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New Year, New Book, New Life

In the end, we all become stories. Margaret Atwood It’s been a while since I’ve been back in this space. In the interim, I sold my house, bought a new one, moved, lost a close friend to a pulmonary embolism, got a book contract, wrote said book, turned in the manuscript, contracted Covid 19, helped my mom recover from gallstones, and a head injury, and taught a full teaching load. Yes. I’ve…

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The Healing Balm of Words: A 12 Week Intensive with by-weekly live sessions

The Healing Balm of Words: A 12 Week Intensive with by-weekly live sessions

Pre-requisite: Spiritual Writing, Writing to Change the World, or Telling Stories After the Fire writing workshops. (One course.) This 12-week workshop is designed to help you heal. It starts by helping you to uncover your deepest wounds, clean them (metaphorically), bandage them, and then, take the time to peel away, layer by layer, what truly ails you. It includes access to a private Facebook…

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Telling Stories After the Fire: Memoir & Personal Essays

Telling Stories After the Fire: Memoir & Personal Essays

A self-paced writing workshop on writing that allows you to explore stories from your own life. You can write about your secrets, lies you’ve told, the unvarnished truth, long-dead pets or friends, your parents, your siblings, your extended family, your education, how you learned to drive, your first love, first kiss — you name it. It is delivered digitally (via an emailed link) once per week…

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Writing Coaching Session - 30 Minutes/60 Minutes/90 minutes

Writing Coaching Session – 30 Minutes/60 Minutes/90 minutes

Need help finding the narrative? Fleshing out the story? Getting to the juice of the tale? Seen or unseen, I will bloom. – Daisaku Ikeda I am here to help you bloom as a writer. As a writing teacher with twenty years’ experience, teaching at a university in the Southwest, I can help you weave the threads of your ideas into workable narratives, essays, poems, or opinion editorials. I hold a Master…

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Writing to Change The World: A Writing Workshop

Writing to Change The World: A Writing Workshop

A self-paced writing workshop on writing that allows you to raise your voice and fly your freak flag to help others and change the world. It is delivered digitally (via an emailed link) once per week over the course of a month. This workshop is offered twice per year in June and December. Includes invitation to a private writing workshop page on Facebook (Wonderland Writing Workshops), prompts…

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Letting Spirit Drive the Car: Spiritual Writing Workshop

Letting Spirit Drive the Car: Spiritual Writing Workshop

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Love > Fear

Love > Fear

“Our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke Face it.  The world is more than a little coo-coo for cocoa puffs these days.  If you dare turn on the TV or open a newspaper, you are assaulted by images and information guaranteed to make you want to build a bunker and stock up on canned goods.  And there are plenty of people doing just that. Stockpiling…

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It's OK to not be OK.

It’s OK to not be OK.

Art by Tran Nguyen I couldn’t sleep the past few days. Perhaps the new moon was calling my name. Perhaps my hair was on fire. Or perhaps it was the heat, the wildfires, the drenching rain, the ass-kicking hurricanes, or the overflowing Covid wards. Was it the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-common sense I saw on full display everywhere I turned that made me too wired to sleep? Was it…

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Joy

Joy of Childhood Wallpaper Day 10 – A – Z Challenge Choose Joy. “Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow…

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Taking Flight

Ed Binkley Art “We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.”― LeeAnn Taylor A chrysalis spills open. Here we are. The moon swallowing the sun in a total solar eclipse (December 14). A twenty-year cycle closing. A 200-year cycle opening. Yet another round of letting go in the penultimate year of letting go. We shed old skin and walk out of one life to start another. I don’t know about you…

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The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Art by Christian Schloe

“The Age of Aquarius demands that we hold a worldview that none of us is separate from one another nor from the planet.”

― Andrew Lutts, How to Live a Magnificent Life: Becoming the Living Expression of Higher Consciousness

Nine months have passed since I wrote The End of the World As We Know It here in March. Sleep-walking and numb for much of the year, I’ve watched my…

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It's the End of the World as We Know It

No one is immune to the clarion wake-up call that's blaring everywhere we go. We are what we focus on. We are what we expect. We are what we prepare to receive. Believe it, dears. Our thoughts create the world.

I’ve long been a keen observer of the machinations of the outside world; I watch and I wonder. I take my time and slowly assimilate what I observe.

However, as we descend into the Pluto transit of the United States (once every 246 years) and the shattering of the status quo that will be the hallmark of this coming years, I have begun to see how difficult this rebirth will be for those who are…

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Sacred Selfishness: Where Have I Been?

Sacred Selfishness: Where Have I Been?

Art by Christian Schloe via Google Image

Some of you may wonder where I’ve been.

I haven’t written here (or anywhere else for that matter) since November of 2018.

I’ve been walking through the dark night of the soul. I’ve been tending to my mother after her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. I’ve been saving my life. I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes in January.

For the past nine months, I’ve been…

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Out of the Ashes, You Rise.

Out of the Ashes, You Rise.

Image by Christian Schloe

I sing the body electric. I celebrate the ‘me’ yet to come.                   

                                                                       ~ [a song based on Whitman’s poem]

You awaken with these words running barefoot across your mind.

They feel like a reminder to embrace whatever is coming, to celebrate what is, and to marvel at the chance to do both.

***

Y…

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Risk Being Seen

Art by Amanda Clarke

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Often these days, I feel a little like a prairie dog popping my head up from my underground hidey-hole. I find myself wondering if it is safe to live above ground and let myself be seen.

Invisible is a place where I feel safe.

Invisible is easier for me, less exhausting. Allowing myself to be…

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Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

  stock image

“I am not crazy, my reality is just different from yours.”- Cheshire Cat” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: With an Excerpt from the Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll

I can’t tell whether I should be excited by all this change or terrified.

Truth be told, I am a little of both.

My life is revving up in a way that I haven’t experienced…

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Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

  Image by Catrin Welz-Stein via Google Image

  In memory of G. Valmont Thomas – December 15, 1959 – December 18, 2017

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~ Albert Einstein

Focusing on what’s good.

As the year’s end approaches, I’ve been thinking about what’s good in my life, what’s right. It’s easy to…