Fableogs

The 10-Minute Train-in-a-Sliver-of-Sun Meditation and Other Moments Seized

On a recent walk home from picking up groceries, I got stuck on the wrong side of the tracks, waiting for a seemingly interminable freight train to pass. Already, I was frustrated. Grocery shopping and cooking have become a whole fraught story, since a bad blood test in mid-January has forced me onto a super low potassium diet. This means cutting out nearly all my favorite foods (Chocolate! Avocado! So many leafy greens! Sweet potatoes! Broccoli! Beans! Almonds!) So, the groceries were extra heavy with my resentment. I was primed to fight against the reality of the train preventing me from getting back to the place where I was staying (I was away). And a strange thing happened. Instead of…

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Discernment Is My 2024 Challenge

The first thing I did on January 1, 2024 was climb up a mountain with a friend. A little more than four hours on snow and ice in very cold, grey conditions. When we got back to the car, I couldn’t even manage to click the car remote to unlock the doors, my hands were so frozen. And it was glorious to open the year in nature, in the vigor of my body (which has not always been a given this year), with a challenge and great company. 2023 was its own mountain and as much as I love mountains, I’m hoping that 2024 will bring fewer tears and fears and more ease and flow. Every year (as many of…

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Is Enough Abundant?

    As the holidays and 2024 approach, I declared the start of my personal new year on October 28th. The day after the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, in a year of substantial loss—in addition to my mother there was the loss of my beloved 17-year-old cat, the loss of my 28-year marriage, the loss of my home and financial security and the (thankfully temporary) loss of my health. All of which I’ve written about here during the course of these last months. I want to look forward. And, I’m struggling to feel like I’m enough, that my life is enough and, to put it bluntly, that I have enough resources. What does enough even mean? And how about this…

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Does a Diagnosis Change Who I Am?

Two months after an emergency visit to the hospital for 3 days (which I wrote about here), I’ve finally been diagnosed. I have Addison’s Disease. So, not enough for me to have a name for what ails me. It has to declare itself a disease. That causes a lot of dis-ease for me. There’s a strand of thinking that says we are empowered once we are diagnosed. Along the lines: Knowledge is power. Now you know what you’re dealing with. And that classic marketing tag line: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. With a diagnosis, I’m in measurable territory. There’s a map. I can manage. I should be relieved. Instead, I feel defeated. I’m not yet able to accept that the…

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My Long Term Running Relationship with Central Park is Evolving

I have run in Central Park since 1993. I’ll let you do the math. When I first got here, I lived on 113th Street and came into the park at its northwest corner on 110th. Then, six months later, I moved to 85th street and then to Riverside and 79th. So, for 28 years, I have run into and out of Central Park at the entrances on 81st and 77th. One result of the demise of my marriage is that I have gone full circle. I run into the park at its northwest 110th Street entrance again. Welcome home. The cycle of life. Except two things—it doesn’t feel at all like home. Not yet. While I still carry inside me that 27-year-old, who learned…

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Lying to Myself About Meditation

Monday morning. May 8th 2023. I wake up after an unusually restful night of sleep. I know I got up to the bathroom once. Other than that, I have no recollection of sleepless restlessness, which is not the norm for me these last many months. The first thing I notice is the fading rose of the light on the buildings out my window, soft and clear. I am surprised the day is here. I check my iPad for the time. It’s on the bedside table. Reading a novel (on the kindle app on my iPad) in bed as I fall asleep is one of my life’s pleasures. And, in that moment, reaching for the time, I realize this: I did not…

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When Grief is Your Running Companion

In Joy Hargo’s poetry collection,  Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, there is a poem titled, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented, interspersed with lines of italicized words I didn’t recognize. Wey yo hey, wey yo hey yah /hey.I like to read poetry aloud and, as I read her poem, a series of strong emotions swept through me — sadness, longing, love. I am often overtaken by the emotion of a poem while I’m reading, but, in this case, I didn’t even know if I was reading proper words. I later learned that they weren’t words. They are what’s called vocables (more on that in a moment). Yet, I could feel their meaning as I spoke the sounds aloud. They compelled a chant that seemed to…

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Sweating Like a Whore

I once called my mother a whore. We were playing double solitaire. A game that, between the two of us at, was a full contact sport. Slapping our cards down with no mind as to whether the other person’s hand might be in the way. In this particular game, we were neck-a-neck, cards piling up in the center at the speed of light, then we were both going to the same stack with the same card and my mum’s hand was quicksilver, hitting the mark before me. You whore. I shouted loud enough for the house to hear. She laughed with gleeful satisfaction. I wasn’t even grounded. That’s how complicit we were in our intensity. Even calling her a whore…

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Breathe and Blossom—What I Learned at a Biathlon Clinic

In the spirit of “welcome”, my word of the year, I’m trying to open myself to the flow of life. So, when I happened to walk through the Tahoe Donner cross-country ski center and saw a notice that a biathlon clinic (that’s skiing and shooting a target) was happening the next day, I signed up before I had time to talk myself out of it. For more than a decade, every winter, I promise myself that I’ll take a biathlon clinic and then somehow, magically, I am never available (or they aren’t offered due to pandemics). The date I signed up for was the only one of the three Sundays offered that I could participate. I didn’t have anything big…

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Mina’s WOTY and Annual Challenge

I woke up alone on Sunday morning (January 1st) for the first time since I was 19 years old. I had a lovely celebration with friends the night before and even in the days leading up. And the day of the 1st itself was rich and full—I wrote, I went to a three-hour 5Rhythms event, talked to a friend on zoom and had dinner with another friend. But it’s clear that this will be a very different year. How different and in what ways is still an unknown. So, my word of the year (WOTY) is WELCOME. Every year (as many of you do, no doubt, and many of us here at Fit Is a Feminist Issue) I choose a…

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