As the emails inviting me to events and interviews pile up, the insanity of celebrating our one Earth just one day a year strikes me as ridiculous as limiting myself to a single kernel of popcorn per movie. As if I could! Seriously, folks, where would we be without the breathable air, drinkable water, and comfortable climate that our Earth provides? Silly question, I know, and yet giving thanks for all that sustains us seems like a lot to pile onto a single day. I can barely get my shoes tied and the laundry done. My personal practice this month is to give thanks for fresh water ..read more

What does celebrating Earth Day mean to you? Participating in a beach or river cleanup? Taking the stockpile of cans to recycling center? Donating money to an environmental cause? Or is it just one of those guilt-ridden “I should be doing something” moments? Here’s a suggestion to consider: Explore this “Love Earth Invitation,” from my book, Love Earth Now. Allow yourself to steep in this exercise, even if, especially if, it feels silly, a waste of time. Dare to feel, listen, and sense. Resist, if you will, trying to put a label on it or explain it. Let go of any sense of urgency to fix or res ..read more

I know “March Madness” refers to college basketball, but I’ve decided to co-opt the term. It’s high time, in my own opinion,  we had a month to honor our own various forms of madness, be it fury at the political scene or a pathological inability to pass up a cheese plate.  And it seems like there’s more and more to be mad about every day. I feel the foundations of everything I once took for granted, all the “progress” we made ripped out from under us like Lucy snatching the football away before Charlie Brown can kick it.  The problem is that I never learned how to be m ..read more

The Thanksgiving holiday inspires me to remember all I’m grateful for—as it does for a lot of us. I tend to go overboard, making a monumental list as if I’d be jinxing some good thing if I left it off. It’s my personal kick-off to the holiday madness, I suppose. This year, I’m vowing to keep it simple, get a calmer start, stay focused: I’m grateful for LIFE. This time last year, I was in the midst of chemo treatments—the success of which is still utterly unknown. I was terrified I’d be leaving this life before I got to see my children fully grown. I was frantic about m ..read more

I finally got around to turning the page on the month calendar, and, though I’ve been drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes for a solid month (there’s some fodder for the haters), I’m still shocked to see OCTOBER at the top of the page. It’s been consistently showing up after September for all my several decades now, so why the shock? Everything has just seemed OFF lately. Our local weather has been giving me whiplash, careering from cold, overcast days to scorching heat waves. We either have a Speaker of the House or we don’t, depending on which minute you tune into the news. I’m relieved t ..read more

We creep past the house, scanning the wares laid out on the driveway, while avoiding the hopeful gaze of the woman tending them. Is there anything here that entices us to tackle parking on this narrow, bumper-to-bumper-parked street? We spy just a few tables, all loaded with glassware and little kid stuff, so it’s tempting to keep driving. Once an accidental hobby, “oh, look, a yard sale,” scouring the neighborhood for deals has become Our Weekend Thing for my husband, David, and me. Not that we need a single thing. Our house, garage and what-passes-for-a-basement-in-Los Angeles are already cr ..read more

Have I mentioned how much I despise plastic gift cards? The mere sight of the rack full of them at the grocery store sends me into such a rage that I plan my route through the aisles to avoid them. It’s a basic courtesy I extend to my fellow shoppers. No one wants a madwoman foaming at the mouth in the food-buying place. Perhaps that sounds like an exaggeration. Perhaps we have not been properly introduced. All the resources that go into making those plastic cards that get tossed after a single swipe—if it ever gets swiped at all—infuriate me as much as the effing phone book. A mind-blowing 3 ..read more

“I HATE HER, I HATE HER!” That would be me. I’m the ‘HER.’ “SHE GETS A NEW PHONE AND I GET HER OLD IPHONE! WHY CAN’T I GET A NEW PHONE?” My eleven-year-old daughter authored this fury-filled scrawl, and I’m torn between spewing my own rant in self-defense and . . . chuckling. She has no clue, I remind myself, what a gift a two-week old iPhone is. Or what it can do. See, I’d gotten the phone on an wild impulse to get current, to make the switch from Android to Nirvana. Or so I’d been led to believe. Nirvana eluded me. Though I’ve been using idevices since the first BlackBerry came out, I couldn ..read more

The Sausage-Making of it All Stooped like Quasimodo, I trudge the dusty, uphill trail, mentally listing all the reasons why trekking in the heat is a dumb idea. The scorching sun makes every step a strain, but I try to keep my eye on the prize: the shady picnic area just ahead. Several of the writers in our Natural Muse Meetup have already gathered at our usual spot and none of them appear to be overcome by the trek. We regularly meet in outdoor parks with hard benches, biting bugs, and way too much bird poop. Guess whose idea all this was? Yep, mine. So I resist groaning when I finally set do ..read more

My Sacrifices for Art. As I extract the weeds still stuck to my clammy palm, beads of my sweat drip onto the other greenery I’ve just plopped onto the table. I stand in admiration of my plunder, the bounty of another urban foraging escapade. I’m pretty sure I made it home without being video shamed. Thanks to a complicated series of bribes and threats, I entice myself into a brisk walk every morning, to free up the creativity that gets bound up in the bedsheets at night. And I say, “every morning” with a wink and a nod because some days are more fraught with excuses than others. “Too hot” has ..read more