“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf
26 April 2019 When I travelled to China in 1999 to adopt a seventeen-month old, I remember wondering what the future would hold. I was single and 48 years old and working for pay at a job and a half. I wondered whether I was too old - what would it be like when I… Continue reading A Loving Rapport – mothering daughtering
April 28, 2019 I haven’t been posting on the recent shooting and car ramming in the U.S. One anti-Semitic and one Islamophobic. The dead and injured and their communities suffer so. The target changes but the gender of the offender remains the same. Men, often young. The latest death of a young person hit by… Continue reading Rambling with Ghosts
22 September 2018 When you’re drunk it’s so much fun—Your stories don’t make sense. An early fall has strung The elms with yellow flags.Anna Akhmatova "i feel like a stranger" says the woman across the tablewhose glass of wine is alwaysthe first of the evening. The second evaporatesin the mind before the swallowof her "disappearing… Continue reading “i feel like a stranger” (my mother’s brain)
3 June 2013 Last night I launched a co-edited volume of 75 voices celebrating the 20th anniversary of Women's Words. My daughter was in the audience. I thought of this moment not long ago when she was too shy to stay in the audience and came up to the front to stand with me while… Continue reading Mothering and Women’s Words
22 May 2010 calm enough after a day at a zen-do: we meet to share tea and chat this morning. Then silence: 30 minutes silent sitting meditation (zazen), 30 minutes silent walking meditation, 30 minutes zazen, 30 minutes silent walking meditation, 30 minutes zazen, one hour work in silence, lunch together in silence (sound of… Continue reading Zazen
No Gate No Lock 