Glorious Ordinary Podcast

In the preface to my last essay, I said I would lay down all complicated feelings and enjoy my son’s wedding. I managed to do both. But all the feels went somewhere, and I learned (again), though I already know, I’m not the only one trying to let go, to make sense of them, to put them down.

Lucille Clifton’s poem, “blessing the boats, was the centerpiece of my wedding toast. It was especially apt since we had the ceremony on a ninet...

My nourishment journey started in college over forty years ago when I found myself far from family, alone with beliefs about my body and food. Learning to feed myself, and learning how food affects me emotionally and mentally as well as physically has been a life long experiment, maybe more like a roller coaster.

Before we find ourselves reaching for food to alleviate distress, can we consider which foods truly nourish us so that wh...

What else is there? Only an all-encompassing Love beyond the mind.

What else is there? Again, love. Love is always there. No matter whether we know it or not.

Sometimes we need something to disarm us. Once disarmed, we find love where we least expect it. We recognize it, even without an apology.

If you want to read or listen to more of my essays, check out my Substack, Glorious Ordinary https://valeriespain.substack.com/

I'm a writer, ...

Perhaps erasure poetry is always inherently a political act, perhaps it is always inherently a violent act. ~Jennifer Chang, poet.

For my erasure poem, “Not An Apology," I used an email my ex-husband sent me after we attended our son’s graduation from nursing school. We had been divorced almost two decades by then.

The first paragraph is blah blah blah about how we worked together to be good parents, but the second caught me by surpr...

(Most of the time) I believe I have to keep noticing beauty, joy and love in the small moments of my life, or else I’ll stop seeing them in our collapsing world.

Growing up is hard. Otherwise everyone would do it. ~Kim Harrison, author

I’m the grandparent who dismantles the family room couch to make forts and other structures for my grandson who’s loved doing this since he was a toddler. Inside the fort I read to him with a flashlig...

I’m writing in a moment of extreme heat in the Northeast United States. Such weather affects how I manage my type 1 diabetes and makes the brain foggy. That distraction made writing this essay a bit of a slog, and the result feels like a bit of a jumble. But a good essay doesn’t lay everything out. The writer points in a direction and hopes the reader will follow. They’ll tell you soon enough if they can’t—or aren’t interested.

So ...

Even when I really believe I have to do such and such a thing / or be at such and such a place, if someone at the height of my frenzy said to me, what would you do if you knew you had a day or a week to live? And if I stopped and sincerely considered it, I bet that whatever I think I absolutely must do, that thing would not appear on that last list of last things to do in life.

What I actually need is fairly simple, and the simplici...

We’re distracted by things outside us. And internally, we distract ourselves as we’ve been trained to do by algorithms, and by devices showing us 30 second video clips that keep us scrolling.

Pausing is radical because you stop.

Listen and discover how to be radical.

Valerie is a passionate writer of the bi-weekly newsletter, Glorious Ordinary, and the sole producer of this podcast (ChtGPT did help her write the show notes but only th...

I keep trying to comprehend what's unfolding nationally and looking for signs of it where I live, in city government, in the schools, in my neighborhood.

How are people I know well, or not so well, affected? How are the people they know affected?

Everything feels very different.

It is and it isn't.

**I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on what’s truly important. To work with me, message me on Substack,...

If you combine the title and tagline of this week's podcast episode, you have the last line of Ada Limón's poem, “During the Impossible Age of Everyone.”

I’ll read the full poem at the end of the episode, but for the last ten days, all I had was that line, and I kept repeating it,

People have done this before, but not us.

**I’m a mindfulness teacher and coach, helping clients focus attention on what’s truly important. To work with me,...