Category: Writing

I want to say somethings about touch- to remind you how important touch is, especially during this time of not touching.  I am speaking with some authority as one with thirty-eight years of experience as a touch professional, a Certified Massage Therapist specializing in trauma. First, a few basics.  People need touch.  No really!  This is serious.  The absence of […]

Did it all fall apart today?  Did the worst come down on you like fire and hell and rocks all at once?  Did you ever think it would be so bad?  So awful?  So full of terrible? We watch for bad things, we do.  We suspect some bad things, but never this bad, never this hard and hurtful.  We don’t expect […]

I’ve done lots of hospice work over the years.  Helping people to have as good a death as possible is a lovely, intimate, delicate work.  There’s a piece of dying that comes before, well before leaving life begins.  This is sharing the story of your life, putting the down chronology of your own journey. Often those mourning are […]

A few ideas have been swirling in my mind for some time now and maybe it’s this late night in the cold early spring that finally brings these ideas together to make a whole.  I will have to write for a while to see what comes. I’ve been thinking about saving a life, the large and […]

As I went into the store, I saw him crumpled on the sidewalk in a corner of store windows.  He had a hood pulled over his head and a small backpack.  I wondered then if I could buy him some food.  When I came out of the store, he was standing with his back to me.  He turned to […]

Marshall and I began planning this writing retreat last summer.  We sat looking over my calendar to see where and when my travel work might fit in some solitary time in the desert.  We’ve been doing this a bit for the last few years and now we’ve extended the time.  This is something I am most grateful for. […]

Did I ever tell you this story?  I was just out of massage school in Boulder Colorado in the Spring of 1984.  I was doing lots of massage with rape survivors and people with AIDS and not being paid for it.  I got too tired with that work to keep washing muffins tins at a friends bakery during […]

Dear All, Quakers have a grand history of being some of the first people to carry water to put on the fire of a social crisis: Margaret Fell going into prison to care for prisoners and their children in the 1600’s, some few of us working the underground railroad in the 1800’s and later helping […]

There are sweet parts of my life that I am grateful for. Sweet parts I didn’t expect and couldn’t have imagined along all these long decades of living. There’s our little house perched on a hillside facing the Sun each day. There’s my work that has been a great teacher and constant source of wondering […]

Out of the blue comes email from my old high school friend, Melvin Ash.  I haven’t seen him in decades.  We were the Viet Nam Moratorium Committee of 1970 in our little New England town of 3,000 people.  We held a peace rally after school- 10 people came.  We had a candlelight march ending with […]