TRUE CRIME - TRUE LOVE MEMOIR

In my search for good news about love, I came across an article on the website of Jim Hopper, PhD. that, as a caregiver, gives me great hope and pause for reflection. Titled Mindfulness and Meditation: Kindness, Compassion & Love, the article gives us a roadmap for cultivating these qualities. In discovering and practicing new…

Barry’s nickname, Ashtar the Magnificent, came about because of his psychic—he called it psycho—ability. I only had to be in the same room with him to feel better.  I wrote briefly about falling in love with my partner Barry 13 years after Vic died (a coworker hunk I’d secretly been in love with), toward the…

Brian Smith, like most of the firemen at the department, feared Jaku. After swearing me to secrecy he told me that the firefighters laughed at Jaku’s stories to appease him, but they all knew better than to believe the outrageous sexually oriented lies he’d told about me. Brian said the guys knew Jaku lied whenever…

It happened in October of ’83, a few weeks after I transferred from the Army Fire Department into the alarm room on Whaler Air Force Base. I’d just finished my initial two weeks of dispatching training on day shift, and was working the midnight shift solo. I’d turned the lights down low to keep an…

Barricaded in an airport hotel room in Bangkok on January 5th, her passport seized by Saudi authorities, 18-year-old Saudi teen Rahaf al-Qunun desperately wrote her first-ever tweet in Arabic, “I’m the girl who ran away to Thailand. I’m now in real danger because the Saudi embassy is trying to force me to return. I’m afraid.…

The first time something otherworldly happened to me, I was four years old. Drawn like a magnet to a desert ironwood tree in Tucson, Arizona, I wrapped my little arms as far as they’d go around the big knobby trunk. I’ll never forget the energy like electricity slowly snaking through me. I felt so alive.…

Living in the countryside of central Spain in the early sixties felt magical for 8-year-old me. I still remember our home address: Patrocinio (he who gives his protection), Gomez (man) Tres (three), Canillejas (a region 5 miles northeast of Madrid). Although roving bands of gypsies traveled in tattered wagons through the countryside, these fast-change artists…

I’m a longtime follower of the teachings of the entity called Seth, channeled through writer Jane Roberts, his words transcribed by her husband Rob Butts. I continue to embrace Seth’s core teachings that consciousness creates matter; that each individual creates his or her own reality through their thoughts, beliefs and expectations; and that the “point of…

On 23 December 2018, while digging for positive news stories, I uncovered an inspirational story reported by CNN’s Impact Your World. Throughout the year, CNN brings us stories of average people who’ve discovered extraordinary ways to help others. Although their backgrounds and circumstances are different, their motives are the same: to create positive change and…

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve’s eve, in 2012, when Barry and I lived in a condo complex in Mililani Town, I was hanging out with the neighborhood kids—mostly girls, a couple of boys—at the new jungle gym outside B building. The girls, would-be gymnasts all, jumped and twirled and did amazing flips on the…

The chubby man’s mirrored goggles reflected sunlight as he skillfully performed an underwater flip in the Nuuanu YMCA pool, barely stirring the surface of the water at the east end of his swimming lane. His yellow fins and flaccid arms propelled him swiftly toward me. I hoped he’d be friendly. Swimming pool rules dictated you…

I came across a hopeful article in the New York Times saying that science can provide accurate news to counteract the fake news threatening to engulf us. Good news indeed! We are increasingly assaulted by “alternative truths.” Climate change is a myth, according to many, despite plentiful evidence to the contrary. The mass shootings in…