My biggest challenge of the moment stated and solved. Day 4 of the Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance” project.
Category Archives: Spirituality
One Strong Belief
An exploration of my pantheistic beliefs. Day 3 of the Emerson “Self-Reliance” project.
There’s No Place Like Home
Upheaval in the world and personally brings up the ever-present yet elusive question of “Where will I find home?”.
Zuzu Irwin Dreams With Jellyfish
The first installment in a new Zuzu’s Petal series, Zuzu Irwin’s Global Safari, that explores an amazing encounter at the Long Beach Aquarium in 2001 and its reverberations to today.
On Angels, Demons and Living Paradoxically
My friend Vesper’s amazing blog post inspires me to consider my thoughts on good, evil and other things in between.
Wild Things Make My Heart Sing
Reflections on the magical and terrifying film “Where The Wild Things Are”.
In the “Nought”ies I:
Many of the things that I did in the Naughts Decade. I probably left out a bunch, but anyway.
Why I Don’t Celebrate Halloween Like I Used To
When I first moved to Europe going on seven years ago I was bummed that I felt they didn’t really celebrate Halloween, American style. Dressing up, spider webs, pumpkin carving, creepy music, Trick-or-Treating…Halloween was always my most favourite holiday. I love costumes and basically will use any excuse whatsoever to dress up. Movie premieres, themed…
The Bane of Forgiveness
Here in Europe we have this amazing cream called Bepanthen that is phenomenal for healing wounds without any resulting scarring. Doesn’t matter how you got the wound, scrape, burn, but if you use Bepanthen on it you absolutely will not scar. I got to thinking that maybe forgiveness is like that cream. If you don’t…
In Memoriam
Eight years ago two planes flew into New York’s World Trade Centers killing thousands. I remember my then-boyfriend waking me up to tell me what had happened. It was 8am in California and so I laughed at the news, thinking that someone had pulled a Fight Club and destroyed two empty buildings. When he reminded…
‘Til Kingdom Come
I read my first Stephen King novel when I was 12 years old. The book was Carrie and the year was that of the Gulf War I, 1992. Thus began a love affair with King’s books that has continued to shape my life until today. This year I turned 30 and I’m even more in…
The Local Expat
When I was a single twenty-something living in Spain it upset me to no end how difficult it was to make and integrate with a group of Spanish locals. I couldn’t understand why locals wouldn’t want to make a foreign friend and learn about someone’s life outside of Spain, in the same way that I…
The Mother Claws
Unlike most places in the world that can seem alien at first glance, Prague hides her true nature until she trusts you enough to share of herself. The longer you are here the more she undresses her darkest secrets and shows you her violent scars. Kafka called her a number of variations on “the little…
The Trauma Fairy
I am pretty sure I’ve discovered a new fairy who has been in my life for some time now. I’m calling her The Trauma Fairy, and my belief is she goes into our minds while we sleep and erases things that are just too awful to remember. One of the more dramatic times she visited…
The Ties That Bind
Five years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I met an amazing Californian Phillipina woman and we became fast friends, seeing in each other kindred spirits. Interestingly enough, it was the same year I met Paolo Coelho who told me: “Always keep your heart open; it will bleed, but it will heal.”…
Coupling
Life as an expat can be trying, in spite of its seeming glamourousness. One of the most difficult things I’ve noticed across the board is how hard it is to integrate with the locals of pretty much anywhere. What you find out is that especially in a place like Prague, with a great deal of…
LOST in symbolism
The Season 6 finale of “LOST” featured a gargantuan statue of the Egyptian crocodile-headed god Sobek. Being fascinated not only with “LOST” but also Egyptian mythology (I even took a how-to-read-hieroglyphics course a few years back) I figured it must mean something. *Builds a mountain out of mashed potatoes* Sobek was worshipped in ancient Egyptian…
How To Alienate Good People
A surefire way to alienate good folks and lose friends is by being fake. Fake people are the worst. To clarify, being fake is very different from being polite or professional. Being fake is pretending to be friends with people you can’t stand and not giving them even the slightest moment of pause to think…
Preparation
Everything we do in life requires some level of preparation. Our jobs, our hobbies, our dinners. It gives us a chance to get all our ducks in a row before moving on with a project, and even the smallest amount of preparation tends to make the end result better. What’s strange is that I’ve been…
Salvaging
