Fran Wescott

I am filled with love and light. I need only open my eyes to see the light and open my heart to feel the warmth of that love. For some reason I’ve found at this time of year that I’m resistant to this idea. With the onslaught of the holiday kerfuffle, I was grumpy about what I anticipated but unwilling to adopt a different approach. I was resistant to acknowledgement that family holiday celebrations can be pleasant, abiding instead with a stubborn inner dialogue about what in those observances is less than magical. I was just feeling like and acting like a Poopy Head. I wanted to cry and whine and pout about the lack of joy I felt for this time of year. I didn’t feel connected to it, and found instead that it amounted to an element of my personal “work plan.” And I couldn’t find a way to talk about it since a) it’s not up to my peeps to "fix" this issue, and b) the sharing of shitty feelings about the holidays is the relationship equivalent of kicking a puppy -- ra

Winter Lessons I deeply resent the Hallmark Channel. We had a good thing going for a while -- I turned to them for some vapid-but-salving entertainment. I turned to them for the simple pleasures of a baker who gives away cups of coffee to her regular clients and who assists the impossibly beautiful cop in his murder investigations. I turned to them for the lush escape of a beautiful, beloved  renovator who transforms homes in a small coastal town in the Northwest… and who assists the impossibly beautiful cop in his murder investigations. There was always great scenery (many filmed in NW Canada), super outerwear (who knew that any one baker / decorator / home renovator could have so many stylish, statement-making coats in her wardrobe?) and pleasant, if predictable, outcomes. And then the holidays arrived (in October…) and things went South for us. Now when I tune in, I’m confronted with lots of shiny people who suffer implausible gaps in their perfect, shiny lives and the ent

Imperfect I was corresponding with a friend of mine and she shared that certain momentous events had her spinning. That resonated with me. I don’t know when in the last 30 years I ceased to enjoy that sensation -- but spinning and reeling are no longer on my list of Top-10 Beloved Sensations. Dusty and I are standing in the center of a circle spinning alternatively in both directions and I am trying in the midst of this unfocused, unsettling time to find my center. I vacillate as I shift my weight against the whirling events of the day -- one moment relying on the excitement of a departure from the familiar; the next hunkering down at home. What an amazing privilege to get to redefine one’s center of gravity -- perhaps away from the care of now-grown children and more toward one’s own growth and care -- but it leaves me a little breathless and nauseated, too. The older folk in my universe are doing fine, but they are – conversely – pretty much at a standstill. They are trying

Darker My family call me “Mary Fucking Sunshine”. My mother – who claims never to have uttered a coarse word before her progeny developed a whopping case of potty mouth – was the one to apply that moniker to me. I feel sure my nickname was meant both as a loving statement of support for my positive outlook, as well as a dig to point up how annoying that sunny outlook can be. There’s been some dark shit going down these days. I thought last fall when the election debacle unfolded that I had a bead on the shape of darker things to come. I thought that I’d be able to imagine the various policy disasters that one could easily – if grimly – anticipate. But then you fold into this toxic mix a frothy measure of natural disasters, the death of inspiring people – both within the immediate family and the broader human family – and some challenging-though-natural familial developments, and you’ve got a recipe for some serious, I’m-not-fucking-around Doom and Gloom. And so, as my nickna

Empty Philosophers have asserted for thousands of years that we are not defined by our bodies, by our deeds, by our feelings, certainly not by our possessions or even by our intentions. These thinkers assert that humanity is defined by spirit, and we’re encouraged to think of ourselves as an empty bowl – my body is the bowl and my spirit resides in the emptiness of the bowl. As a woman actively seeking to define for myself the space between my feelings, my intentions and my thoughts, I ask of myself: what occupies that space? On my best days, it’s love. And maybe on my worst days, it’s love.   My watch word for two years running has been “compassion” and when seeking compassion for myself and others I’ve come to find it only where love resides. My heart has also taught me that love is limitless. I have no fear of giving away too much love. I don’t subscribe to cautions about forgiving the unworthy, or trusting people too much. Where love is concerned, I’m trying to honor my “al

