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Hello friends, Take a deep breath. Tune into your body. How do you feel? Are you tired? Jumpy? Energized? Agitated? Exhausted? All of the above? Take another deep breath. How is your heart? I don’t even want to begin to assign possible markers for your emotional state, because the possibilities are so personal, always, but especially right now. Some of us are alone. Some of us are caretakers. Some of us need care. Some of us are caregivers who also need care. Some of us are busy. Some don’t feel busy enough. All of this, in the midst of world events, affects our emotional states, or what we call our hearts. The physical heart is a muscle, of course. And muscles can feel strong or weak, vital or weary. Battered, bruised, or well cared for. So… I suggest we all take another deep breath. Drop our attention to that space high up within our protective ribs. Perhaps place a hand gently there. Breathe again. How is your heart? And what does your heart need today? What is one way you can offer your heart what it needs? I’ll close with this: Today, I feel grateful you are alive, out there somewhere, connecting with these words. We are in this together, us and our hearts. And as poet and psychologist Scherezade Siobhan writes: "We best rescue each other in daily heartbeats." Best wishes - Thorn My Kickstarter campaign for Resistance Matters: Essays on Love and Action launched on Tuesday. It's the only way to preorder this revised, expanded book of essays on our times.
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Hello friends, This morning, the rose city of Portland Oregon is shrouded in fog. Just yesterday afternoon, I walked in cool, crisp air and autumn sunlight. Tomorrow, it will rain. And such is life… days shifting from sun to fog to rain and back again. This past week, very little work has gotten done. Well, not the work on my schedule. Not the emails that need answering or the novel I’m almost finished writing. Not getting necessary paperwork to the book keeper. Not the ordering of books for...
Hello friends, The REM song “Hold On” is playing through my head this week. Partially because, after years of trying, someone in my family couldn’t hold on any longer, finally succumbing to a host of illnesses they just could not shake. The song is also with me because of the sheer number of people struggling right now. Struggling to simply survive. Whether because they don’t have money for food or rent, or lost their job, or struggle with mental or physical health, or they are under attack...
Hello friends, This will be a short missive because I've been in Las Vegas all week, at the big Author Nation business conference and the big Reader Nation book fair. While Vegas is not my favorite place—an understatement. I actually find it very trying—I travel here to learn. I travel here to get out of that proverbial comfort zone. It is good for me to stretch myself, body, spirit, and mind. Sometimes, in order to learn, we must cast ourselves into the strange and challenging... And let me...