Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

I’m going to try something. It’s odd, I think. It may even be just a tad narcissistic, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to interview myself over the next year, and ask a question a day. Oh, why, why, why would you want to do such a thing, Nanette? (See, there I [...]

At least when the sun is shining. Even, sometimes, on cloudy, wind-swept days. I know, now, why people warn against them. The other evening I was innocently walking along when I looked up and stopped right where I stood, transfixed by the sundowning sky. It was brilliant! Storm clouds closed ranks overhead, dark and billowy, [...]

The dead have been stomping around again (well, as much as they can stomp, what with being a bit insubstantial and all) and causing a hoopla, lately. Luckily, I am the only one who can hear them – and even I don’t exactly hear them so much as I feel their impatience, and worry, and [...]

“I decided, if I’m going to be poor and black and all,  the least thing I’m going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me. ” Unlike the quotes I rotated monthly, Ornette Coleman’s words strolled onto my site over a year ago dressed in deceptive simplicity, [...]

I was updating my “Why this is all about me” page this morning, and at one point I needed something to compare creatively working through the junk to get to the good stuff to. Of course the usual came to mind – gemstones, a diamond in particular – but I don’t much like gemstones, and [...]

You know, one of those birds that pretends to be wounded to provide a distraction from their nests and their young? I could be wrong – I often am, after all – but I don’t think the midterms are going to be as bad as some predictions. I just remember during the primaries (and the [...]

What an odd sensation! See, I was writing a promised (to me) article on Haiti and it just wasn’t going right. Start, stop. Delete. Start, stop. Delete. Rinse and repeat. Finally I realized that there was a whole nother way of looking at things hovering at the edge of my mind, that I had been [...]

… if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up. Anne Lamott I should have found this quote the other day but it will do just as well for today. Dawn is sometimes a long time breaking. I [...]

I’m sitting here opening and closing various posts I have in draft – writing a little here, changing a little there and, in general, being completely uninspired and not accomplishing much at all. And all the while – for days in fact – that phrase has been running through my mind: “Sufficient unto the day… [...]

Which is also undone, for that matter. Looking around my house this afternoon I noticed that my fridge is freshly cleaned but my kitchen is a mess; all the laundry is washed and dried, but not put away; my mom is all washed and in bed, but her bathroom is only partly cleaned; cat is [...]