As with all trauma, pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to become incredibly small. All the details and to-do lists evaporate and life slows to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”

A long time ago, just out of graduate school and some 2,500 hours into a five-year process of becoming a counselor, I sat down with my supervisor and announced that, while I enjoyed working with clients, there was something more pulling at me.

Two weeks ago, I was about to get to writing a little something about gratitude for this newsletter when the unexpected randomness of Life happened. My companion, Baci (whom you may recall from his recent celebrity appearance in this column) had a disc rupture, leaving his back legs paralyzed.

A number of years ago I read a little book titled, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. In it, the author tells the story of being struck by a mysterious condition that left her completely incapacitated, unable even to sit up.

Before we zoom over Thanksgiving on our way to Christmas/New Years/Spring Break/Next Summer, I would like to pause to consider the most basic and greatest of gratitudes: that we have the privilege of being here at all.

It’s been two months since my last communication and I feel compelled to catch up. A lot has happened, the first and most significant of which affected all of us here on the West Coast. No, I’m not talking about the demoralizing implosion of the San Francisco Giants and the subsequent, equally depressing success of the Dodgers

In the early summer of last year, my world became very small and quiet. A combination of illness and clients completing their work with me en masse left me feeling adrift at sea.

I recently read a thought provoking essay about success. The writer — a psychologist, author, and well-known speaker — enumerated his personal definitions of success, a list that, remarkably, had absolutely nothing to do with work, status, or wealth.

The night sea passage can be the space between an ill self and a healthy self, a nest gone empty, retirement, the loss of a loved one, or a failed business venture. Whatever the particulars, one is left feeling as though everything has crumbled and vanished. The night sea passage is not a booze cruise, my friends

One of my favorite quotes, torn and taped to my desk, is this one, attributed to Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, “second best” was a phrase of defeat. “Come home with first or don’t come home,” my brother once quipped as I left for a debate tournament.

Here’s a holiday pop quiz: Do you remember what you received for Christmas last year? Do you remember what you gave? Me either.

As I look back over all the essays and blogs I’ve written, I’ve never once addressed the subject of loneliness, which is really rather strange since loneliness is epidemic in our culture, and since I’m on very familiar terms with it myself.

A cell phone rang, and I watched in stunned disbelief as one of the mourners (and I use that term loosely) took the call. In an audible voice he engaged in a five minute conversation, graveside. I still have a bruise on my jaw where it dropped and hit the ground.

Sometimes the Universe is not subtle. In the past eight weeks, I was privileged to watch three pairs of birds build their nests, lay their eggs, and fledge their young. At the same time, a half dozen monarch caterpillars joined our family and we’ve watched them grow and form glittering green chrysalises and emerge as beautiful butterflies.

Adrenal fatigue — the main symptom of which is unremitting and total exhaustion—is rampant in the U.S., especially among middle-aged women. I might have found this fact interesting in and of itself, but a recent and recurring bout with adrenal fatigue has caused me to pause, quite literally, to consider the nature of disease, its meanings, and our role in creating it.

Everyone I know is going through some serious suffering. I’m not talking about the suffering one feels watching a Tom Cruise movie, or hearing the phrase, “I know, right?” I’m talking about suffering chronic illness, staring mortality in the face, losing a loved one, being in dire financial straits: in other words, Hell.

Reading through my collegiate musings reminded me of some interesting things from my past that I’d forgotten, like the fact that I sure did have a lot of boyfriends, and I sure was into Jesus, and I sure was a damned good daughter for writing all these newsy letters. But the big OMG moment was seeing how really very little has changed.

how do we revive Soul—a subtle, invisible, formless, internal entity—living as we do in a noisy, gadget-gawking, consumption-oriented society that constantly pulls our attention away from our inner life?

The life of a writer is not as glamourous as you might think; it’s not all sweatpants and eating dry cereal out of the box and royalty payments stuffing the mailbox. This morning, for instance, I awoke from a spicy little dream and stared into the dark thinking about the dream and what it meant and trying to drag out the good feeling for as long as I could.