Enchanted
It’s a small thing, but I do it. I share my delight in watching a travelogue that slightly embarrasses me, that I spend any time rapt by the English canal countryside from a narrowboat, narrated by a wholly unfamiliar middle …
Survival
If there is one thing I know for sure about trauma and survival is that if we put two brains together and put them under a scan, the traumatized brain would be lit up and on fire right now. Survival skills …
Kol Nidre as Connection
Kol Nidre at the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles is unique from the very beginning. Inmates from different sections of the same security level are not allowed to mix, even for religious services, except when they are. So it’s …
On Memory
After Appelfeld, ז״ל The [trauma] “was etched inside my body, but not in my memory. “In my writing I wasn’t imagining but drawing out, from the depths of my being, the feelings and impressions I had absorbed because of my …
THE APOLOGY, a review
THE APOLOGY Eve Ensler Of course it’s triggering, but just know this and read however you need to, maybe in small bites, maybe between walks at the ocean, or talks with your therapist, but consider the nature of what it …
Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, a review
TRAUMA-SENSITIVE MINDFULNESS: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing DAVID A. TRELEAVEN Thank you for writing this, David. …
Canada Geese, for my sister
Annie Jackson 1950—2017 Then I notice the Canada Geese are marching directly toward me… Mary Oliver says in “Wild Geese”: Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild …
4th Floor Window
Zazen is a fluid thing where distinctions never match my actual experience. The cat climbs onto my lap, circles into the curve of my ankle and settles. I sink into whatever this is. This unhappy unknowing. Metta for everyone, to …
Hope
The two bald toddlers are cancer patients. There are pizza boxes spread all around the end of the hospital bed, surrounded by IV pumps, on the hematology-oncology ward of Children’s Hospital. The main patient is two years old; they are …
Yahrzeit Letter
My father was a disturbed man. It is not his death I mourn when his yahrzeit comes every year; it’s something else. This is a complicated grief. Today his yahrzeit brings up less terror and more sadness as I trust …