community
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Why Practice Empathy When You Can Do Spiritual Bypassing
“Let me tell you about the time someone with greater faith than you went through the same situation and handled it so much better than you did.” If I opened my heart to you and told you about my struggles and this was your response, I would thank you very kindly for sharing your wisdom… Continue reading
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Lurker in the Group Chat
I sometimes wonder if you’ve forgiven me always said it’s OK if you haven’t but it’s been so long I’m probably the only one who’s still on that you all have come far and left that behind not even a blur on your rearview mirror but the group chat is still alive I don’t bring… Continue reading
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The Silence After Your Read this Poem is Political
Ignoring your symptoms and coming to work because a paycheck that’s eight hours short won’t let you replace your shoes with cracked soles for another month is political. The number of PTO hours you’re allowed is political. Whether it takes two months or three of missed rent before you’re living in the street is political.… Continue reading
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Stone Soup Redux
What abundance awaits us when we refuse to let our neighbors go hungry? What freedom is on the other side when we see ourselves in the faces of strangers? What if the knocking on the door is an offer of steadfastness and community disguised as a cry for help? What if the tragedies on your… Continue reading
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PS. She has vegetarian options
People like to talk about the excellent food in Chicago: the Michelin Starred and Beard Awarded, the authentic or the creative spin on a classic, the immigrant communities making the city a home with generational recipes for walls and flavors for foundations. When my friends visit, I flex my city by taking them to some… Continue reading
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If You Only Looked at Headlines
you might think everywhere has lost all its humanity and we have forsaken one another, but in the last five minutes alone I watched two women who don’t know each other hype each other up by the Dunkin pick-up counter: hair compliments, outfit compliments galore and another lady has whipped out her phone to show… Continue reading
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Vulnerability
How much more freely and more often would we create if we could always be this, a tad too honest and a tad too hopeful for the tastes of the world, showing up for the parts of ourselves that are insecure or bothered or unfinished, the canvas jarred by interruptions, the language naked with need.… Continue reading
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Little Calculus
It’s 18 degrees and I’m standing at the southbound X9 Bus stop. Can’t feel my fingers, can’t feel my toes. North and southbound lanes are on a red light. I see my bus, stopped four vehicles away. I can walk to it and get out of the cold. The east and westbound lanes on a… Continue reading
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My Mental Peace Looks Like
The people who are making more money than me and seeing my vacation pictures at a place that’s a one-hour drive away from home are not pitying my children because our family trips don’t start at airports. It’s perfectly OK to run into the women who have given me their clothes that no longer fit… Continue reading
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My Uber Driver Mistook me for Mexican
“I thought you were someone from home,” came after his apology “Filipino,” I said, as an offering, after I apologized too A small bit about myself in exchange for a glancing tenderness his language allowed “That’s why. You have the Spanish blood too,” and that was that And I didn’t want to burden him but… Continue reading
Rampant & Golden 