Blessed are those whose bellies are free – swelling with every breath and posturing for no one; they shall know ease in their own skin and sense the truth of things, both of which shall remain hidden to those who perform and posture and shrink themselves to please...
Every life is a work of fiction. That’s what I tell my memoir students. People come to me wanting to tell their life story, the narrative that sums them up, the myth that captures their essence. They expect to find this story hiding inside them like one of...
Today there arrived in my inbox a missive announcing a film festival on aging. Describing a series about challenging traditional stereotypes, it read, “These rockstars of aging are still giving 100% in their careers or fearlessly volunteering their time for others -...
An Antidote to the All-Conquering Hero In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, American mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested that the world’s most important mythological stories share a common framework: they all involve a hero, who happens to be a...
In Celtic tradition there are many moments considered to be a “thin time” which means that heaven and earth feel closer and we might experience moments of connection to those who have gone before us in ways that we don’t usually. These moments are the daily portals of...
Two days after I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, I had an abortion. I went looking for one spiritual initiation and got another. I was crossing campus on a spring morning, headed to my class on Dante’s Divine Comedy, when the smell of wet dirt...
I’ve always considered myself to be both a very independent person and a very introverted one.I’ve always considered myself to be both a very independent person and a very introverted one. When I was in my early-mid 20s, I was especially entrenched in this view of...
Seeking the most powerful healing practices to address the invisible wounds of war, Dr. Ed Tick has led journeys to Viet Nam for veterans, survivors, activists and pilgrims for the past twenty years. He writes: “During one of my annual reconciliation journeys to Viet...
Ann is an award-winning writer and performer. Her current solo show, Inappropriate in All the Right Ways, has been described by The Huffington Post as “a show like no other.” Her show, Loveland, played for two years straight in San Francisco where it won the SF Weekly...
When people write about traumatic events, a question that often comes up is, “What if I don’t remember what happened? What if I was dissociated at the time? How can I recreate an event effectively on the page if there’s a blank spot where the memory should be?” This...