I discovered yesterday that my sensitivity to spoken words is a weakness, a fault, and a chip on my shoulder. Admittedly, I’m a sensitive person. I can cry watching car commercials. Tears flood my eyes when I watch adorable pet videos on You Tube. A beautifully worded poem will cost my box of tissue about 10 tissues. When a soulful guitar solo wafts towards my ears, the whites of my eyes turn red and I sniffle through the song. Yes, I’m a […]
It was a gardening-perfect day. The sun poured light like glistened milk from heaven into my garden lot. Towering spouts of gray […]
When I released my dependence upon hair color and liberated my grey roots I opted for a great haircut to enhance my […]
I grew up in dysfunction. I smell dysfunction’s stink in an instant. As an adult, some of the dysfunction from my childhood stuck. Several tragedies later, I recognized my behavior and how my behavior hurt others. My stinky self begged for a remodel. (It remains a work in progress.)
Before we knew that the young man who lived behind our home was apparently murdered, weird vibes wafted through my back yard, […]
I wasn’t shocked when a sheriff pulled into my driveway Sunday afternoon—a magnificent Sunday afternoon colored with a blue that only the Pacific Ocean can conjure underneath a cloudless sky. We just returned from an ocean bluffs walk where we showed off our beautiful and peaceful village to a LA visitor who arrived in the wee hours of the morning with our daughter and her boyfriend. Pelicans soared overhead and we raced to get the best photo. I kept my eye out […]
Love thy neighbor. Oh boy! I’d guess it’s a direct challenge by the task’s author. The directive is akin to a parent’s demand, “Eat thy chicken gizzards.” (My apologies to those who love eating chicken gizzards.) But as there are foods one cannot stomach, so there are “thy neighbors” that one cannot stomach. Yet, we’re supposed to love them. Twelve years of parochial school education lingers in my concern about the divine directives. Today, one will not find gizzards or any kind […]
“On 9/11, despite being out of mobile phone reception, a huge number of hikers abandoned their walks. They hadn’t heard about the terrorist […]
I don’t doubt that climate change is upon us. So when the conservative think tank, Heartland Institute, recently set up an electronic billboard that read, “I believe in global warming. Do you?” with a billboard sized photo showing the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, as the believer, I thought I was self-incinerating. But I wasn’t. It was a Six-Oh Dear! symptom–also known as a hot flash. Admittedly, I wore the pretty-in-the-morning out after more than 23,000 daily wake ups. But there are mornings when […]
Seen also in The Cambrian A thousand or more northern elephant seals sprawled across the beach when I arrived for my volunteer docent duty yesterday. These intrepid seals travelled about 2500 miles to this beach to lose their dead skin and old fur. They must haul out and remain on land for four weeks in order to molt. We call this shedding of the dead epidermis and old fur a catastrophic molt. I posted myself at the very south end of the Piedras Blancas […]
The Muse Pallet 