Anxiety Goes to the Monastery

Oh. That’s the problem. Not the panic attacks, the anxiety, the what happened and didn’t in New York, the what does it mean to not be a New Yorker or to leave. Not any of that. My sister friend asked what I was afraid of, and I said, “I’m not worthy.” Nuns again for […]

East to West

Eleanor Roosevelt has one white rose on the desk she doesn’t use anymore, because she is dead. My mother and I sat in the reconstructed saloon of a German family. Her grandfather had taken his salooning skills all the way to Nebraska, others had stopped short of that. Others had lived in Germantown, in New […]

For/Fourth/Forth

I make positive protest posters. They say what I believe, what I want, rather than what I’m against. One of my signs was “Freedom from Fear,” copyright Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941. I am for freedom, but not the freedom libertarians talk about, which is no freedom at all, the freedom to die alone and miserable […]

What is the Whale

We were given square canvases and teal and purple and white paint. I found the teal and the purple horrible. The teacher was going to guide people to paint a dandelion with its winged wishing seeds in the wind. We did not have to paint that. It took me a while to figure I wanted […]