I have a friend who has moved fifty-nine times in her life, and most of these moves happened before the age of consent—before the age when she had any part to play in making the decision to go. As I face the latest move in my own life, I have compassion for that child. Moving is never easy. When you move, there is always so …
Throughout the whole of human history, people have lived in family groups. In my own life, for a long time I thought it was important for me not to do so. My parents did the best they could, both of them, but they were what’s known as functioning alcoholics, and once I earned a college degree, I moved as far away from them as I …
This week in a writing group I’m involved with, my friend Jen Maurice wrote about a time that she identified as being “the happiest and, perhaps, the most stable and productive days of my life.” I was greatly intrigued by this assessment. It inspired me to ask myself what part of my life has been that for me? I closed my eyes and asked the …
Yesterday it was a shock to find in my post office box a letter from Donald J. Trump. At one point in my life, I did think of myself as a Republican—but then I turned seventeen, and civil rights became a personal issue. That was almost sixty-three years ago, and I am not exaggerating when I say I have never looked back. I don’t think …
Joe Biden and I both tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, July 17. For the next few days, I kept expecting the president to experience this as his turning point. The debacle of his televised debate loomed ever larger in my own mind. Would he finally see, with this further debility of the virus, that it was time for him to retire from the field …
Lately, I’ve been thinking about friendship—the loving connections between friends. In recent years, I’ve become quite a loner, but only in an incidental sort of way. I enjoy alone time—and probably need to have it—but it is contact with other people that gives my life its savor. I live alone, but I need to have a real conversation with at least one person every day. …
I am sliding into my eightieth year. No, I’m not going to be eighty soon. I’ll be seventy-nine, which is—as I’m saying—the beginning of the eightieth year of my life. I still feel unaccountably young, and one way I manage that is to have some older friends. When asked her age, my friend Marilee Peterson usually glares and says, “I am older than dirt!” One …
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to create a home for myself. This is something I have done, on my own and from scratch, ten times in my adult life. I’m not talking about simply moving, as I did from California to Oklahoma at age ten with my parents and younger brother. This did present difficulties, but creating a home was my mother’s …
Certain memories are like touchstones. I come back to them again and again, in the same way I once would run my fingers over a lucky stone I used to keep in my pocket. This particular memory is a reminder that I am blessed. It was a statement I heard, but heard in my own mind, from a deceased holy man I had never met …
I said recently that I hadn’t had a choice about spending time in an ashram. It was a surprising thing to say, but it was accurate. Of course, you always do have a choice, but there are times when one option is so obviously what you need that you know it would be irresponsible to choose anything else. Why was this so? I had been …
I'm Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.