It’s my birthday, another few inches of snow fell overnight and I took the afternoon off to play in the snow with my daughter and grandson. 😃

I feel tender when I think of you-who-reads-my-words, especially these days. There’s a lot coming at us and I hope you will take refuge in your own tender heart, in your own words.

Do you have a transactional relationship that you need help unwinding from?

There are times when the best medicine is to stick your head in the sand. This is exactly what one friend wanted to do last week. When overwhelmed by dissonance, confusion, anger, gut wrenching fear and existential angst, avoiding reality - for a little while - can be an act of self care. 

An advantage that we survivors have today is that we’ve already lived through feeling like our people and our world have turned against us.

We humans are capable of working through extreme discomfort - and through this process, we become more human, more beautiful, more real.

To be a survivor of cultic abuse is to rise from the ashes of systems designed to dehumanize and claim a seat at life’s table.

Throughout last week, I was an emotional wreck - obsessed with facebook postings and dribbles of messages coming from my friends in Western North Carolina. For five days, we didn’t know if they were alive. The morning of the Writing Symposium, I snapped off a news report, needing to keep my focus and not let fear take over. It was a couple more days before we began to hear details of how their idyllic home and land had been ravaged by Helene's catastrophic impact.