Not Everything Is Terrible, Poetry Edition

* Text: If You Were Looking for a Sign, This Is It Yesterday was hard. The day before yesterday, hard, too. Somehow, something about today has made it soft. Not the unrelenting blankness of the December sky. Not the pain in my teeth, or my hands, or my aching heart. Not the electric bill. Not […]

Not Everything Is Terrible, Volume 2

Ed. note: Now, even more than last year, it’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not all, but some!) are good. Here are a few of the things that gave us hope, lifted our spirits, and gave us a […]

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays Uponst Us All

And the People of LWON, on this day, are taking a break. They will be back, they promise, rarin’ to go, on Friday. Please come back. ________ Photo: By Markus Koljonen (Dilaudid) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4270871

Parts of It Were Pretty Bad

Jenny:  It’s the first full year without my dad, which makes my heart hurt. And then one of my dogs, Geddy, goes and dies. Well, he got hurt first, and there was a lot of pain, and he was kind of old and not a great candidate for surgery, and we tried to manage his […]

My Favorite Books of 2024

Something funny happened during the time that I spent writing my book: I stopped reading for pleasure. Not because I wanted to, but because I was reading so much for research that reading began to feel like work. But then my book came out, and I traveled around the country giving book talks at lovely […]

Snapshot: Moss

Here’s some moss I saw on a recent walk along the Thames River, west of London. The Thames itself was too high to walk where my traveling companion and I had planned – the trail was underwater, and so were lots of fields and the meadow in the background of this photo, where a woman […]

This, Too, is a Dog’s Life

As I was researching and writing DOG SMART, trying to understand what it means to think like a dog and experience the world as a dog, I had an epiphany of sorts: Dogs around the world wandering the streets—the “village” dogs you are bound to see roaming here and there, often with a few pals, […]

The Archaeology of You

This post ran back in 2018 and digging it up was another act unearthing oneself, something I end up doing when rummaging in my car, when I clean my desk. Our own lives are archaeology. Put a trowel in your hand and go through your past. Bounce ground penetrating radar through your heart. See what […]