Hope

Free Fall

  May 27, 2009. This is the day I learn I have cancer. Weird. I never thought I’d hear those words. I am still drowsy from anesthesia. The doctor just comes in, and she says, “Well, we thought it was hemorrhoids, but it’s not. It’s a tumor. It’s cancer.” Just like that. Now I am […]

Into the Storm

What happens when you vow to live awake and alive? What happens when you open yourself to the stir of Spirit symphony? What happens when you become an active participant in your own destiny? What happens? Excitement. Fear. A massive upheaval. In a word: Storm. I was going to keep a secret about this. My […]

Learning to Float

I don’t like going out in boats. There is something about a “recreational” structure floating out in the vast expanse of dark deep water where at any moment a storm could strike, sending me to an untimely death, which makes the idea of a relaxing boat ride nonexistent in my world. The bright orange vest […]

Surviving the Storm

I recently watched (read: sobbed through) an interview of a woman whose children were killed in the Tornado that savagely tore through Arkansas last year. One minute their hands were clasped together in the living room, the next she was face down, pantless, and severely injured, lying in a field of nothingness. But when she […]

The Fear Underneath It All

 To listen to the spoken-word version of this post by Ashley, click below.   “But the tigers come at night. With their voices soft as thunder. As they tear your world apart. As they turn your dreams to shame . . .”  ~”I Dreamed a Dream,” Les Miserables   “You’ll never do it again. Your words are […]

When the Rain Does Not Come

  I used to watch the summer monsoons as if they were a picture show. Our house was perched at the top of a hill overlooking Tucson. Every August, thunderheads would roll over the bluish hills and send their pencil-sketch lightning bolts down over the glittering city. I’d turn off all the lights, spin the […]

What I Want Them to Remember

Their nightstand and bookshelves tell you all you’d need to know. Anne of Green Gables, Ramona, Laura Ingalls Wilder. We have Girls Think of Everything, Rosie Revere Engineer, Not One Damsel in Distress. Harriet Tubman. Helen Keller. Sojourner Truth. Marie Curie. These are their heroes. We go through our Bible with care and find all […]

Meet the Princess of the Press: Ida B. Wells

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Before Billie Holiday sang the lyrics above at Cafe Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York, another icon of history, sat nightly, frantically documenting every lynching […]

Dorothy Day: Saint with Thorns

  “Don’t worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.” ~Dorothy Day I heard about Dorothy Day years ago, when I was a young radical. She was an advocate for women’s rights before American women had the vote. She was arrested and went on a hunger strike. She advocated for the […]

Blue Skies

  Winter in Denver is much better than winter in Cincinnati. You can argue with me all you want, but guess what? Three hundred days of sunshine a year means you’ll feel that golden warmth shining on your face more often than not. Even in those dark cold days between the Super bowl and March […]

Living in the Boring Chapter

It seems to me that most people live semi-ordinary lives with straightforward paths. You graduate from elementary school to middle school to high school to college and then you start working. My life has often consisted  of jumping headfirst into a random major change, freaking out because it was harder than I expected, finally acclimating […]

Recycled

“White woman, why water full of sorrow flow from face?” The young woman’s Chenglish needed no translation and neither did my tears as she poured rosewater into a wooden bucket to soak my feet. She was wearing a Louis Vuitton jacket, sequined sweater and rice hat: a fashion style as common in Kunming, China as […]

Same Leaf, New Perspective

I desperately want to make a clean break from it. For more years than I can remember it’s taken up camp in the pit of my stomach and invaded my mind like a Philistine army with a Goliath heading the charge. It’s followed me around, rocked me violently to sleep, crawled, slithered, sunk into my […]

Clean Breaks

“He’s lucky, it was a clean break.” People say this sometimes when a leg or arm or ankle is broken. I teach high school and I am always surprised at how often my students end up injured, often seriously. “It was good that the break was clean.” How can a break be good? I’ve never […]