Presence

Beautiful and Ordinary

July 18, 2026

 

One of my favorite ordinary parts of each day? Taking Biscuit for a walk. Especially if he finds a good stick.

It was an ordinary week, not one for the memory books, that’s for sure.

But I’ve been thinking about the ordinary, my ordinary, and remembering back to a time a few summers ago when we had just moved to our little house, and I was still married, and both my kids were home. Those were ordinary days, hot days, because we didn’t have air conditioning yet. I was shuttling my youngest to Lego camp down the hill and my oldest to friends’ houses for playdates. Sometimes we would go to the local community pool in the afternoon to cool down. There was nothing especially noteworthy about any of those days, but if I could, I would go back to relive any one of them, just for the pleasure of being back in a time when both of my kids were home and we were all together.

I have a feeling that someday I might look back on the ordinary week I had this week in the same way, wishing I could magically transport myself back to my kitchen table, where I am attempting to write something worthwhile, but feeling discouraged because it all seems so ordinary. My youngest and I had carnitas for supper that were prepackaged and delicious. I took Biscuit for a walk and talked to my neighbor who was out watering her flowers. It is still hot. I’ve been listening to a book, “The Calamity Club,” on my drive to work and whenever I can once I get home: when I’m doing dishes, chopping onions, puttering around the house. It’s more than 28 hours long, enough to almost make you give up before you start, but I’ve stayed with it and only have about two hours left. It feels like a real accomplishment and it’s a great story—highly recommended.

But isn’t spending more than 24 hours listening to an audiobook kind of an ordinary thing to do? Continue Reading…

Power, Presence

A Mistake I Did Not Make

June 27, 2026

Photo by Kenneth Schipper on Unsplash. Pigs are cute! If you read to the end, I share how I’ve had times when I adopted a vegetarian diet. Seeing photos like this? It makes me think about  doing that again.

I almost made a big mistake this week. My shadow side and ego were definitely showing up.

I had work at 11:00 am Tuesday morning. Normally, I leave my house about an hour early, which gives me plenty of time to make it to town, since the drive generally takes only half an hour. Tuesday was not a normal day, though. The first part of my drive is straight down the freeway to the town where my kids went to school; that usually takes ten to fifteen minutes. But Tuesday? It took two hours.

Two hours!

Not surprisingly, I did not make it to work for my 11:00 am appointment. I did not make it to work until nearly 1:00 pm.

Because sometime in the dark of night, a semi-truck jackknifed and turned over, spilling some of its cargo onto the freeway. Lots of semi-trucks move up and down our freeway, and there are areas with surprising curves. Speeding trucks sometimes misjudge these sections; sleepy drivers cause problems, too. It’s not unusual for the freeway to shut down for a time so the authorities can clean up a spill.

Except the spill this week was unusual. It was pigs—hundreds of pigs.

Some of the pigs escaped and had to be rounded up. Others were trapped in the truck’s trailer and had to be rescued. By 7:00 am, the local news reported that “a handful of pigs were let out of the trailer.” By 8:00 am, crews were trying to load the pigs onto another trailer that had arrived to take them away. Not surprisingly, this was not easy, since the pigs were apparently not eager to be transferred anywhere else. Animal Services was at the scene, and “one of its vehicles had at least five of the pigs that ran loose onboard.”

All of this happened while I was still sleeping, and then merrily going about my normal morning routine without a care in the world. Eventually, I had notice that something might affect my drive time, when a friend texted me that she’d heard the freeway was backed up. I was about to take Biscuit for a walk, but thought better of it, and hopped in the car and was on my way. I made it to the freeway onramp and saw that traffic was basically stopped, so I very cleverly got onto the frontage road and zipped along, spying the stopped cars on the freeway and feeling rather pleased with myself. Until the frontage road also stopped.

And that was the beginning of my disastrous morning commute. It was a painfully slow process, moving up a car length or two for close to two hours.

Continue Reading…