Glorious Ordinary Podcast

Two weeks ago I spent a day with my five year old grandson in Gloucester, MA. We had an adventure and he gave me some advice about making choices though he didn't know it. To be free in the world, you must be free of the world. Or your past decides for you and your future. ~Sri Nisargardatta Glorious Ordinary is a reader-supported publication on Substack and you can read this essay there, and beco...

This essay is about coercive control and domestic violence, about autonomy and who gets to decide how we use our time. AI : I do not use it in any part of my creative process: from conceiving and nurturing ideas, to editing drafts, to writing and recording final essays or podcasts. Everything you listen to and read—including the em dashes—is the work of one human. I am a writer, poet, life coach a...

A Romance of Apples It’s unlikely Eve plucked an apple from the Tree of Knowledge since up until the 17th c. the word “apple” was a generic term for all unknown, i.e. foreign, fruit, excluding berries, though it did include nuts. What fills out heads Eve disgraced herself when she ate from the Tree despite God clearly saying absolutely not! but even as a child in Catholic school I could not condem...

Right now, the activities I embrace without hesitation are playing with children and holding babies. And holding the hands of grown up people who need their hands held. And hugging those who need or want to be hugged, including animal companions. The particular difficulties of my life feel like so much drivel when there’s a baby asleep on my chest, or I’m making pillow forts with a five-year-old,...

Life waylaid me this week so I’m reposting an essay relevant to these times. This now is no different than any other now . The place we find ourselves isn’t anyplace new, and the consequences of choices made will unfold in the places it always has—neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, small towns, big cities, every place we live, work, play. Be kind and generous—throw your arm over someone’s shoulde...

This is a clip of my Insight Timer talk about irritation and annoyance which are at the root of anger. Find the talk here: The Roots of Anger: Irritation and Annoyance And the companion meditation here: Meditation: Releasing Irritation Get full access to Glorious Ordinary at valeriespain.substack.com/subscribe

When it’s just me, paper and pen, writing is meditation as Krishnamurti describes it below. I jump in and the current takes me. Words are sent out like messengers, then called back, then sent out again until they’re moving together like a murmuration of starlings, a lamentation of swans, a murder of crows. The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again....

This is a narrated essay from my Substack newsletter, Glorious Ordinary. The kernel of this essay is the still image from the 1950’s melodrama, All That Heaven Allows : an older woman looking at her reflection in a TV screen. I saw this Douglas Sirk movie for the first time decades ago and this particular image stuck with me. Apt for our times, and I thought I would write about screens and their d...

This is the end-of-year essay from my Substack of the same name. It's about dealing with lingering Covid symptoms and what was, and is, truly healing. Thank you for being such a constant listener of this podcast. Please like, rate and share so others can find me. And if you celebrate the year’s end and beginning, I wish you many Blessings and all Good Things in 2026! I am a passionate writer and p...

This is a recorded essay from my Substack newsletter of the same name. Sometimes I also record dedicated podcast episodes. This is a replay of last year’s week-before-Christmas essay and updates. My hope for you, dear listener, is to also find solace in the dark of the year. And together may we embrace the light of the New Year with whole and loving hearts, as Dylan Thomas did in A Child’s Christm...

This is a recorded essay from my Substack newsletter of the same name. Sometimes I also record dedicated podcast episodes. Thanks for listening. Anger is an incendiary power. I want to reclaim legitimate expressions of anger and not cede that power to the depraved and corrupt, not give it up to people who mistake chronic grievance and cruelty for a cleansing rage. Presently it seems fine to be ang...

This essay was published in 2024, and is inspired by the nature writing of Barry Lopez, especially his book, Arctic Dreams , and an essay by Mary Rush from Emergence , an online magazine. It’s a rumination on the inner and outer landscapes we’re bound to, how language is tied to the land, and how patient attention leads us to experience an animate earth. When I think about … how to recognize the a...

