August 31, 2012 – 4:59 pm
“Everyone has a story. Mine began in November of 2000 when I thought I’d given birth to the smallest baby ever born.” So begins Kasey Mathews’ moving memoir Preemie, an account not only of a birth story gone terribly awry but also of a young woman giving birth to herself, learning to love and accept the person she is through the harrowing, humbling process of learning to love and accept her tiny, excruciatingly fragile baby girl, born more than four months premature. Nearly twenty-three years after my own first pregnancy, I still remember a line from one of the many…
January 9, 2012 – 11:07 pm
Last week, I wrote about wholeheartedness, a word that truly seemed to pick me, rather than the other way around, for 2012. On New Year’s Day, my last morning at Kripalu, having accepted my word, I decided that I would simply allow myself to live into it. Moment by moment, I would try to do the loving thing, whatever that might be. Instead of second guessing myself, worrying about what might happen next, or trying to come off a certain way, I would set my foot down firmly on the side of love over fear. And so, at the risk…
February 20, 2011 – 2:52 pm
I have had it only a few times, a sudden sense of arriving at my own front door, of being home without even knowing that I’d been away. I felt it twelve years ago, when I first unrolled a yoga mat in the back corner of the Baron Baptiste Power Yoga Studio in Cambridge. Never mind that the room was heated to 102 degrees and I’d dressed, unwittingly, in sweatpants and a heavy, long-sleeved shirt. Never mind that I couldn’t bend over and come any where close to touching my toes, that I had no idea what a downward-dog was,…
January 11, 2011 – 9:08 pm
I love earrings. But the idea of anything puncturing, piercing, or poking my body makes me queasy. I first tried getting my ears pierced in college, fortified by two glasses of wine and my friends’ assurance that this was “nothing.” Two months later, and I was still creeped out every time I had to work a stud through the flesh of my ear lobe. One night, preparing to go out, I stood in the bathroom, teeth clenched, sweat beading out all over my body, and began the dreaded ritual of putting on my earrings. The next thing I knew, I…
