Conscious life, hear me roar. I recently got a direct message on Facebook from a high school friend I haven’t talked to in many years. “Do you still have that picture of you and the ghost in Africa?” He wrote. I sat there staring at the screen, thinking it funny that after so many years, […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. I have just returned back home from running around Manhattan and New York Fashion Week. As you might imagine, an intense week full of long legged runway models, moody designer presentations, and the deep bass beats of stylish music gives New York City the air of theater, sex, and retail […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Each day we wake up with hope. You may not realize it, but every morning when you brush your teeth, make a part in your hair, swipe your metro card or open the front door, you are subconsciously convinced that today will be a new, hopefully better day. If you […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. I was brought up Catholic by two parents born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The seaside city is still dotted with my French Canadian relatives who must still believe that religious statues bleed and cry when we sin and masturbate. If you go today to the Sacred Heart cemetery […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. When I was 19, living in Italy and then backpacking Europe, I re-entered my life back here in the States with a whole new perspective on what I would want from the future. Oh, I could envision this virgin bucket list and sitting here writing this – at this very […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. It could have been when I listened to Nick Hahn, former CEO and co-founder of Cotton, Inc., a keynote speaker at a recent sustainable fashion event at FIT. It might have been when he told the audience that Monsanto may have made his company better and that the use of […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. It should never be all that surprising when idiocy takes hold of a culture. We allow it to with every right we give up, every piece of fast fashion we purchase, every texted bastardization of the English language (YOLO!) and every time we wait in line at a Dunkin Donuts […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. A friend commented on a recent column I wrote, saying, “The last time I went to hear a band in Boston, I realized I’d become the creepy older guy in the back of the room.” “Creepy?” I asked him. “We’ve become creepy?” Christ. A few weeks ago I hit an […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Coming home on a ferry Sunday from Martha’s Vineyard, I pulled out my iPhone and checked emails. I should have waited until Monday. A close friend emailed me she’d had the most bizarre weekend ever: running over a stray dildo in a bike lane, a homeless man telling her she’d […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Poet Mary Oliver took on hero status for me when I was 24, living in Portland, Oregon, and in the only “bad” relationship I have ever had. What always comes as a complete surprise to me is that I was introduced to the poet through him. He was a law […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. I met a friend last week for lunch in New York City who knows a lot about sewing, knitting, using one’s hands to make and yet she brought up a really good point: how to change the image of women who “craft.” “And yet keep its very essence intact,” she […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Two-Volume Novel The sun’s gone dim, and The moon’s turned black; For I loved him, and He didn’t love back. – Dorothy Parker My daughter came home from school the other day with this Dorothy Parker poem scribbled in 11-year-old penmanship down her palm and onto her wrist. “I got […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Even when I was little, I knew my grandmother was a deeply sad woman. In fact, my earliest memory of my grandmother is the one of me listening to her weeping quietly in her bedroom when she didn’t know I was hiding in her closet (having just found a bevy […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. No matter where you live, no matter how many life experiences you have, and no matter how much self-confidence you hold, there is nothing to stop certain men from treating you like a little girl. Blame it on some bizarre, existential threat that men – and at times, other women […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. Before there were foodies, there were hunter-gatherers. If you were hungry around 10,000 years ago, you likely had a good sharp spear, a stone implement, or a bow and arrow to help. You moved stealthily through grassy inlets, dark forests, and rough waves, or the tall grasses of a savannah, […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. I think the first time I became aware of trash and the environment was when the Keep America Beautiful commercial of Iron Eyes Cody came out. (As drums pound and smokestacks puff out fumes, Cody looks at a highway coated in debris. A bag of trash is thrown at him. […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. “I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.” – H.G. Wells My oldest brother, whom I had not talked to or seen in some 10 years, just left my house. For years, I’ve envisioned all the things I wanted to tell him. All that […]

  Conscious life, hear me roar. Santa Fe, New Mexico is home to one of my favorite coffee shops, the Aztec St. Café. When I lived there, I would spend hours with the locals, smoking American Spirit cigarettes and drinking strong coffee, including a too-sexy-for-his-own-good Taos Indian man, two actresses from New York City, a […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. I hate Christmas. If you like Christmas in the least, steer clear, or I may just ruin it for you…on every level possible. Blame this on the holiday’s predictability, its waste, its hypocritical platform where we give to receive some forced satisfaction that somebody cares about us, throw in a […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. From the day you are born, your family, to some degree, defines who you are. How you interpret that connection may change in stages as you get older, but you will always be linked to the over-achieving mother, the annoying sister who gets better grades than you, the father who […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. When I was 21, I set sail on an old cargo ship for Europe and North Africa. Two years prior, I’d finished college in Italy, had backpacked Europe and Tunisia by myself, and had finally come back to Cape Cod – as you might imagine, a fully changed woman. It […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. The night before Thanksgiving, my family was safely tucked in their beds all under one roof. With my parents visiting for the holiday, we play a little bed scramble: My mom always takes my daughter’s bed upstairs, my daughter and I sleep in my bed, my husband sleeps on the […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. When I was around 12 I helped my father gut a deer. That night, before anything happened, my mother and I were talking softly by a crackling fire. It was November, with darkness falling early and the wood’s silence deafening, even perched on a cliff overlooking the choppy waves of […]

Conscious life, hear me roar. You see me on the streets of the city, a tall, dark-haired woman you guess to be in her thirties. That’s thanks to lots of organic creams and copious amounts of ingested water; I have just turned 41. In fact, I hear it all the time: “I’d never guess you […]