Love and Safety

Beacause  at the end of the day, blood and marriage shouldn’t be the primary determining factor when building a household that is best for the individuals living in it. Children and the adults who raise them do best in families filled with love and safety. 

 Eugene Scott, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/11/opinion/nuclear-families-nontraditional-pride-month/

the most powerful collective action you can take.

In just five months, you will be able to do something more than wring your hands, march in your communities, shake your head, call your congressman, or pull your hair out in frustration.

You will be able to vote — the most powerful collective action you can take.

 Dan Rather

The Chase

Last night Lulu saw a bunny as we parked the car on the top of Walnut Hill. When I opened the door she dashed over my shoulder and was gone! I ran calling her name. She had entered a ten inch gap in someone's gate and was circling around their backyard with her red leash dangling. I was shouting her name while running after her. Luckily I was able to stomp on the leash and stop her. I was shaking all over grateful that nobody was home and many other variables that could have been worse. I imagine someone seeing a hilarious clip on their security camera of a 65 year old lady in a big straw hat chasing her dog.

What you’re trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There’s no objective reason why they’re right. They just sound right to me.

MARTIN AMIS

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know. The page, the page, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

ANNIE DILLARD

Use the Energy of the Fear

 Understanding Anxiety as Energy

Before diving into techniques, it’s helpful to recognize that anxiety is more than just a mental or emotional experience—it’s a full-body reaction. When you feel anxious, your body prepares for action, flooding you with adrenaline and increasing your alertness. While this reaction was originally designed to keep us safe from physical dangers, today it can be redirected to keep us focused and motivated.

So why does understanding this matter? When you view anxiety as a source of energy rather than a roadblock, you can harness it as a resource to take control of your life. This mindset shift is the first key to transforming anxiety into motivation.

 Reframe Your Fear

Anxiety is often connected to fear—fear of failure, rejection, or uncertainty. To turn anxiety into motivation, the first step is reframing how you think about that fear. Instead of seeing it as a sign of weakness or something to avoid, start thinking of anxiety as a signal that something matters to you. This shift from “fear as failure” to “fear as fuel” can be empowering and even exciting.

When you’re anxious, your body and mind are ready for action. But without an outlet, that energy can spiral into stress or even panic. By taking small, manageable actions, you redirect this energy toward something constructive. 

source

Rebecca Solnit

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates and the symphony resounds. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

— REBECCA SOLNIT

When your gratitude for world and people around you is in place, no matter what you're going through, you're in a good peaceful place. 

Liza Minnelli memoir Kids, Wait Till you Hear This (page 312)

Pickle Red Onions in Pickle Juice!

Consider throwing in a smashed garlic clove, a few peppercorns, or a dash of hot sauce to give the onions an extra kick!

listen to the language we use

Writing can be a very dramatic pursuit, full of catastrophes and disasters and emotion and attempts that fail. My path as a writer became much more smooth when I learned that, when things aren’t going well, to regard my struggles as curious, not tragic…. We have this very German, romantic idea that if you’re not in pain, and if you’re not causing pain by making your art, then you’re not really doing it right. I’ve always questioned that.… I mean, listen to the language we use to talk about creative process: “Open up your vein and bleed.” “Kill your darlings.” I always want to weep when people speak about a project and say: “I think I finally broke its back.” That is a really fucked-up relationship you have with your work! You’re trying to crack its spine? No wonder you’re so stressed out! You’ve made this into battlefield! We should know enough about the world to realize that anything that you fight fights you back.

ELIZABETH GILBERT

The Domino Effect

The past two Saturdays after my swim I read all day recovering from the week which lead to exceptional Sundays. I have a lot more respect for rest and reading days. 

Yesterday after many rainy weekends I decided to seize the moment and weed wack our tiny yard while Bill was home to help with electrical cords and dog supervision. It took 10 minutes. 

Then I had an idea. I suggested we move our round glass outdoor table and 3 chairs and umbrella off of the cement to the newly whacked yard. Then I saw I finally needed to rake the leaves after nine months! I dumped them over the fence into our overgrown big yard to continue composting.

 

The table is now hidden and buffered by the evergreen bush so we no longer have a view of the drug dealer car in the shared parking lot which has been 24/7 nonstop parade of addicted zombies coming up and down the driveway. We can repossess our property by being in it!

We ate supper (leftover mashed potatoes with scallions and kale) under the colorful umbrella at the table and enjoyed hearing the sounds of happy children playing tag in the lot. A few hours earlier the kids had a BBQ with their families on the far side of the parking lot under the big trees. Perhaps they were feeling the same way. 

 

Then it started to rain but we stayed out for a few more minutes. We got up and gathered our dishes and closed the umbrella. As soon as we were inside the wind picked up and there was a downpour.

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

REBECCA SOLNIT

It makes me sad to see how far too often people are loved when they are fake, and hated when they are truthful. 

– Karen Salmansohn

Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace. Pema Chödrön

Sometimes I think it would comforting to invent a new set parents.

I make things. 

Why not create a new set of parents?

For starters they would be receptive and kind. 

They wouldn't try to impress me or blame me for everything. 

They wouldn't be addicted to alcohol and pills. 

They'd have love in their hearts.

They'd show up! 

I don't write like my mother, but for many years I spoke like her, and her particular, timorous relationship with language has shaped my own. There are people who move confidently within their own horizons of speech; whether it is cockney, estuary, RP or valley girl, they stride with the unselfconscious ease of a landowner on his own turf. My mother, Rose, was never like that. She never owned the language she spoke. Her displacement within the intricacies of English class, and the uncertainty that went with it, taught her to regard language as something that might go off in her face, like a letter bomb. A word bomb. I've inherited her wariness, or more accurately, I learnt it as a child. I used to think I would have to spend a lifetime shaking it off. Now I know that's impossible, and unnecessary, and that you have to work with what you've got.

IAN McEWAN

Dream

I dreamed I was swimming in a circular blue tile pool. It was doughnut-shaped with a hollow in the center. Another YMCA.

I saw a man driving away with an upholstered chair draped across his windshield blocking the view. That's not good, I thought. He's just going around the corner, someone said. 

I remember you from China town, the driver said to me.

Really? New York Chinatown 1978?

Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist

by Barbara Crooker

Because he can still cause a reaction in me
when he talks about SN2 displacements,
amines and esters looking for receptor sites
at the base of their ketones. Because he lugs
home serious tomes like The Journal of the American
Chemical Society or The Proceedings of the Society
of the Plastics Industry, the opposite of the slim volumes
of poetry with colorful covers that fill my bookshelves.
Because once, years ago, on a Saturday before our
raucous son rang in the dawn, he was just
standing there in the bathroom, out of the shower.
I said Honey, what’s wrong? and he said Oh,
I was just thinking about a molecule.

Because he taught me about sublimation, how
a solid, like ice, can change straight to a gas
without becoming liquid first. Because even
after all this time together, he can still
make me melt.

“Why I Love Being Married to a Chemist” by Barbara Crooker from Les Fauves. © C & R Press, 2017

Peter Grosz

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Peter Grosz is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning writer who has worked for Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Amy Sedaris and can be heard regularly on NPR’s “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!”