cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
I’d booked a room of my own for a week at a lodge on the outskirts of Cosby, Tennessee—a town too sleepy to care if you call it the middle of nowhere. Set just off a creek where horses grazed freely on miles of green meadow, the lodge I’d chosen had a wraparound deck, a…
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My deadline looms before me, but I have nothing to offer. Not a word. I know all I need to do is start writing, and before long, I’ll be finished, but sometimes starting seems impossibly difficult. I turn my attention from the window I’ve been gazing through to my laptop, open a new document, and…
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A long time ago, I read. I read books I paid for that I wouldn’t need to review, to interview the author, or to underline because I was studying the plot structure. A long time ago, I wrote. I journaled, sent newsletters, started blogs (five and counting), and submitted articles. A long time ago, I…
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This must be how it feels to start the protocol to set off a nuclear warhead. My dry eyes idled on the screen as I scratched my hot armpits. I finger-combed my hair and massaged my scalp. I tapped the “Confirm” button, refusing to think further.
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A little notebook sits on the back, left corner of a small, brown table in the tiny kitchen of my cottage on the Dutch Caribbean Island of Saba. No matter how many times I spray and wipe down the wooden surface, a thin film of “too many chaotic dinners” remains. I reach for this journal,…
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Only art penetrates the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. – Saul Bellow During my freshman year of college, I decide to register for a drawing class. We meet every…
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I have always viewed each passing season in my life as chapters in my ever changing, ever growing “Book of Me.” Each chapter tells stories of joy, pain, loss, curiosity and progress. Some of these chapters are filled with angst and ennui, some chapters are full of new found passions, others speak of various heartbreak…
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I missed my deadline. The deadline set for this very piece you are reading—I missed it. I don’t have much of an explanation except that, lately, life has kind of been like a hail storm in August.
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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.” – Rainer Maria Rilke A few weeks ago, as I drove my son to camp, he asked, “Mommy, how much did I cost?”…
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I have a pharmacy on my nightstand. Every night, I pop a number of vitamins from four different containers. Water, vitamins, water, vitamins, water. Then there’s the orange pill bottle. It’s not a multivitamin and I can’t get it over the counter. Out of all the pills, this is the one I’ve taken the longest,…
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