Author: Jill

Decoration Day

For this girl, a not-particularly-good-at-history, middle class, sheltered child, Memorial Day meant the pool was opening!  Not very deep, but I’d actually love it if my kid had the same summers I had. Depart at morning, ride bikes to the pool, come home for lunch and disappear back into the neighborhood until Mom blew her fierce, two-fingered whistle around dinner time.  Those memories are great and I remember them well. Unlike my fun memories, I’d guess plenty of people have times from their childhoods where the memories are more of a haunting kind they’d like to forget. How beautiful when...

How to find Joy without getting stuck in the Pleasure Principle

Just Kidding. God help me, if my blog has come off like a “how-to,” then I missed the mark I was aiming for. Well sure, I play Dear Abby with my friends, when they ask for my opinion, and I ask them for theirs. This has rarely worked for me (probably them as well) because no one really knows what is best for someone else. Usually when I do take someone else’s advice it turns out wrong, and when I don’t, I look back in hindsight and say, “Shoulda listened to that one.” Two things came up that put me...

Scorn the Shame

I was so ashamed. No one was victimizing me, I just couldn’t do what I needed to do at that time. The reasons didn’t matter when the bar I set was beyond my reach. There was a simple solution but I couldn’t see it, behind the cloud of shame. I needed to reach out for help. In this case seeing beyond the fog included letting go of the pride that tries to hide the shame of failing. I must scorn the shame, becoming mindful that failure is not an end in itself if I can gain wisdom and act accordingly....