O brook, older than
any generation can recall,
drafting ferric-red
through mountain gullies,
eons of erosion
scraping sandstone
to the sea;
superannuated,
yet running faster than
all the memories
that teem and tumble
from my brain,
sweet reminiscences
as well as pain, all
churned and pushed
farther and further
from...

When my child was gravely ill
I would feed birds
from plexiglass shelters
suction-cupped
to the kitchen windows;
there I first met
black-capped juncos.
I learned that they flew to us
from distant Oregon;
such tiny wings to carry
such a long, long way. 
How did they do it?
What instinct
brought them hundreds of m...

Inauguration day arrives, and I am the most politically hopeful that I have been in fifty years. I know that sounds odd, even crazy, given all that is happening, so I’ll explain:

I was raised by dyed-in-the-wool, rock-ribbed Republicans, a whole slew of them: aunts, uncles, grandparents.  My dad be...

I was recently watching the film “Born Yesterday”…the 1950 version with Judy Holliday, William Holden, and Broderick Crawford.  I’m quite familiar with it.  In the 1970s I acted in two different productions of the Garson Kanin play, originally written in 1946.  Trying to educate the ditzy showgirl B...

I remember it so vividly.  I was standing in the Gap store in Old Town Pasadena, when my heart started racing and I began to hyperventilate.  What was happening?  I was much too young for a heart attack…it was clearly some sort of anxiety.  Agoraphobia?  There weren’t that many people in the store o...

“Make haste to deliver me…to help me.”  Psalm 70:1

What does this mean?  The God who knows no time constraints has us pray for his speed, his haste.  Doesn’t “haste make waste”?  Don’t we already live in an impatient day, when we want what we want when we want it and find it painful to wait for any...

In the weeks before his death Jesus says, “Listen to me carefully. We are on our way up to Jerusalem. When we get there, the Son of Man will be betrayed to the religious leaders and scholars. They will sentence him to death. They will then hand him over to the Romans for mockery and torture and cruc...

“let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure.”  Luke 13:8  ESV

During summer’s scorch the birch tree withered,
so many dead branches, leaves shriveled and brown.
“Cut it down,” he said, but that sounded so cruel.
“Prune it back,” I said, “and put s!#@ on the roots.
If it comes ...

When I was an adolescent, I had a system for organizing my closet.  Skirts together, shirts together, sweaters together.  I would start at the left each day and pull a skirt from the line and then match it up with one of my blouse options and then a sweater, starting the quest for each with the furt...

The whole world is on a sickbed right now.  I’m praying for a healing, but not a return to life as usual.  In many ways I am not desiring my old normal…and not just because as an introvert I have more time to myself.  There is a lot that I miss about my former life.  I miss the kisses of my grandchi...