In an essay from Mary Martin Wiens, she explains how she came to terms with the scars and imperfections on her body,and how she sees them now as lines of a story. Here is an excerpt from Mary’s essay. Be sure to hope over to the full post, because the whole article is beautiful. We journey from a seed in our mother’s womb until we are planted in the grave with ever-changing bodies. Time scratches out its passage across my looks and the looks of all those I love. All our lives, our bodies manifest evidence of an existence marked […]

Writer George Eliot, also known as Mary Ann Evans once said, “I would not creep along the coast but steer out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.” Have you ever played it safe along the shoreline? Eliot didn’t, In a time when women wrote only romance novels, she gave herself a pseudonym and went ahead with her dreams of becoming a published author whose writing was taken seriously. She didn’t play it safe in other areas either. She isn’t exactly role model material in the morality department, but she didn’t hide that she was a mistress, not a married […]

Phil and I have been married for 22 years and it took us a few years to figure out that certain holidays were more stressful than they were enjoyable. Valentine’s Day used to be one of those. We learned that expectations could cause a lot of conflict, thus overruling the whole point of the holiday. It became nothing more than him trying to figure out what I wanted, and me expecting him to just know what I wanted. What we learned from too many years of expectations and let-downs is that gift-giving out of obligation dictated by the calendar isn’t […]