Falling Gently Podcast

For my 58th birthday I gave myself the gift Of ceasing to be disappointed in myself for not being a morning person Back in the days when I wrote New Years’ Resolutions Becoming a morning person was on every single one of them A fantasy in my head involving yoga and writing and tea Before anyone else woke Communing with the emerging light Feeling centered and connected That’s not generally how my d...

If you were to guess How many times in your childhood do you think you said “When I grow up, I’ll never do that,” or “When I have kids, I’ll never make them…” whatever Probably a lot Although plenty of those things are self-fulfilling prophecies Many do shape how we move forward and raise our own children This is something I noticed early on and had to square with I lived my baseline, and used it...

There were brief periods when my children were in classrooms Classrooms can be surprisingly political places Especially for those unversed in chaos theory We had our share of great teachers and questionable ones Great friends and nemeses To make sense of it all, we had a family metaphor School is like an ice cream store There is room for all of the flavors in the coolers Some flavors you’ll like,...

When our kids were little Sometimes a friend wouldn’t be in the mood to play with them And they would take it personally Doesn’t that person like me anymore? It’s a moment And it doesn’t feel good It works both ways Sometimes they wouldn’t be in the mood to play with a certain friend It didn’t necessarily mean they didn’t like them Or did it? That could be a real quandary How does this feeling ref...

Kiichi Usui was the best man in Yoko Ono’s first wedding They were part of a group of Japanese artists that came to New York in the ‘50s To make art that didn’t exist yet Kiichi parlayed his traditional Japanese art education into abstract expressionism While Yoko got into the Fluxus movement where the idea mattered more than the object You may be familiar with the story of how she met Lennon When...

In 1990, Buddhist practitioner Cynthia Jurs went to Nepal There, she was lucky enough to have an audience with a 106-year-old Rinpoche She asked him what she could do to help heal the earth and her people He told her ‘Just one person practicing deeply can have a dramatic impact But you, dear one You need to bury clay pots in the earth’ Excuse me? Not what I was expecting Not what she was expecting...

Today I had the opportunity to use my umbrella shaped like the Duomo in Florence There’s a detail on it most people don’t notice Like the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Big Ben in London Florence’s skyline is recognizable based on the Duomo Or, more formally, the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore The cathedral grew with Florence’s prominence in Italian history First, just a small church on a northbound...

There is not a food on earth that I expect to fulfill all my nutritional needs Much less satiate me permanently There is no shampoo so powerful that I’ll never need to use shampoo again And there’s no clarity, on any subject, that means I’ll never need to address it again with my beloveds Why, then, do I keep thinking ‘this spiritual practice should clean up all the remaining debris” “This mental...

In my early 30’s I lived in a boat house on a small private lake in Michigan I called it “camp” Which is how I squared myself with copious spider population It was the early days of the internet and I’d done a keyword search using “charming” And it was Down a ½ mile-long driveway Around the side of the main house Park by the magnolia tree Follow the stone path to the 40 steps The entrance of the h...

AI has led me astray more than once It just sounded so sure of itself LLMs don’t present data as data They weave narratives Intimating that they know everything You’re being seen and understood as you rarely are in life And here’s your straightforward 7 day plan It has been helpful, like when I had an identity theft scare And super not helpful, like when it said an appointment would be covered whe...

Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of emotional mirroring or reflection Most of my family was too busy to engage The sister closest in age, however, had lots of time on her hands Which she used to tell me how much she hated me That everyone did That anyone who pretended to like me, was indeed just pretending Not just most days Every day Consequently, I felt the need to get a second opinion And, not f...

Avon Road, in Rochester, Michigan, dead-ends into Adams Road Just southeast of Meadow Brook Music Festival It’s a road my family traveled often on our way home And for about a 9 month period when I was in my early teens I had a recurrent experience with a stunning wisteria tree Which sat in a yard a few houses east of the light If we were the 7th or 8th car in line, I could view this tree out the...

