Do you like your life?

by Madeline Laughs

A few years ago we moved across the country from a 2500 square foot living space to a beach box that’s not even half as large. Then I took a year off from work and gutted the beach box from top to bottom. The house belongs to my mother in law, so it’s not even a place we can call our own, but we had no idea how long we’d be living in it, and wanted to be comfortable.

The stress of it all finally got the best of me and one afternoon while my husband and I were making sandwiches together, I complained mightily. He listened quietly until I finished and then he asked, “Do you like your life?”

It stopped me cold.  

Strong women

by Madeline Laughs

I’ve thought a lot about what the term strong women means to me over the past few years. I think I have been blessed to know and to have known quite a few of them throughout my lifetime.

To be strong, in every sense of the word, brings to mind a well muscled machine of a body, but the strongest women are not always the most physically fit among us. I know some ladies with the rock hard abs and the feisty attitudes and have always been skeptical of their bellowing rebelliousness and in-your-face posturing. To me, this blatant show of fist shaking doesn’t speak as much of being strong, as it does of being fearful.  

Such Sweet Peace

by Regyna Longlank

Such sweet peace as follows strife
In the eye of the hurricane
I live my life

kag 1989

Me & You

by Regyna Longlank

satellite image courtesy of NASA

Still trying to understand past relationships
and embarking on my own, with a friend
seeing again what I saw as a child
and bringing new understanding
an older point of view, more aged   

The Shadows

by Regyna Longlank

digital image by Regyna Longlank

the shadows, clouds
which affect you in the air
are different from those
which fall on the ground

the angle is changed
the view altered
and the light which falls
onto the ground is seen
glowing, green and white
unlike anything else