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LIFE & LIVING

A good story can change the way you see the world!

stephanieraffelock

Jul 10, 2016
3 min

Our Breaking Heart

My heart won’t stop aching for the cops shot to death while they were trying to protect the protesters. I think about their families and their children and the big gaping wound it has left. Everywhere, the light of life is being snuffed out in our world and no one can see in all this darkness. And politicians have been greedy and lying for so long that no one remembers the truth. Public service is just a quaint term that doesn’t mean anything, anymore. Only losers serve, isn’

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stephanieraffelock

Jul 27, 2014
4 min

Is Age Just A Number?

The impervious feeling of youth is a delicious drunk of newness and firsts: first apartment, first true love, first heartbreak; the delight of garage sales and thrift shops, that furnish the backdrop upon which one begins to build a life, blissfully unaware of the baggage of childhood that follows them into independence and self-sufficiency. In my twenties, I surfed in the mornings with Bernie, napped in the afternoons and then waited cocktails at night to pay for a life styl

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stephanieraffelock

Aug 19, 2013
8 min

Letting Go

Each year I plan a retreat for my community. This year I am bringing Dr. James Finley to Boulder, CO on September 20, 21 and 22, 2013 to lead a retreat on Meister Eckhart and Letting Go. This is an interview that I conducted with Dr. Finley a couple of weeks ago. To learn more about the retreat and how to attend, please visit: http://www.finleyretreat.com “Letting Go” is a phrase employed by psychologists and theologians alike that inspires and encourages us to loosen our psy

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stephanieraffelock

Jul 16, 2013
4 min

Barefoot Wild

At four my parents divorced and my father relocated to Glacier National Park, which presented a whole different pallet of nature than Carlsbad’s desert. In that park, I climbed up the steep hill next to the cabin and ran to the bottom, arms out stretched as if in flight. I gathered huckleberries for pies that my sister made and stood at the kitchen window watching a bear cub take our rug off the clothes line and carry it up a tree. My parent’s divorce created an interesting p

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stephanieraffelock

Jul 12, 2013
3 min

We Are Voices In A Rising Chorus

It was soft at first. The words of a small Pakistani girl named Malala who said “educate girls,” and strung together sentences on a blog of activism, using the power of speech to such a degree as to bring the Taliban to hunt her, kill her, a fourteen year old girl. They could not kill her and they fled her wounded body, trembling in the kind of fear that only cowards know. Her voice became stronger and today she spoke before the United Nations about the power of education. S

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stephanieraffelock

May 20, 2013
2 min

With Wild Abandon

The chores of Saturday somehow soothe me. The act of putting things in their place marks the ending and the beginning of the cycle. I love to have my life ordered. It makes me feel secure. So it was in this frame of mind that I stopped at the light on McCasslin Boulevard and saw to my right two young women of 15 or 16 on their bikes, waiting for the walking sign. They were wearing plaid cotton pajama bottoms and matching striped t-shirts, green and white. And even though the

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Sufficiency, Sustainability and the Dreaded Common Good

stephanieraffelock

May 12, 2013
5 min

Sufficiency, Sustainability and the Dreaded Common Good

My Closet (Photo credit: kian esquire) Sufficiency: What is enough? A small closet of clothes that can be worn to the office, and a few things for the weekend—or a walk-in closet filled with fifty pairs of shoes and sweaters that still have the price tag dangling from the sleeve? I happen to love clothes. I like to dress up for work. I like to dress up to have lunch with a friend. In the past I have been known to tell my husband that a woman cannot have too many pairs of blac

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 30, 2013
2 min

I Write My Life

Aside from a few newspaper articles and a couple of magazine pieces (I wrote a piece for Quilter’s Magazine once) and few big blogs like Care2, I am not a widely published or famous writer. I write because I am a writer, one of what I imagine to be millions who get up each day and scale a white screen or blank page, looking for the right turn of phrase to convey the story, the life within life. I blog a couple of times a week, because it just feels right to see a finished pie

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Emotional Balancing Act and Other Musings on What’s Positive and What’s Not

stephanieraffelock

Apr 23, 2013
3 min

Emotional Balancing Act and Other Musings on What’s Positive and What’s Not

I am not certain if “making the world a better place” is something that we are taught or if it’s something that rises up from within us. I don’t remember learning, or even making a decision about trying to leave the world better than I found it—it was just sort-of, kind-of, always with me and one day I woke up to it. Maybe it was the prayer that I was afraid of that acted as the alarm clock– the one where you ask: “please show me Your will and Your way,” and then hope that Gr

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 18, 2013
4 min

Number 42

Jackie Robinson swinging a bat in Dodgers uniform, 1954. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Here is something that both of my parents gave to me: they taught me that it is wrong to judge another human being by the color of their skin. I grew up with a sense of inclusiveness. My father told me that it was the contents of a man’s heart by which he should be measured. I never knew any other way of looking at the world. I also grew up in all white neighborhoods and went to all white schoo

