She is wearing a robe spun from shooting stars and I’m wearing a dress sewn from a sheet of rain.
It was 1996, I was having a rough time working in Mexico City. I was belly dancing in Polanco and living above the Arabic nightclub. My best friend, Kim, came to rescue me, and we bought bus tickets and headed out to explore the country.
I have never felt more like a queen than swimming in a waterfall in a jungle surrounded by ancient stones with my twin soul, who put her arms around me when I was cold…
We were visiting London on business, monkey business…
I woke up feeling blue. I stumbled through my usual routine: grateful list, brush teeth, comb hair, put on mascara, fold laundry from last night and start the next load, toddle downstairs for a cappuccino, water my flowers… As I was watering, I listened to
Divorce and death seem especially piercing on holidays. I don’t know why. Certainly global pandemics and worldwide quarantines don’t help matters. In fact, they do quite a bit of piercing themselves. It’s something to ponder while I sit here on this rainy morning, drinking my
And now the baby is 16, the same age as Sleeping Beauty when she pricked her finger on that spinning wheel and fell asleep. But my girl is definitely not asleep. She’s awake, probably the most awake person I know. At 16 years old, the is full of love and kindness and a devotion to truth and justice that seems unshakeable. This girl can easily defeat fire-breathing dragons. So maybe all the wishes from the women/fairies at her baby shower worked that day.
The truth of the truths, the truth of my battered grieving soul, is that love just keeps growing. I loved my father so much and then I met Kim, and my heart burst into lights and a whole new love, a love I had never seen before and it felt like my heart got bigger, and then I became a mother, and my love grew even bigger. Boundless. Timeless. Eternal. I still feel it when I look at the sunlight on the sea, when I link arms with my son, when I hear my daughter yelling, “Mom! I need an emergency hug right away!”
And, now that I know the staggering pain that comes with losing the people you love so much, if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. I wouldn’t trade one extraordinary moment.
When we made the wings all those years ago, Kim kept saying we were infusing them with our love. I think she was right. Because if there’s one real truth in this world, no matter where people go when they die, the love remains, and in the swamp of grief, I need to remember the wings.
I woke up this morning and memories of Kim, my soul mate, flooded in, wrapping me in a warm fuzzy blanket of love. I could write forever and not cover all the stories I have about our time together. And I never feel like I’m
My motto has always been: “Take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves.” (Thank you Dorothy Parker, for writing this brilliant motto.) Whether this has served me well or not is a matter of opinion. I have yet to win any
Kim was a suncatcher. She literally was so full of light and the air around her twirled and radiated rainbow lights. She would have been 46 on February 8 this year, 2020. So when I was invited to a birthday party for our dear friend,