The transition from an urban space to a natural one is often self-conscious. The being called “I” tries to experience walking in the woods. It takes a while to recognize I am thinking about experiencing, not experiencing . Attention eventually turns to breathing. Breath settles the body. And finally just breathing—just walking—just hearing wind and bird calls—just smelling the pines and the snow....

In the preface to my last essay , I said I would lay down all complicated feelings and enjoy my son’s wedding. I managed to do both. But all the feels went somewhere, and I learned (again), though I already know, I’m not the only one trying to let go, to make sense of them, to put them down. Lucille Clifton’s poem, “blessing the boats, was the centerpiece of my wedding toast. It was especially apt...

My nourishment journey started in college over forty years ago when I found myself far from family, alone with beliefs about my body and food. Learning to feed myself, and learning how food affects me emotionally and mentally as well as physically has been a life long experiment, maybe more like a roller coaster. Before we find ourselves reaching for food to alleviate distress, can we consider whi...

What else is there? Only an all-encompassing Love beyond the mind. What else is there ? Again, love. Love is always there. No matter whether we know it or not. Sometimes we need something to disarm us. Once disarmed, we find love where we least expect it. We recognize it, even without an apology . If you want to read or listen to more of my essays, check out my Substack, Glorious Ordinary https://...

Perhaps erasure poetry is always inherently a political act, perhaps it is always inherently a violent act. ~Jennifer Chang, poet. For my erasure poem, “Not An Apology," I used an email my ex-husband sent me after we attended our son’s graduation from nursing school. We had been divorced almost two decades by then. The first paragraph is blah blah blah about how we worked together to be good paren...

(Most of the time) I believe I have to keep noticing beauty, joy and love in the small moments of my life, or else I’ll stop seeing them in our collapsing world. Growing up is hard. Otherwise everyone would do it. ~Kim Harrison, author I’m the grandparent who dismantles the family room couch to make forts and other structures for my grandson who’s loved doing this since he was a toddler. Inside th...

I’m writing in a moment of extreme heat in the Northeast United States. Such weather affects how I manage my type 1 diabetes and makes the brain foggy. That distraction made writing this essay a bit of a slog, and the result feels like a bit of a jumble. But a good essay doesn’t lay everything out. The writer points in a direction and hopes the reader will follow. They’ll tell you soon enough if t...

Even when I really believe I have to do such and such a thing / or be at such and such a place, if someone at the height of my frenzy said to me, what would you do if you knew you had a day or a week to live? And if I stopped and sincerely considered it, I bet that whatever I think I absolutely must do, that thing would not appear on that last list of last things to do in life. What I actually nee...

We’re distracted by things outside us. And internally, we distract ourselves as we’ve been trained to do by algorithms, and by devices showing us 30 second video clips that keep us scrolling. Pausing is radical because you stop. Listen and discover how to be radical. Valerie is a passionate writer of the bi-weekly newsletter, Glorious Ordinary , and the sole producer of this podcast (ChtGPT did he...

I keep trying to comprehend what's unfolding nationally and looking for signs of it where I live, in city government, in the schools, in my neighborhood. How are people I know well, or not so well, affected? How are the people they know affected? Everything feels very different. It is and it isn't. **I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on what’s truly important. To...

If you combine the title and tagline of this week's podcast episode, you have the last line of Ada Limón's poem, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone.” I’ll read the full poem at the end of the episode, but for the last ten days, all I had was that line, and I kept repeating it, People have done this before, but not us. **I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on wh...

Mindfulness practices let us step into the spaciousness that is always there and puts the thinking mind in its proper place. In other words, to think, plan, or strategize when we need to, then stop when we don't. Can we even imagine that? Get full access to Glorious Ordinary at valeriespain.substack.com/subscribe

The tagline, everything self help is a distraction , means don’t believe the constant hype that you have to constantly work to “improve” yourself, your situation, whatever, because there’s something wrong with you. Where we put our attention matters- Get full access to Glorious Ordinary at valeriespain.substack.com/subscribe