“I am going to pray for you,” she said, with a sparkle in her eye. “I’m going to pray to the Buddha that a nice man comes along and loves you and brings goodness and companionship to your life.” It was hard to hear. “That’s so lovely of you. But truly, my life is so […]
Category: How to do life
Not just a number
She left work months ago to rest after a return of her breast cancer. She went to Singapore to spend time with family and friends and she prayed and prayed to the Buddha. “If I still have value here, please let me stay. If I am just a waste of resources, then I will go. […]
The loyalty of leaving
When I was younger, I felt deeply and strongly that if you love someone, you never leave them. You stick by them, you help them, you accept them, you do anything for them, you give them anything you have. I now believe with even more fervent depth and strength that there is a higher love […]
The spiral of grief
“For in grief nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? …how often will the vast emptiness astonish me […]
Your new strategic morning routine: A piping hot mug of fuck it
Let’s stop getting all catywhompus about the profound importance of mornings. You have one thing you need to do in this life. Just one. Are you ready? Here it is: Your only fucking job in this life is to manifest you, as only you can, exactly how you are, in the most genuine and courageous […]
Love is a giver
I used to only know entanglement and I thought it was love. There was love in there, for certain. Sometimes lots. But it was a love I felt owed me things, heavy with expectations. It was love designed for getting from. This is different. The love doesn’t change when he’s gone. I still feel […]
I don’t think of me as single
Let’s agree to use the word “god” as a shorthand. I don’t mean it as a shorthand for the ever-fashionably non-committal “whatever god you want to believe in”. Not at all. I mean it specifically as a shorthand for “Kathryn’s somewhat bizarre and magical experience of a high reality which works awesomely and she doesn’t […]
You kill it, you eat it
That last post reminded me of a story. When my brother’s daughter was maybe 5 or 6, they found an injured squirrel in the yard, struggling and slowly dying. Seeing the opportunity for a teaching moment, he brought his daughter over and explained to her that the squirrel was in bad shape and that it […]
Save Schrodinger’s Cat
Let’s call it “Experiential Quantum Superposition”. I hypothesize that the truest stories have no endings. These stories fizzle messily into the unknown, forcing us to accept all the many layers of complex and sometimes conflicting truth in one big chaotic soup. These loose ends make us uncomfortable, take away clear targets for assigning blame, and […]
Give up early. Give up often.
I believe in quitting. I am a devout quitter. Because every act of quitting is the powerful act of choosing something else. Life is unconsumably large. In our time here, we select a tiny subset of all that we could experience and we must, by design, leave the rest. And much of what we leave […]