tools that you will be using in this course. There are [...]

Shifting Stories: Sampling Books, One (or 2) Chapters at a time. “Use this book as a handy life guide. I think of a guide as something, or someone, that keeps us aiming in the direction we want to be going. A guide has traveled ahead of us and has seen the dangers and the glories [...]

Shifting Stories: Sampling Books, One (or 2) Chapters at a time. When you come to a fork in the road, take it. —Yogi Berra When you face a fork in the road, step on the exhilarator! —Pat Riley Ready—Set—Shift. Why not change our point of view? After all, who really wants to live in a [...]

A Metaphysical, visionary, fantasy, adventure: At the first sign of dawn, the problem Meg experienced at night slipped away, and she felt safe enough to leave the building in search of food and information. The Market was Meg’s first stop each morning. As soon as the faintest beam of light streaked through the sky from [...]

It’s an interesting term: Sheltering in place. What place? That is the question. Where in our thinking are we sheltering? What are we believing? What are we accepting as truth? Are we allowing ourselves to fall into this current pandemic of fear? Because that’s what this is. Fear attempting to force us into separation. Shelter [...]

For years, while sitting in a tiny church in Venice, CA, I stared at this quote on the wall. “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need.“— Mary Baker Eddy. I did not truly understand what that meant. But more than anything I wanted to. It was a promise, and I [...]

I love the idea of making the right thing easy, and the wrong thing hard. It’s simple, and at the same time has layers and layers of meanings. I first heard a horse trainer use it, but since we are always training our human minds, it is a perfect idea for us too. The obvious [...]

Life is full of simple lessons. I had one the other day. It made me laugh aloud, and say to myself, “Good grief, Beca.” I was secretly glad no one saw what I had done; like a cat that slips on wet pavement and pretends that it never happened. However, here I am telling the [...]

When one of our granddaughters was little, Del and I would sit with her while she took a bath. She had a bathtub full of little yellow duckies and her favorite game was lining them all up on the edge of the tub. Once she had them in place, Del would point behind her and [...]

Starting in my early teens, and lasting for the next 25 years or so, I collected words and saved them. I read the newspaper and clipped articles that moved me, ideas that opened my eyes, essays that inspired me, and pasted them all into a big journal type book. I read books, watched movies, went [...]

I’ve heard that if you want to be a writer, having had a bucket load of many kinds of jobs is a good thing. I am not sure that is actually true, but I know that in my lifetime I have had those many jobs, and some of them produced some very interesting stories. This [...]

As a teenager, I would often fight with my dad for what I perceived as my rights as a person, not hampered by the fact that I was a “girl.” I would argue with him that it was unfair that my younger brother could stay out longer at night (for example) than I could because [...]

All winter the blue storage box sat alone on the floor of the garage, calling me. Years before, my husband and I, on our way to more traveling, had left it with my daughter for safekeeping. She returned it in the fall, but I didn’t open it, knowing it would require something from me that [...]