“Your true home is the here and now.” -Thich Nhat Hanh One Sunday morning during the adult study at Orange County Buddhist Church, I was having an especially troublesome bout of Imposter Syndrome. Sometimes feeling like an imposter is a red flag to be heeded, like when I was an…

Hello out there! I didn’t write an essay in September. I was buried under life, our days a flurry of practices and homework and driving to and from and projects and an out of town trip that made the month go by in a blink. You know, the usual. …

You have to go to the real world. You can go back to your regular life, and forget any of this ever happened. Or you can know the truth about the universe. -Weird Barbie Warning: a few tiny Barbie spoilers. Another school year has begun, just like that, back into…

My kids are away at summer camp, all of them, for the first and only time ever. Next year my oldest will age out, and I have big plans to go on our first backpacking trip together while his siblings are away. I haven’t gone backpacking in almost 20 years…

We went camping recently. Camping as an adult isn’t exciting, at least for me. It’s so much work. I had my smartwatch calculating my steps, giving me empirical evidence that even just puttering around the campsite packed in a whopping 8,000 steps. Add in meal prep, cleaning, tent set up…

Well folks, the other shoe dropped. A few days after I posted my last essay, things went downhill. The night before, Ethan had said to me, “Mom, you’re so happy going out with Greg. I think it’s really good for you.” It’s true. I was glowing. The future felt bright. …

I typically try to write a blog each month, but somehow May slipped away from me and it never happened. The school year ended, and right now I’m in the middle of my one and a half weeks where my kids are still in school and I’m not. In other…

One-third of the year is over, and it always amazes me how fast the months zip by. Especially this time of the year. As a teacher, my life is in tune with the rhythm of an academic calendar. Just when the annual burnout feels like too much to handle, in…

These days, I’ve been measuring the state of affairs in my life by our return to pre-pandemic activities. It’s interesting, because it was a similar experience dealing with grief. …