Finding The Path I have discovered that my grandfather (born in 1896) was a Princeton classmate of F Scott Fitzgerald (also born in 1896). I should have known this. And in fact, he mentioned once when cautioning his grandchildren not to take on too many distractions in college that he’d told Scott Fitzgerald the very same thing. To wit: “drop something or drop out.” Fitzgerald decided ultimately on the latter. I should have put two and two together and arrived at the fact that Pa had attended college with this great American author. While I found several points of similarity, there were important differences between these two men. My grandfather took time from school to serve as a 2 nd Lieutenant in France during WWI, finishing his Princeton degree when he returned (thankfully) in 1918. Fitzgerald left Princeton around the same time, but largely because he was doing so poorly in his studies. Fitzgerald reportedly floundered a bit and then took a commission as a 2 nd Lieutena

Zen Movement? Nothing in my aesthetic could be considered "Zen," but even so, I find myself clearing shit out of our house with slow-but-steady efficiency. One good reason for my commitment to this odious process is so that we can save a space for the big, grown-up lives that The Girl and The Boy will be cultivating over the next few years. I am also, however, more keenly aware of the need to cultivate space in our home for my own life, my own thoughts. That's such an odd thing to pronounce. I could just have my thoughts. But I do believe that in much the same way we all need to cultivate sleep hygiene; I am finding the need to cultivate thought hygiene. And this will influence my decision-making around which shit must go. I shall weed mercilessly (but carefully) the shit I've saved for the kids. Neither child wants all their elementary school art projects: I shall exercise thoughtful curation of each young'un's "collection" of repr

Teahouse This weekend I treated myself to an excursion into the Orange County countryside with my sister. Nestled in the middle of nowhere is an open-air teahouse crafted out of reclaimed wood and perched on top of an assortment of re-purposed shipping containers. Visitors to this aerie get a second-story view of more than a dozen raised flower and herb beds. There’s the vivid saffron yellow of the flowers that eagerly wave in the breeze as if to say to passersby and onlookers: “pick me!” Next to them is the spiky purple flower of the lavender plant. Lavender is the quintessential show-off plant: both herb and flower. Tall, impossible color, overly proud – perhaps even confident that it will be noticed before the saffron yellow of the neighboring bed. In spite of the cheerful beckoning of that sunny flower, lavender will garner the most attention with all that exotic fragrance and color. Standing watch behind this competition is a bed of very tall, very consistently-sized flowers

Stew All I’ve got is a stinkin’ analogy: You know how you make a giant pot of stew (of any kind) and you eat stew for a week in an effort to empty the pot? You eat stew every day and you exercise massive gratitude and you thank the universe for stew and you practice intentionality and savor every morsel. You observe reasonable portions and try not to gorge yourself on stew and at the end of the week you look in the bottom of the Tupperware and you still have about three bites of stew left. Before you move on to the next awesome – perhaps even improved -- meal for the coming week, you need to figure out how to dispense with those three fucking bites of stew. There’s no eating the stew – you’re done with stew. You can’t just pour the soapy wash water into the Tupperware – you’ll end up with nasty, soapy stew instead of a clean Tupperware. What do you do? You have to empty the damn Tupperware. So, in my experience of reality, the stew is this most recent phase and view of my life

Launch Code It seems so very odd and even counter-intuitive that in one of the most important relationships of our lives the goal is to say good bye. That doesn’t even cover what that actually means. Think of it this way: you have a cellular connection with this little human that came from your body. You nurture them, protect them (yes, to some degree we protect them) and try to teach or at least inform them. You follow closely even when they are experimenting with distance and freedom. You listen and watch and try to learn from them – who they are, where they say they want to go. You try to foster and maintain a connection so that as they pull away and if by some miracle they ask for help, you’ll actually be there and poised to offer it. Or, at least to know what’s going on enough to provide comfort, if not a miraculous “fixit” solution. So, you’ve done all this work, you’ve crafted and maintained a flawed but intricate connection to this beautiful human who’s only just begi

The Wild Woman I’ve been thinking a lot about my Grandmother recently. While I’m grateful for the many inspiring women in my world, one of the qualities I admired most about my Mother’s Mother was her ability to have fun. Of course, I know my Grandmother endured all manner of life-altering challenges – she was not immune from life’s weathering ways. But she was made of an especially tough mettle. In fact, I wonder if her mettle wasn’t forged from her ability to enjoy life when the opportunities for doing so emerged. For as many sad times as she survived, boy did she also enjoy some awesome wild times. My Grandmother was, in fact, a Wild Woman. When my Grandmother and her best friend went to Europe together in the summer of 1929 they based themselves in Paris. In the fall, they made their way to Italy, where they ditched the chaperone and went to Algiers. During this excursion, news of the American stock market crash finally reached them and in response they made their way to