The Weaver

December 11, 2013

SONY DSC

I posted a version of this at BeingUnbound yesterday. Please forgive the first (and likely last) cross-post but the story has as much to do with inspiration and intentional enjoyment as it does with travel bounds. As I am wrestling with some big questions (like where I will live and work next) telling this story helped remind me what it is that I love to do.

Once upon a time…

Over the rim of his coffee cup he gazes again towards my feet and says, “I am completely mesmerized by the fabric of your scarf.”

I smile and look down to the pashmina loosely tied as usual thru the handle of my rucksack.

“It has a story.”

“I’m sure it does.”

With ripples of pleasure that deepen my crows feet, I tell it.

For this is what I do. This is what I love to do. I travel and collect stories. And sometimes I collect a physical thing which is like a beacon that points to the story behind it.

[Read more…]

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Surviving Divorce to Thrive

July 7, 2013

I am just shy of 6 years in my post-divorce life.  I ran across this writing a few weeks ago and struggled with whether to publish it. I can only think that someone, somewhere needs to read it. For her… 

Going through this you are going to feel crazy.

You are going to have extreme highs and extreme lows.

You are going to take a while to sort things out and create the new you.

There is no “right” here. It’s all ok. Breathe.

My mom told me that she tells all her divorcing clients to not make any life-course-altering decisions after a divorce for at least three years because you are just too reactionary and fragile. Sometimes three years sounds itself ridiculously long — you are making new life decisions daily. Sometimes you will think it is not nearly long enough to get your shit together.

You are making countless changes because your routine is entirely shaken. It is like moving to another country overnight. Go to sleep one day in the US and wake up the next in Uganda.

You are faced with all the enormity and scary and wondrously blissful feeling of getting to make new patterns for yourself. [Read more…]

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Un Po

June 17, 2013

His words come at me rapidly. I only understand half of them — if it is a lucky day. He likes me. He wants to get coffee together. I am a beautiful. He wants to give me a belt.

italianoThis is what I love about “my boots guy.” Guiseppe continues to speak itlaian to me even though I’m sure he knows that I don’t really comprehend. The thrust gets through — certainly the bevy of baci do — but much of the meaning is lost.

I confess that after 9 months living in Italy, I am still very much an english speaker.

How I failed to learn italian

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Perspective of living — abroad and otherwise

April 21, 2013

As an American and a runner I am shocked and horrified by the bombing at the Boston Marathon. As a student living abroad, I’m even more shocked and horrified by the subsequent reactions and am struggling to find perspective. And peace.

War and war-like actions are the worst mankind has to offer this world. Violence begets violence. It always has been a self replicating and escalating cycle and it, I fear, always will be.

View from the DuomoI am by no means the most erudite student of history on the planet but I grew up in a news-aware home as the daughter of two Peace Activists. Some of my earliest memories are of holding a candle outside the White House and Pentagon. I remember vividly trying to wrap my young mind around the concept of a hunger strike. I celebrated my 8th birthday around a bonfire while participating in the Great American-Soviet Peace March in the Soviet Union in 1987.

In this light — my own perspective — I look at current events.

Perspective, let us share some

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Traveling to Terezin

January 9, 2013

My knowledge of history is lacking in big places. Facts and dates, names of places even, sift through my sieve brain. When it came to World War II and the holocaust – the “final solution” – I was notably deficient in perspective.

With a few days back in Prague, I signed up for a tour of Terezin. The Nazi “gift of a town” it was a neighborhood turned ghetto-concentration-camp-holding-pen of disease, death and misery… and art.

Lasting Testaments [Read more…]

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