I make a ritual each year of going to the first place I found morels with Bliss. I’ve never found one there since. Fear and familiarity keep us stuck in the past. I memorialize it, pay it its due respect, but I can’t dwell there long or I risk rumination.

Normally, I love my overactive imagination. It serves me well 90% of the time in my creative pursuits. The other 10% of the time, when either current events or encountering a cyber truck causes my brain to catastrophize the future, I fall into catastrophantasizing. The fantasy whirlwind of my and humanity’s inevitable doom consumes me in a way that can’t be summed up with a word as beige as “anxiety.” So I made up a better word.

“Why is it moms never get to eat until their food is cold?”

Ralphie observes the same fate of his own mother in A Christmas Story. Time after time Mother tries to sit down and as soon as she attempts a bite of her dinner, she is thwarted with a request from her little piggies. “My mother had not had a hot meal for herself in over 15 years” Ralphie recounts.

Our life is a constantly evolving narrative. We can change the genre from drama to comedy anytime we wish with some mindset work. What if instead, we saw through the fictions of our lives a little more honestly so as to live as joyfully as we say we wish to?

The very first word in the history of Western literature is “rage” or “wrath.” It is how Homer’s “Iliad” begins. Mars is known for his hot temper. As is Neptune. And we all know that it is woven into the human narrative throughout time.

My chickens are molting. If you don’t know what that means, basically it is like watching an episode of Naked and Afraid on Discovery TV, but re-enacted by chickens.

Grief is complicated.

Sacred memories, synchronistic occasions of happenstance have a quality about them that is indescribable. They can’t be pre-planned, or organized and they can never be recreated. When you recall them, it almost seems like the air was thick with magic. Probably because it was.