Left to right: Me, our darling mom, and my sister Carol. Our brother, Rick, was off at school when this picture was taken. Nature often offers metaphors more elegant than any we can manufacture. In the redwood ecosystem, all seeds are contained in pods called burls, tough brown clumps that grow where the mother tree’s trunk and root system meet. When the mother tree is logged, blown over, or destroyed by fire the trauma stimulates the burls’ growth hormones. The seeds relea

As tender days approach, a birthday, the day our beloved shed their earth suit, Mother’s Day, the holidays, there is a common heart tether that binds each of us together with one another that I have heard time and time again when tapping into my own inner voice and listening to other bereaved mommas. It is the intense fear, angst, worry and even some panic that when my body alerts me that a challenging day is coming and my insides are all over my outside shouting that there’s

I am called to imagine and what that means for me is to not say, “I cannot imagine.” I wrote about this quite sometime ago on another forum and it raised quite a few hairs on people’s heads and arms and that’s good. We can agree to disagree, yet I feel immensely passionate about this. When someone is going through something that has not touched our sphere and they are describing it, replying, “I cannot imagine,” may create a wall, a divide, rather than a bridge where we can

“Forgiveness isn’t something you do for someone else. It’s something you do for yourself. It’s saying, ‘You’re not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.’ It’s saying, ‘You don’t get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.” ~ Jodie Picoult Sometimes I feel as if forgiveness and I are in a flow state and at other times it resembles my early years learning how to drive a stick shift. Grinding, halting, jerking my body all around and sensing those gears are goin

Beautiful Again ~ Kate Mapother, Carved. I can’t wait for things to be beautiful again. I mostly believe they will, but I don’t think they’ll be the same kind of beautiful as before. I think the new beautiful will have deeper lines in her face. A topography of the badlands we just traversed etched into it. Every glance will be a kind of homage to the blows we took, and the people we lost. The map will run north to south, from her eyes to her feet, and wherever we find beauty

The shattering and sitting within the pain IS revolutionary that Glennon speaks of and the only thing that makes any semblance of sense when nothing else does. I remember a dear friend asking my mother how she was coping after the loss of her son and her reply was that she had cleaned every closet in her house. This common need to create order out of that which feels so horribly and painfully chaotic often occurs for those of us in grief. There just has to be something that