While current events have at times felt uplifting, they can also be extremely re-traumatizing for the black community, and therefore, for my family, as my partner and kids are black.
My 9-year-old somehow found the video of George Floyd's death while he was homeschooli...
We had a couple handfuls of Orzo pasta left before we were completely out of food.
I was lost in the deep recesses of Tarahumara country, Las Barrancas del Cobre. The rivers were high, so our planned route was impassable and we'd had to go off trail. We'd...
When I was a new therapist, I had a client that I only got to work with for a couple of months. She was young - maybe early thirties. It was challenging from the start. Her alcoholism was so extreme that she showed up sputtering drunk a couple of times. She was court-o...
Right after Mary Oliver died, I spent time poring over her words, as you may have, as well. And something about that poignancy of reading her in the immediate wake of her last breath created in me a veritable flood of words. For 4 or 5 days I was in a soup of language,...
You may know that Halloween evolved from the fall pagan festival of blessing the harvest, Samhain, and the opportunity to honor what we have brought forth from this earthly realm. The Halloween tradition of putting on masks is only a small step beyond the original co...
While this 9 night festival is celebrated differently in different parts of India, it is widely considered to be a time to celebrate the triumph of dharma over adharma. Navaratri is a time to honor Duga, in her many forms, and it...
A friend just sent me a compelling article about trauma in the classroom. When a child has experienced deep traumas, s/he will often present as tough, guarded, or hostile. However, behaviors that communicate anger or bravado could be guarding a thinly-veiled state of p...
We watched the fireworks from up above the city the other night and could see so many human projects all at once. So much industry. So much fuss. So many humans throwing so much energy around, burning so much shit up.
I had such a neutral sense of it. This is unusu...
Jason Chesnut is a white evangelical pastor with a liberal arts background. He does anti-racism work and tries to follow Jesus. He says - in his mini bio on Facebook: "I'm trying to follow Jesus. And that mostly scares the shit out of me."
