Entries
Slow Your Roll: A Writer’s Cacophony
Lying in bed this morning, long before the slamming of doors and the starting of engines awakened the sleepy barrio, a million thoughts were stampeding through my head. Impressions about the things I looked at or heard as a rolled …
Amping up the Corporate Ante: Conservation Beyond Compliance
Voted several years running by Fortune Magazine as one of the country’s best companies to work for, DPR Construction aims to be more progressive than its competitors, continually pushing the envelope. For instance, it earned a LEED platinum rating from …
Beyond Cult Controversy: The Mate Peddlers of the Twelve Tribes
As I wound my way up to Morning Star Ranch Farm tucked back in the hills of Valley Center located adjacent to the well visited Keys Creek Lavender Farm, I remembered a man from years back. He was a short …
Rising from the Trenches Part 2: San Diego's Urban Corps Receives Two National Awards
Not sure if you’ve heard the news yet, but we had local heroes recognized in Washington, D.C. last week. During the Corps Network's 2012 National Conference held from February 12th through the 15th in the chilly capital, our local Corps …
Samurai Surfers: Cashing It All In to Live on The Edge
When I first landed here on the shores of the broad Pacific to winter in paradise, I fell upon an article describing the new face of homelessness. Recently, I read another article describing how more and more people are choosing …
Heaven's Good
I live in the lap of luxury. No kidding, I do. Started about six years ago when the first man I chose (versus who chose me) decided that he didn’t want my love. When I plunged into the murky dank …
A San Diego Christmas
With marmalade swirled salmon colored leaves clinging to grey branches against the cobalt sky and grass rendered florescent by winter rains come early, there isn’t another place in the continental US I’d rather be at Christmas time. In a t-shirt …
Rising from the Trenches with San Diego's Urban Corps
"I had time on my hands," the young man said with bowed head. I nodded in comprehension. As I watched him running paint speckled hands through his cropped hair, I thought of the long haired Lakota-Shoshone brothers I had met …
Faces in Stone
My grandmother once told me that forgiveness was the greatest of gifts because it was the most difficult for us to part with. We hold it precious and grant it sparingly, she said, when all around us every day it …
Ode to Eyes Wide Open
Question: Is it any easier to assist the living to live than the dying to die? There are lots of walking dead out there, lots who have given up the ghost. Yet, who am I to say that their doing …
Into the Beyond
Curled up in bed with my headphones on listening to Matisyahu on Pandora, I absorb the news. Alone in his apartment in a small east coast town, a friend of mine died mysteriously. His body wasn’t found for days. This …
Life on the Rim: The Surf Along the Pacific Ring of Fire
We’ve all heard the jokes about California someday sliding into the sea. We all live in secret fear of the “Big One” being so close to the San Andreas Fault. Or do we? In the time I’ve been in southern …
Weird Jobs: An Unemployed Exec’s Goldmine
California is second in the nation for joblessness with an unemployment rate of 12 percent. More than a third of those unemployed have been seeking gainful employment for more than a year unsuccessfully. But, alas, the downtrodden needn’t resort to …
Dirty Laundry: Sexual Assault Exposed
Deborah Copaken Kogan speaks out again, and more power to her for daring to do so. In the July/August issue of More magazine, the journalist addresses the persistent social inequities pertaining to assaulted women. In the article entitled America’s Real …
A Day in the Blogging Life of a Writer Wannabe
The sun’s risen, coffee’s been brewed and my Mini, booted. James and Dash are very aptly singing, “Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind,” in the background. It’s another mild midmorning in August and …
Love's Wang Dang Doodle
Joseph Campbell in his Power of Myth interview with Bill Moyers back in the ‘80s mentioned that the Greeks have three words for love instead of the one we use so frivolously: eros, philios, and agape. Eros, romantic and passionate …
Sweet, Soft Sundays
After a long loud feline stretch, I rolled over to see that it was almost nine. Shocked that I had slept so soundly well past sunrise, I pushed back the chenille covers and shuffled my bedheaded self across the tiled …
Baptisms and Tapestries
As I am known to say often, it’s the simple things. As the sun faded with the yawning day on my final night housesitting in Coronado, I turned on the hot tub. While it warmed up, I poured myself a …
Love Me As If You Liked Me
There is an old adage that life has a way of taking you exactly where you need to go. Although I have questioned that probability numerous times throughout the years and done my fair share of heel dragging, in hind …
The Church Embraces the Crone: Becoming a Nun at 50
A wealthy Hollywood socialite once said, “Many women in mid life or later find themselves longing for something more in their lives. While the heart is searching, listening for a call, the head is saying, ‘I want to do something …