Marriage is Strained After Having Children Being a parent is hard. But being a parent is really hard on a marriage. New parents report eight times more arguments than non-parents. Studies show that relationship quality plummets by nearly 70% after the birth of the first child, when couples experience more conflict, less intimacy, and growing […]
Meditations on Humpback Whales: Mindfulness of Sights and Sounds
On a recent trip to Africa, I climb the bluff from which, I’d been told, I could see whales breaching. I have the strand to myself; September in Tofo, Mozambique, is not the season for beach-goers. I stand like a sentry as I gaze out at the Indian Ocean. I’m familiar with the Pacific, but […]
The Church of the Backyard: Finding Comfort in Nature
For many years I have met with a group of women one Friday morning a month. Around our kitchen tables, we light a candle, have a moment of quiet, and then sip tea together as we read from a variety of spiritual works. In recent years, we often turn to poetry. Most of our meetings […]
Falling in Love Again with Your Partner: Love Maps, Friendship, and Staying Connected
When love is new, we ask questions to get to know our partner well. As Mandy Len Catron wrote for The New York Times in her charming summary of a study 20 years ago by psychologist Arthur Aron, we like learning about the person we love, but over time we forget to keep learning. In […]
The New Year: Rebirth and obstacles
By the third or fourth week of January, many of us are reevaluating our lives. We’ve either made resolutions (and perhaps already broken them) or we are resisting this ancient practice with awareness of the years of collapsed intentions when previous New Year’s hopes didn’t pan out. Yet we continue to be drawn to the symbolic cycle […]
