When I was a senior in high school, my mother decided to go back to college and finish what she had started many years before. She had started college right after high school, but got married after her second year, promptly got pregnant, and had to quit school because in those days (the 1940’s), women…
This is the second time I sat down to write today. When I started this morning, or rather, tried to start, I had just logged into the computer when my son called me from the garage to let me know that our freezer was full of food that was no longer frozen. Needless to say,…
It is back-to-school time where I live. I have been spending most of my time recently buying backpacks and pencils, getting my calendar updated with parent teacher conference dates and school sports schedules, and learning the new procedures and policies that are required to go to school during a global pandemic. It’s a very busy…
Can we all just agree that 2020 has turned out to be nothing like any of us would have expected? Whether we’re talking social distancing, face masks, hand sanitizer, homeschooling, or a run on toilet paper, all of us have been forced to adapt to new realities. Some of them have happened rather seamlessly, while…
There is a story my children like to tell, when they are especially annoyed with me, or when there is a new audience, or when they want to remind me of the frailties and foibles of being human and it goes like this: We were going out to dinner one night, a sit-down dinner in…
We Seek After Knowledge and Wisdom This summer I have had the amazing opportunity to live in southeast Alaska where my husband got a job as a deep-sea fishing captain. This was a dream come true for both my husband and me. For a while now we have wanted to step away from our busy…
When I started college I had a battered old backpack, dark green, filled with books and pencils and notebooks. It was faded and fraying at the edges, the leather bottom scuffed and scratched, and had already seen a year or two of wear as I dragged it through the last little bit of high school.…
Archetypically and mythologically, women have had a role largely contained within the private sphere. As women have moved into new domains, particularly in the last one hundred years, one of the consequences has been a loss of an archetypical reference point. This change is described by Joseph Campbell who notes that “there are no models…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKgOoKi11B8&feature=youtu.be
Nestled at the foot of a string of majestic mountains, so tall their tops are wreathed in clouds and mist, lies a long, green valley that used to be a part of the ancient silk road, a trading route from China to the West. Noorani Barkat grew up here in the Baltistan region of Pakistan,…