After considerable delay and false starts, I am back with a new blog.  It took considerable thought to come up with the title “Readings and Writing,” but in the end it seemed the obvious choice. Simply put, here is where I will be writing about the things I am reading: whether in the cards, in my beloved books or in the air.

Several years ago, I saw a therapist who devoted week after week to persuading me that “sensitivity” was a gift. The first time she uttered the word, I recoiled as if she had called me a particularly bad word. I am from The Bronx after all, and that is a place that values the ability to look, feel and talk tough.  Sensitivity? Fuggedaboutit. She may have said “sensitive” but I heard words like loser, victim, crybaby and completely-useless-human-being.

This is a tough world, I remember saying.  I couldn’t be sensitive AND strong. I couldn’t be sensitive AND survive. I knew this, just as I knew there was no hope for me to be myself. I had to put on the layers – the motorcycle jackets, the combat boots, the scowls – because I had to. End of story.

And yet, through no real fault or effort of my own, the whole structure I had built to cover up and protect that sensitivity started to fall away upon the birth of my first child. It wasn’t a pretty story but it brought me here: to the Pacific Northwest,  to this blog and  to the knowledge that I am sensitive and can read things – in nature, in lives, in cards.

And I’ve grown to like it that way.  Much better, it turns out, than motorcycle jackets and combat boots.