Although I have a few topics I’m ready to blog about, I’ve not posted lately because I’m busy reading Split at the Root in German! It never ceases to amaze me how Universe works. There was a time when that language was my primary so I knew the difference between “deren” and “dessen.” That’s no longer the case, and I am sure other linguistic things have also fallen by the wayside. Should have made a greater effort to keep ...
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Two weekends ago, Germany celebrated Pfingsten, the feast of Ascension. The British name for it is Pentecost or Whitsun. It is a time the freshly blooming fields, the greening woods, hills, mountains, the flowering bushes and hedges are celebrated. The enchanting cuckoo and all other songbirds have returned. My thoughts tend to go to Germany in this verdant season. I arrived there with Mutti, my German mother on June 17, many decades ago. We left the boat that ...
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It’s Arbor Day today – April 24th. and I’m reminded of trees and identity, and a documentary I saw about the legendary and very real Timbuktu, the ancient city nestled in the middle of windswept Saharan sand dunes.
There’s something about the Sahara that has fascinated me since childhood. Perhaps because I grew up in the tropics where vegetation is dense, green, and colorful. The rainy afternoons of my childhood were spent indoors looking through my parent’s National Geographic magazines. Their ...
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Last week, an article in the Huffington Post https://huff.to/1I0A0fj To The Lady Who Called my Toddler a Thug, written by Rachel Garlinghouse, a white mother who adopted a black boy, got my attention. Particularly because of her concern that her little boy, just because of his appearance was, innocently and not so innocently stereotyped by people whom she knew. It’s the US, I thought, and it’s a ...
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On Saint Patrick’s Day, as my son’s name is Patrick, I decided to honor his grandmother, my mother-in-law, whom I loved most dearly. I wrote this essay for her when she was 102. When time came for her to accept that her only son would choose a black girl as his wife, I never heard any negative comments. Florita accepted me and Patrick fully and unconditionally into the fold of her family. And that was remarkable in the 1970’s upstate New ...
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In the past few blogs I’ve written about wanting to love my birth mother Rosa, a woman I did not get to know. The mother who raised me, however, I knew and loved dearly.
She was 50 when she decided to keep me. her name was Esther, but I called her Mutti, for she was German. She was born in 1888, while Queen Victoria still ruled in England. Picture being raised by a Victorian woman! I could ...
Continue Reading →This blog post was inspired by Denise Oliver Velez’s diary in The Daily Koz, https://bit.ly/1F9qYs3 in which she writes about the almost complete lack of representation of non-White women when female merits are praised during this month. It comes down to the usual, that history is written by the victors, and those have belonged, in our time and age, to the White race.
I was thinking of blogging about women writers whose ...
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Not easy, working on spiritual action. And I don’t know if that is an adequate term for what I am focusing on in my meditations.
I know my mother died early in her life, of a massive stroke. People said she died of a broken heart at having lost me, regardless of her repeated efforts and sacrifice to remain connected.
Once I had learned my story as my mother saw it, based on what my siblings shared with me, I ...
Continue Reading →There are still times when I feel pretty wretched. They are no longer because of something someone said to me. But they come at night or during meditation, and have to do with my relationship with my mother. Not my German mother who in so many areas is deserving of my love and praise, but the mother who cradled me beneath her heart and whose placenta fed me for the months I lived in her womb. I am not ...
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In gratitude for the many blessings received, on Thanksgiving (Nov. 27 & 28, 2014) I am offering a free ebook version of Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity.
Here is an excerpt of the first time I met my niece and younger brother… (The Ruth mentioned is my German sister.)
I was back in the world of my experience with an ambivalent willingness to revise it. Surrounded by the objects of my childhood and being with ...
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