The awkward transitional periods between one phase of life and the next can give us pause to review our history and see what we’ll salvage and take with us forward. At the moment, I’m saying goodbye to the last year of my life as a relocation coordinator and moving onto a number of new possibilities…
Developing compassion as a way of life for you and your children
His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, “Genuine compassion is based on a clear acceptance or recognition that others, like oneself, want happiness and have the right to overcome suffering. On that basis one develops some kind of concern about the welfare of others.” Compassion is the ability to see all fellow human beings as equal…
Death Of A Young Man
I always felt a strange and strong connection with Heath Ledger. It became even stranger and stronger when I found out that he has almost exactly the same birthday as me. Same day, month, year and almost the same time even. I felt it was some sort of sign. When I found out about five…
To Be Or Not To Be A Vampire
Prague is a demanding city. It gives so much, but it also takes a lot. Energy, life, money. These things exist in abundance here, but they also flow away so quickly. Prague is a vampire’s city. Shrouded in gray for more than three-quarters of the year, it is the perfect place for those who really…
Signs And Wondering
Since Wendy passed away, I have lived my life following signs from the Spirits. Especially during my time at the UN and in Spain it seemed as if every decision I made, the course of each of my days was defined by signs. Signs were everywhere. It got to the point that even people who…
Good Omens, Bad Omens
The year 2008, and so far six months living in Prague. Today is the first day the Sun has broken through the cloud cover and pierced the shield of this vampire city. I haven’t written for ages, and I think it was because my last blog incarnation of The TripWire went stale and my ideas…
The Stranger In Me
Although it’s been weeks since I’ve seen it, I’m still thinking about the movie The Brave One. Jodie Foster repeats throughout the film that after the horrific trauma she went through, it was like a new person emerged in her. Someone who was capable of doing things that she never would have dreamed of doing…
The Art Of Letting Go
In high school my dream was to be a movie star. I was in every play I could possibly be in, performed on stage every chance I got and even went so far as to pick a university in Los Angeles because I wanted to be an actress. Once I got to L.A., I realised…
Lost and Found
As always, somewhat obsessed, I have a new fascination with the TV series Lost. I know, I know. It’s sorta cliche by now, having a thing for Lost. But my thing is this: I read an article about how Lost is really some version of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. You know, the Gunslinger chasing…
Goddess Uma
I have always believed that there is great power in names. A vibration that not only shapes the person but also invokes a distinct type of energy depending on the name. I have noticed that certain names do not bode well for me. There are names that have had such good energy in my life….
The Silver Lining
While I was devastated to get fired for the first time in my life, each day that goes by I am beginning to understand that the job experience itself has a much greater spiritual significance than I ever would have thought. The job taught me that integrity, while a quality most of us strive to…
Heroes
do you ever get the feeling that you are meant for something more? not just something more, but something great? something amazing, something extraordinary. a feeling that is more than just a feeling or a hunch; something deep down into the dark core of you that tells you that you are special. that you are…
How “Babel” and Uma Are Connected
Many people compared Babel to Crash and Magnolia because of its story line about the intersection between the lives of disparate groups of people, and on a superficial level the comparison is valid. But what made Babel stand apart from every other film was the fact that it showed how we are all connected not…
Work Will Set You Free
I feel like the Turkish Daily News came into my life for a few specific reasons, and namely the people I connected with while I was there. Also, it gave me something to keep my mind focused on with Uma being in the hospital. I think if I were home alone all day it would…
Turkish Lessons
They say you can’t know Turkey or understand anything about its people without having your job threatened by management or by getting fired. Today I just learned the latter Turkish lesson as I was fired today from my job at the Turkish Daily News. At first, it stung. That was pride fucking with my head,…
A Sinister Sunday
Sunday’s are no longer a day of quiet leisure and relaxing with my secret pleasures of ‘The OC’ and ‘One Tree Hill.’ In lieu of catching the only work shuttle to the Hurriyet Media Tower where I wile my days away trapped on the top floor like the princess I used to imagine I was,…
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