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God vs. the color blue
I really miss travelling. It’s been a year since I’ve been anywhere international and also since I stepped foot on an air plane. In a year of so many deaths, both big and small, I am keenly aware that this is a lesser suffering. But still. I’ve started going through journals, pulling out small jewels…
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Bathroom Baby
It is a tricky thing to keep tropical plants alive when they live in a loft in an occasionally-heated, occasionally-occupied tiny house in the middle of Midwest winter. My fantasy of creating and maintaining a vibrant, plant-rich space began to wilt along with my plants the three-day weekend we had guests during a cold snap.…
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AJ’s Master Class #2
Hello loves, I just got another beautiful “AJ’s impact on my life” letter and it connected to the second thing I would have talked about at the funeral if I’d taken more time. As I mulled the letter over, I half-remembered a poem that referenced that topic. That same night, as I went through my…
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eulogy for a baby
My baby nephew AJ died two weeks ago. His parents, my brother and his wife, asked me to give the eulogy at the funeral. One would think that distilling a life that only lasted gestation + 5 weeks could perhaps be a tricky thing, but in fact it was easy. After sifting through hundreds of…
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Choosing Life
Just off the top of my head, I can think of three (younger) people I’ve known personally who have committed suicide, and many many others who have either attempted or fantasized about it. This week we lost two celebrities. Last year at this time it was a 10th grader at Skyline High School. He jumped…
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Grocery Store Grace
Yesterday I made a quick run to the grocery store a mile down the road, an entire world away. Instead of the fresh, organic, independent brand, small batch, sexy imported or even sexier locally produced and lovingly packaged food that I like to get at the Food CoOp, Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, most everything there…
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The Ultimate Existential Hack
I have this trick that makes shitty things easier to bear. Ready? Lean closer. Here it is – I have a theory that, before I came to earth, God and I went on a little date.
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What If I…
It was one of those end-of-summer/beginning-of-fall Michigan afternoon days. The sky was the color of blue so common in drought-afflicted California, which I’d been missing sorely all summer while suffering in the humid purgatory of midwest peninsular living. My bumper-sticker-covered black RAV4 was humming down US-23 on the way back from selling shimmery violet eye…
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Looking for Answers
There are few things I love more than someone saying to me “Naomi, you’re an expert on massage, teaching Spanish, online dating, international travel, jam-making, heart-breaking, eye shadow application, etc.”, what’s your opinion on this? Really and truly. I think I’m not wrong when I say that most of us have a littler inner self…
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Hamsa, or The Time I Almost Got Blown Up By A Possible Terrorist
Hilde and I took a train back to Madrid from Italy that summer. We had just walked five hundred miles across northern Spain as peregrinas on the pilgrim trail of Santiago de Compostela with many of our siblings and several friends and decided to treat ourselves to a week of recuperation on the beaches of…
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Behind the Blue Door 