for James

For the last thirty years, my friend Arisika and I have been meeting weekly in my studio to experiment with improvised movement and theater as a healing modality. After a warm-up of free movement and sound that leads us into a light trance, we then perform spontaneous pieces for one another that explore the hard truths of our human condition. Our purpose is to reach for self-honesty, digging deep into the unconscious where our raw shadows and our breathtaking beauty reside, revealing our best and our worst to one another without shame.

Essentially it is energy work, a profound healing process that requires mutual trust and love. I bless Arisika for being my partner in this, and for being a deep friend of the heart all these many years.

I have a recurring dream in which I discover another room in my house. The new room is either off the kitchen or behind a back bedroom, and I’m always surprised I’d never noticed it before. These dreams often feel like wake-up calls – what have I been missing that’s...

This bug making its way around town is a persistent one – as soon as the cough simmers down, the nausea starts in and when that’s over, it’s sore-throat time. It’s been a month of this smorgasbord, sapping my strength for everything but naps and Irish novels. I‘m slowing way down to an enforced stillness and am noticing the wisdom in this; it’s like a meditation in which I am aware of every little thing, especially my own short human life on earth.

It is frightening to look too closely because for myself and everyone alive in the world right now ‘every little thing’ includes so much that is horrific and more dire than we can imagine, and much we dare not even begin to imagine.

In Memoriam, Burton Heda, M.D.

Down at the Bay early this morning, the duck congregation was out on the water – buffleheads and Grebes, canvasbacks and ruddy ducks – their many-colored plumage reflecting bright on calm water as they drifted by. The walkers and joggers were out too, equally colorful in magenta shorts and orange headbands, hijabs and burqas. One young woman, in full head-scarf and skirts down to her shoes, greeted me with a bright ‘Good morning’ as she jogged past, going at a good clip even in her full skirts.

“I must be willing to give up what I am, in order to become what I will be.” A. Einstein

for M.W.

Like everyone else, it seems, I’ve come down with this year’s bug: sore throat, coughs and contagious as hell! You don’t want to be around me.

However, I may be one of the few people who doesn’t mind being home sick.

for Christina and Jak

Many decades ago we built a deck out of old railroad ties just outside the kitchen door. It became the hangout for suppers and whispered confidences, naps and the carving of Halloween pumpkins. Winter rains took their toll and eventually the thick redwood ties began to split and then rot around the edges until, this year, it was clear the crumbling deck had to be dismantled before someone tripped in a hole and broke a leg.

“This was my house,” the man in the pick-up truck told us sadly as we surveyed the burned-out wreckage of what had been his home before the big fires this year in Northern California. “I’ve come by maybe a hundred times looking, and I still can’t find anything still...

For Darryl, Kate, Jerry and Cassandra

Yesterday, I walked into the corporate offices of a Title Company and, signing my name a dozen times to legal documents,  liberated three acres of land from the speculative real estate market.

I was sent into an empty boardroom to wait.

I’ve been to three unrelated performances lately in which the male performers stripped down to their underwear onstage, not provocatively but to symbolically expose their hidden selves. As theater it worked, partly because the actors were all young and handsome, but...

I sit here waiting for a call from the hospital to schedule an appointment with a surgeon, my body on fire and all my pain receptors on high alert. It turns out my aortic aneurism was not that at all, but instead I’ve got something called a paraesophageal hiatus...