At the top of 2018, I decided to take an intentionally different approach to the year. I resisted my impulse to set goals or create a word for the year or do anything that remotely sniffed of resolution making. (As an action-oriented lady, this resistance took some effort!) In past years, I might have told …
To rebrand is to change your image. Traditionally this term has been tied to corporate images, but in today’s world of social media influencers and content experts, we all have our own brand. Often unconsciously the way we show up and present ourselves is forming our image in the world (whether online or in real …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #16 June 12, 2012 One week ago, I was waking up in a hotel room in central Madrid. A hotel that happened to really love floral prints – we are talking roses on the bed spread, daisy-plastered wallpaper, lilies dancing around the blue-tiled bathroom walls. But I digress. Before rush hour had subsided, …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #15 June 6, 2012 It’s Wednesday afternoon and I write from Arlington, Virginia. The morning has been slow and delightful. Coffee on the back deck with Colin and the dogs with the early light of morning just making itself known, a delightfully uneventful prenatal appointment, reading The Marriage Plot (which I bought in …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #14 June 5, 2012 Sometimes it’s hard to know when a story starts and when it stops. This observation has held true for me when I write fiction, but in the last several days, I have been mindful of how it relates to the lives we lead each day – whether or not we …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #13 May 30, 2012 I’m lying in bed in Villa Franca listening to Spiritualized’s Soul on Fire on repeat. Great song. I was just hit by a memory flash. It’s the summer 2009 and I am sitting on a small plane rising slowly up into the air. A Croatian stranger is attached to …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #12 May 29, 2012 What gifts I have been blessed with in the past several days. Here are just a few: The walk to Santa Domingo including a long, hot hill. But at its summit many gifts awaited us. First there was the wind. We raised our arms and let it embrace us, grateful …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #11 May 25, 2012 I learned the following motivational chant while walking through the hot, hot heat in the final kilometers to Los Arcos a few days ago: I had a good job in the army but I left, I left. I left because I did not think that it was right, left, …
MY PREGNANT PILGRIMAGE #10 May 24, 2012 Today I write from Viana, a town of 3,500 long steeped in Pilgrim history. I sit outside the albergue (appreciative of the shade above and cold stone beneath me) typing on my iPhone with the ruins of a cathedral in front of me. The baby is kick, kicking away. …
