Last summer, when I visited a museum and saw Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Women Crossing the Fields for the first time in person, I felt a tug of recognition. It wasn’t just that I had previously seen reproductions of this work, but I felt I had seen it in life itself. It took me a […]
My favorite daily “indulgence” is not really very extravagant; I call it my faux chai tea, which is actually spiced-up green with skimmed milk to provide the latte. It’s pretty healthy and not much of a luxury, except in the sense that it is rich with memory and meaning. It feels to me as though I’m […]
I’ve been quiet lately–since about Thanksgiving, actually, and have been wondering why I don’t seem to have a writing voice. It happens to writers far more prolific and skilled than I, so I haven’t worried much about it, thinking the shorter days had brought a time of gathering, of rumination. So yesterday I was a […]
I’m a sucker for a story about renewal. In her New York Times best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed takes us along on a monumental journey, both physical and metaphorical. At age 26, she is trying to find her way. Her father left when she was six; […]
. . . We can sit still, keep silent, let the phoebe, the sycamore, the river, the stone call themselves by whatever they call themselves, their own sounds, their own silence, and thus may know for a moment the nearness of the world, its vastness . . . –Wendell Berry, from his poem “Words” […]
The smell of Dove soap can evoke memories of my maternal grandmother, even though she died fifty years ago when I was in first grade. When I see a red rose bush, I think of her garden, and the taste of rainbow sherbet reminds me of her gentle kindness. Two of her former possessions grace […]
A century ago, John Muir asserted that “going to the mountain is going home” and that “wildness is necessity” for “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people.” And doesn’t that last phrase describe us all even more now than then? When I was growing up in the Texas hill country, the words most often repeated at graveside funeral […]
Poking around Routt County, Colorado (shown above) last week, my husband and I ran across this chalked message on the sidewalk of the beautiful public trail along the Yampa River: It reads, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” When I read it, I laughed aloud. And maybe that is an important […]
A recently widowed friend says that without her husband of almost fifty years, even little things have changed. A few weeks after her husband’s death, strong storm winds rattled the roof during the night, and she felt helpless and a bit frightened in the darkness. But she has found that allowing herself to feel her feelings […]
Last week, my doubles partner in pickleball, a man I did not know, turned to me after a rousing rally and grinned, saying with good-humored sarcasm, “So–you’re not competitive, are you?” Me? Competitive? It’s been a central theme and conflict for me since second grade when I ran full speed into a tetherball pole while […]
Studies in Color and Composition
Radical Retirement
A Glimpse into My Life & Passions
Joann Pensabene
Where observation and imagination meet nature in poetry.
pursuing a life of purpose
Writing our way to awareness
Living life outside the lines
A Story Circle Network blog for and by women
A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
Practicing Wonder 