While I was gone…

I know what you’re thinking. Has it been a week already? Yes, it has! I’m back. I missed you. I have stuff to share. I took over 425 pictures while I was gone, so we better get started if you want to get through this post today. I’m kidding, of course. But I am going […]

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Worth Fighting For

Of all the things you could fight for, LOVE has got to be one of the most worthy. But that begs the question (and I really, really want to hear your answer): Should you ever have to fight for love? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I’m taking next week off! It’s a bigger deal for me than you, I […]

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A Girl Of Consequence

When I read Lisa McCray’s beautiful “What I’ve Seen” list, it reminded me of how my love affair with lists began. I was in third grade the first time I felt my smallness. It was a terrible moment of revelation for me, when the enormity of the world and the limits of my power to […]

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Our letting-go pain

I’ve been thinking lately about the ebb and flow of relationships, how much easier it would be if the people involved ebbed and flowed in unison. That we don’t is understandable. Our lives are crazy full, our collective hearts in a constant state of break and repair. That we sometimes find ourselves in the same […]

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A Wedding In 5 Parts

Part 1 I’m writing this post in San Diego, where I came to watch my nephew get married. Love, in all its forms, is in the air here – jumbled, chaotic, romantic, familial, platonic, big and delicate. You get this many people together and it’s both magical and scary to watch the stories intersect. There […]

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I’ve been thinking about all the different ways

I’ve been thinking about all the different ways that a heart breaks, not just from the big, terrible life blows, but in a hundred little everyday ways. When we reach for someone who doesn’t reach back. When we work up the nerve to say that thing we’ve been holding in our heart and we are […]

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Our Wild, Precious Lives

I’ve had a number of sad reminders recently about how sweet, fragile, and fleeting life is. We only get this one shot at it. It matters how we spend our time… Last month, after weeks of going full tilt to finish my book, expand the love project, write my freelance stuff, collaborate with some wonderful, […]

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What are you in love with right now?

On Saturday we drove home from Humboldt along Hwy 1, which is coastal and gorgeous and quite definitely the scenic route. With a stop to eat sandwiches overlooking a rocky bluff below the Point Arena lighthouse (and about 137 stops to jump out and take pictures), it took us more than eight hours to get […]

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This is that post.

When I finished my first draft of Beautiful Lives, an agent who was a friend of my mentor’s read it. She said a lot of really nice things about my book and about me as a writer, but she also said she represents chick lit authors and didn’t handle material “this dark.” I was surprised. […]

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Heart-to-heart

March was the month of hugs: 28 hugs, 28 different people, 28 days. I was a little nervous about it. To get to 28, I was going to have to hug some strangers, and while I’m an enormous PDA proponent, asking strangers for hugs felt scary. I wasn’t sure I could actually do it. Turns […]

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