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Thanks Given
Thanksgiving has something to do with wherever you find that moment of transcendence - among trees in a desert city or at the break of day on the edge of Mexico's largest lake. It's about finding the light. Seeing the light. It's about Annie Lamott's Three Essential Prayers - Help, Thanks, Wow:
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home is where the heart breaks … but say nothing
Although I left Northern Ireland over three decades ago, it is still home, still the place and time from which it is impossible to emerge unscathed. None of us got away scot-free. With an apprehension I can’t quite explain, I watched Say Nothing, the series based on the best-selling book by New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Predictably, within the first few moments of the first episode, familiar feelings of revulsion and sadness rose in my throat. It is a harrowing scene that recreates the abduction of Jean McConville from her home in Divis Flats, Belfast, in 1972. A widow and mother of ten, she was one of the…
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when all that’s left of us is love
November 15 2013 That morning, I was uneasy, unable to shake a feeling that something was wrong. When multiple phone calls to my home in Phoenix home, I finally called my friend and asked her to drive to my house where she discovered my husband had died. In another time zone, on another continent, on the other end of the line, I remember feeling detached from news that couldn’t possibly be true. As the reality set in, I was desperate to get away from rainy, rural South Derry and back home to Phoenix, to our cozy little house with its pink door and its sun-splashed walls. I wanted to check…
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Anahorish, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Art, Awesome Women, Great Advice, Human Rights, Justice, Language matters, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Oprah Winfrey, Peace, Phoenix, Politics, Prop 300, Punishment, Seamus Heaney, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Theater
with all boldness
On her afternoon talk show some years ago, Oprah Winfrey shared a list of eight powerful women she thought we should all know— as if we might encounter any of them at the grocery store or on the bus. I remember one of them got my attention—Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps better known to some of you as Nancy McNally from the The West Wing, or as Gloria in Nurse Jackie. She told Oprah that woman should be bolder; that we should argue as much as our male counterparts, and that we shouldn’t try so hard to avoid conflict. We should speak up and out, she said. Boldly. We should, and…
