GUEST POST by MARY LOU MACKIN Before I retired my life was safe and predictable. I couldn’t imagine what it would mean not to work. I was responsible for a large publishing team, two demanding authors, and a product line that delivered the lion’s share of company revenues year after year. I was an adept problem solver. I flew under [...]
Pat Taub
I’ve always tried to find reasons to be hopeful when the world is dark. But after reading Substack posts by Caitlin Johnstone and Jena Brown, who describe love as central to their resistance, I decided to try prioritizing love over hope in my own activism. Unlike hope which can be amorphous and intangible, like hoping for the best in people, [...]
Pat Taub
In our new upside-down world, Britain wins the dubious honor for taking terrorism to an absurd level, arresting hundreds of their elderly for terrorism simply for holding signs in support of Palestine Action, newly proscribed as a terrorist organization under the Terrorism Act of 2000. Succumbing to Zionist pressure, Palestine Action was labeled [...]
Pat Taub
One of the positives of aging is living an unhurried life with ample down time, offering opportunities for reflection. These moments have led me to conceive of aging in a spiritual context, giving my life new meaning. What do I mean by spiritual aging? It’s reframing ordinary moments as sacred, casting a gratitude perspective on relationships [...]
Pat Taub
This past weekend I traveled from my home in Portland, Maine to Oneonta, New York to attend the 90th birthday party of a dear friend I have known for 50 years. I wasn’t prepared for the time travel my visit set off. I kept bouncing around from the present to the past to the future and back again. I met Dave, the birthday celebrant, when [...]
Pat Taub
Almost two years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, 60,000 have died, not counting all those buried under the rubble. Among the causalities: 1,000 men, women and children gunned down while racing to grab meager boxes of food, along with the deliberate murders of 1,000 doctors and nurses and 232 journalists. Now things have cruelly escalated. [...]
Pat Taub
Practically everyone I know is feeling overwhelmed by Herr Donald’s rapid-fire attacks on all we hold dear, which includes police state tactics in arresting migrants, gutting federal funds for housing, daycare, medical benefits, and public schools, while supplying bombs nonstop to perpetuate the live-streamed genocide in Gaza. In general [...]
Pat Taub
In our increasingly unsettled times, I treasure my close female friends who offer support and solace for navigating the road ahead. When I told a friend I was blogging about women’s friendships, she good-naturedly commented, “If grown women had pajama parties, they wouldn’t need therapists.” She was referring to the close connections [...]
Pat Taub
To all in despair over T’s Big Bad bill with its cruel cuts to health care and food stamps in favor of record increases to ICE and the military, along with T’s nonstop support of Israel’s ever escalating genocide in Gaza, let me offer a different perspective. If you just focus on the headlines, you’re missing the cracks, where [...]
Pat Taub
I have a friend who’s been telling me for years that she’s going to take Italian lessons. Another friend has a long-standing dream to visit Japan. For just as long, every time I pass an art supply store, I revisit my dream of taking up watercolors. We’re members of the late-in-life dream club whose engine is stalled. But it doesn’t [...]
Pat Taub