About

I’m a writer, mother, and thinker in West Virginia (US). I love to learn and write about all sorts of things, but I’m most deeply interested in exploring the inner life: what happens inside our minds as we ride the wild river of life.

I write this Substack in four sections, which you can subscribe to individually (all free):

1. 🌊 River Reflections (default section): occasional musings from my reading, writing, and growing

   Featured post: Essay “Where Do We Look for Safety?”

2. 🪷 Serenity Splashes: ~daily poems from my reflections on coping with life

   Featured post: Poem “So this is healing”

3. 🏝️ Learning Lagoon: random posts about things I'm learning, from poetry to physics to philosophy—whatever currently interests me

   Featured post: Essay “Freedom from Free Will”

4. 🎵 Song Stream: songs I write and manage to record

   Featured post: Song “Quiet”

To choose which sections to subscribe to, go to your “Manage Subscription” page. (Let me know if you need help finding it.) All the sections are free; I’m just here for the joy of it. 🌻

More joys

• Writing. Along with the essays, songs, and poems I post here, I’m currently finishing a middle-grade fantasy novel about a group of kids that start a revolution and overthrow their totalitarian religious regime.

• Reading and learning. Currently I’m loving:

  • No Nonsense Spirituality by Brittney Hartley

  • Raising Securely Attached Kids by Eli Harwood

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Elizer Yudkowsky (I’m on my fourth read-through [listening to the podcast-audiobook])

  • Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein

  • Stories of Motherhood by Everyman’s Pocket Classics — a collection of short stories

• Nature. I’m a native of West Virginia, and I feel lucky to live in these beautiful mountains. I also enjoy trying to capture nature’s beauty with amateur photography. All photos here are my own. 📷

• Healing and growing. I grew up fundamentalist Christian, and I’m on a journey of healing from that oppression and learning to think and live freely.

• Unmasking. Similarly, I recently got diagnosed with autism and ADHD, so I’m in the process of unlearning a lifetime of overcompensating for the ways my brain is different from the norm.

Mindfulness is my jam

The phrase “whatever the river brings” comes from one of my poems:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

So be a watcher on the rock,      
   not flailing in the swash,      
      drowning when I try to swim.      
          Sit still, apart; just watch.

Even when the current’s rough      
   and splashes, slaps, and stings,      
      watch what happens, only watch,      
          whatever the river brings.

— from the “S” poem in my “Alphabet Meditation Verses” sequence

Whatever life’s river sends my way, I want to stay steady on my rock of mindfulness—observing and connecting with my experience, instead of being lost in it.