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 12, 2013
4 min

Musings on Living Fully

Twenty-five years ago, tennis was my game. I loved the feeling of getting up early and hitting for an hour before work. I loved the cute little tennis outfits. It was a vibrant game and it made me feel vital. But as nature sometimes compels, that particular sport was finite in my life. A scoliotic back and disc degeneration saw to it. Those two physical messengers had their way with me. Eventually I would stop playing tennis, downhill skiing, or any type of aerobics where my

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 9, 2013
2 min

Dreams of a Restless Night

Enormous in the sky, a full moon cast a glittering ribbon of light upon the dark, black waters, a path that if followed leads you to the weaver. Deep, deep, down at the bottom of the ocean, the old woman who does not remember how she came to be among the fishes and the coral, sits at a loom and weaves the loose weave of nets from seaweed strands brought to her by her by dolphins. A shuttlecock made of shell moves back and forth, back and forth in her bony hand, stringing the

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 6, 2013
3 min

Too Big To Function

Bank of America Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia) How did we get so big? When I was a kid there were local shops where I bought school clothes. Even the larger department stores were not in every city. You could tell an area by the uniqueness of its small businesses. Not every town or city looked the same, like it does now. My mom knew the president at the bank. The company that delivered milk and eggs to our house was a local company. These days if you travel the country, you

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 2, 2013
4 min

Ladies of the Canyon

Cover of Ladies of the Canyon Topanga Canyon was a place filled with old homes, built in the 1930’s as resort homes for movie stars. A craggy old canyon that wound it’s way from the ocean on one side to the San Fernando Valley on the other, a haven to artists and musicians in the late 1960’s into the 70’s. There were plenty of trails that led to small streams and rock outcroppings, where you could smoke a doobie and meditate upon the wind rustling through the scrub oak. Someo

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stephanieraffelock

Apr 1, 2013
3 min

Doing the Leibster

Some mornings, most mornings, I wake up with the committee blaring in my head. There is the usual to-do list, then a tremendous amount of junk-copy enticing me to grab and chew on it. I have to sit for a while with my tea and stare into space before everything calms down enough to prioritize the chatter. Some mornings I read something inspirational. Right now that would be Brother David Steindle-Rast–“Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer.” I like the focus of the book. I fin

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stephanieraffelock

Mar 31, 2013
2 min

Songs of Spring

A box was delivered on Saturday. I had ordered some small French pots for the front porch, anticipating the garden center at Home Depot and an afternoon where I could feel the sun on my back as I bent over them with soil and flowers. I like to arrange things on my porch; a wreath of dried spring flowers, pots and planters filled with colors and blooms; a welcoming to guests—“look life is happening here and inside. There is beauty in our world.” I remember a Sunday morning, de

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stephanieraffelock

Mar 26, 2013
2 min

The Story You Are In

Sometimes it seems so clear; where I am and who I am and what story is unfolding. I had grandparents that slept in separate bedrooms; that spat and grunted communications that were interlaced with whiskey bottles and wooden rosary beads. I vowed to never be like them. My husband and I dance a different dance. We will not, cannot sleep apart. I love this story. It is punctuated by small acts of tenderness that reach out like vines into shared cups of warm ginger tea, someone t

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Snog And Dog– Life Lessons From a Labrador Retriever

stephanieraffelock

Mar 24, 2013
3 min

Snog And Dog– Life Lessons From a Labrador Retriever

The word snog is a combination made-up word, for which there is not another word, and that’s why it had to be made up. Snog equals snow and dog, thus snog. But snog is not just a description of the dog. It is, in fact, a state of mind and heart of both dog and person. In my estimation, snog is the most visceral experience of snow that you can get. It is prayer wrapped in great celebration. However, I found out that snog is a real word that has nothing to do with snow or dog i

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stephanieraffelock

Mar 23, 2013
2 min

A Smith Corona and Wild Weeds

Spiral journals came after that, more poetry and lyrics to songs, short stories about my parents divorce. I swooned over Anis Nin and May Sarton; fell in love with T.S. Eliot and Yeats. Discovered Margaret Atwood and imitated all of it in notebook after notebook. I signed up for classes at the Adult Learning Center and got to be the best one. I sat around writer’s tables and dove into short stories, had lengthy conversations with a man old enough to be my father who gave me b

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stephanieraffelock

Mar 18, 2013
1 min

Kitchen Prayers

A couple of days ago I wrote about “A Place At The Table,” a documentary film now in theaters and also on Amazon.com. This is something that everyone should see. As a result of my writing about that film, a friend sent me a You Tube link about a gentleman in South Central Los Angeles named Ron Finley. Mr. Finley demonstrates for us what one person can do; how one vision, one heart can make our world a better place. We have a real problem with hunger in our country. We ca

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