Well over a year ago, in conversation My son told me he was ‘chalant’ I told him that wasn’t a word He insisted it was I insisted it wasn’t My son is an extremely laid back young man He could be late for something he cares about And still saunter from the car to the door when I drop him off I have literally never seen him run I assumed he meant nonchalant Because, well, he is But it turns out, he...

I spent the first half of my life aggressively pursuing peace In myself (Meditate more! Read more books! Find the Magic Formula!) In my family (See how smart I am and do what I say and we’ll be fine!) And in the world (Protest! Lobby! Canvass! Convince! Enroll! Recycle!) Yet those heartfelt efforts did not generate the experience of peace They kept an idea of peace just out of reach And dependent...

My Tai Chi teacher used to say I practiced Dead Spider Tai Chi I was always poised to collapse I swore I was standing straight and ‘strong’ But when I got tapped even lightly from the side My leg would collapse into center Same with my torso or my arms I can now feel that it originated in the tilt of my hips And the relationship from hip to ankle to foot to earth But for years, this stability elud...

My partner greatly contributes to my well-being But he is not who I would’ve chosen for myself. My younger self romanticized a partner who was dazzling I worked backstage at a music venue in my youth. It was a lot of fun. I quickly adapted to proximity to influence I expected to be in the center of arts and culture Laughing with a glass of champagne in one hand Watching world-class musicians sitti...

There are only so many times a person can be earnestly trying for something Watching other people seem to get it easily And remain chipper in their congratulations Even when those well-wishes are heartfelt and without reproach It’s hard to keep envy entirely out of the equation And curiosity about what makes it unavailable to me This is hard. And tricky. And no one dances through it unscathed. And...

We had a deal with our kids They could participate in pixels (TV, computers, iPads, phones) For the exact amount of time they spent being creative in the day Spend an hour or two drawing, writing, building, playing music or sports I will give you no grief about that game you want to play You want to binge it? You’re going to need to bank some creative time Which often got them into deep-focus proj...

At almost any hour of any day If you ask me what time it is My impromptu response will be within 3-4 minutes of what the clock says And usually right on the nose It’s uncanny But made infinitely weirder by the fact That I have zero precision anywhere else in my relationship with time I’ve never worn a watch I rarely carry my phone I’ve recently heard the term “time drunk” and was a little scared a...

I am a coiner of aphorisms One of my favorites is: “Wonderful capacity. Terrible default setting.” The first time I used it was counseling my nephew about a job interview His capacity to inflate himself would come in handy But be perilous if it was all he brought to the conversation I knew, as I said it, it was going to stick And I’ve returned to it again and again Empathy is a wonderful capacity...

I polish the orb of spiritual devotion as a vocation My belief in the Divine as All is ever-revealed the more softly I look, the more openly I feel Everything in life is singing We are all humming along Creating. Relating. Attention as currency We invest in what we value Or what we’re compelled by Isn’t it beautiful when those two things are the same? When attention isn’t hijacked I’m still trying...

It is very true that my best friend in middle school was a tree I’ve actually had numerous tree-best-friends And even a couple of mystical experiences with trees While the human world often feels foreign to me Trees make me feel right at home So, I totally understood it when forest bathing became a thing It’s a thing because it’s wildly effective in nervous system regulation It’s wildly effective...

When I was 8 years old, the University of Pennsylvania quarterback came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner He didn’t have time to travel home between games and we were happy to have a local celebrity join us After dinner, he’d told us about his summer job at a sugar mill Suffice it to say, I remember every word of that conversation And it is front and center literally every time I encounter whit...

Philip Shepherd tells the story of his niece losing her bracelet at a big family picnic Everyone had been searching the grass of a huge field for ages But when Philip arrived and heard of the quest He looked into the vast field and invited his pelvic floor to find the item And he walked right to it I was skeptical Except not long after reading it My husband and son had made boomerangs And gone to...

I read a book in the 90’s titled “Wholeness or Transcendence” I remember little more than the title And having thought, “Transcendence. Obviously.” Transcendence was my spiritual path to unity with all of life And conceptually, I could get so close But the world and circumstances refused to cooperate. While striving for transcendence, I experienced distinct separation in my body “I” lived behind m...