Dear friends, I struggle with gratitude. Not the part about seeing how my life is overflowing with love and beauty and abundance, though. Hopefully, if you know me at all, you know that I know these things, deep in my heart. I struggle because gratitude is an insufficient response to a world that is unjust […]
I wrote out what I wanted to say, but it was hard to read it through the mist that kept rising in my eyes. Anyway, this is what I tried to say at the wonderful goodbye lunch that my SCG colleagues put together for me this week, where they also gave me this weep-worthy album […]
Y’all, it has been a long long time since I felt ready to post again here. But last week, I was on a board committee call for an awesome nonprofit where I volunteer. We’re choosing a consultant to help structure our first-ever real fundraising campaign, and suddenly we had one of those Moments where there […]
Hello my friends. I am still writing, just keeping a lower profile for awhile. Feel free to contact me directly for updates if you know how to reach me, and I’ll see you back here soon. ❤
Back on the beach of my heart, where so much is the same as when my family first brought me here nearly 50 summers ago. One thing is missing, though: the wreck of the SS James Longstreet, perched decoratively on the horizon during the day, a fiery blaze every sunset, until it finally rusted away […]
Honoring Juneteenth with another step on my lifelong learning journey: I didn’t know that the belated news of freedom wasn’t really being proclaimed to enslaved people in Texas on June 19, 1865. It was actually a warning from the Union Army “directed toward recalcitrant slaveholders,” as Isabel Wilkerson and others report. That is, the enslavers […]
How. How!? How could I have mostly forgotten the time that I was with a carload of teen boys in upstate NY and we got pulled over and the driver got arrested for reckless driving and put in cuffs in the back of the cop car and we were all “asked” to follow them back […]
Our country ’tis of thee… that we tell a complicated tale this Memorial Day. Here are my Papa and Nana on their wedding day, Feb. 27th 1943. Technically, the “right” day to honor Papa’s service would be Veterans Day, since he trained as a pilot but never saw combat and lived to a happy old […]
Reflecting on LAPD clearing the Echo Park encampment of people living in tents: This strikes me as a perfect example of the idea that the function of a system is *what it does.* It’s not that our systems are broken. That would imply we can just fix up what we’ve got, in specific instances where […]
Yesterday, March 26, was #StopAsianHate Day. To my White friends in particular, I offer two things I’m reflecting on: 1/ This article in which, among other Asian-American voices, my trusted college friend Sumalee Montano shared her experience: “In her Los Angeles neighborhood a few weeks ago, an unmasked woman breathed in Montano’s face, then leaned […]