What’s your relationship with endings?

Maybe it’s because loyalty is one of my essential values. Maybe it feels like a form of surrender and I’m just never good at that. It could be that a final decision makes me nervous since I much prefer to keep my options open. Or perhaps it’s because I’d rather not clean up after myself. […]

Read More

Unexpected grace

Last fall I was in the Fort Lauderdale airport returning home from a final memorial service for my brother. It had been another visit full of all kinds of emotions, mostly love, loss, sorrow, and the joy of connection with my brother’s circle of friends. I was a sea of feelings in the busy and […]

Read More

Life, Death, and Gratitude

It’s been quite awhile since my last post, nearly a year, so if you’re wondering where I’ve been or even who I am, there’s good reason for that. My baby brother somehow developed a rare, incurable brain disease – Fronto Temporal Degeneration (FTD) – that progressed quite rapidly. He died this past summer, a little […]

Read More

Despair in the time of promise

The New Year rings in with boisterous fanfare and dizzying possibility. Resolutions, smiles, goals, and promises rule the day. And yet there are many of us for whom this is not a time of determined, positive, goal-oriented, measurable, forward movement. (I do so love to shine the light on the polarities of life that work […]

Read More

Embracing polarities

Christine Thomas – Polarity from Hawkview Coaching on Vimeo. My life is beautifully blessed beyond all measure and my baby brother has a rapidly progressing, terminal degenerative brain disorder. I have more abundance and access to food than humans have had in any time in history and I have no idea how to nourish myself […]

Read More

Sleep thieves

It’s late and I’m exhausted. My honey is sound asleep next to me. The dog is softly snoring and the cat is curled up against me, purring. We are all safe and comfortable, well fed and cozy. And I can’t quite turn off my light and let myself drift into sleep. Not yet. The sleep thieves […]

Read More

Today is the day

In many wisdom traditions there’s a knife-edge teaching that encourages one to let death be an ally. This means living today as if it’s our last. This means looking death in the eye, rather than pushing it as far away as possible. This means finally recognizing that perhaps all that we put off for another […]

Read More

The stories we tell

We are story telling people. We gossip, we pass on family history, we make up stories about strangers and close friends all day long. We love books and movies and TV. We respond to the stories of others. We are story junkies! These stories we tell our selves and others shape our lives. In relationship […]

Read More

Starting with love

My reference point, my starting point, my ground of being is love and her sisters, gratitude and compassion. Of course, then, they are with us from the beginning of building our power-from-within. We are love. We are loving and loveable. There’s no need to prove anything to anybody or people please. As Mary Oliver says […]

Read More

Perfectly good reasons

We need vast oceans of self-compassion as we begin any exploration of thriving in our oh-so busy world. Because if we don’t start from deep non-judgment and compassion, we are yet again telling ourselves there’s something wrong with us. There are perfectly good reasons why we often end up feeling overwhelmed, unable to catch up, […]

Read More