Category: Power of Words
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Full contact listening—writing about it keeps me resilient
When I was little, I was convinced the old white pine tree next to our home and the puffy clouds in the sky were telling each other the most amazing stories. I thought that if I could just figure out the right way to listen, I’d be able to hear them. Tell me. You’re so […]
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This is brought to you by the letter “B”: for breath, beginning, burgeoning…
As I’ve aged, I have more time for tenderness, for the poems that are so earnest they melt your spine a little. I have decided that I am here in this world to be moved by love and to let myself be moved by beauty. I will defend an earnest poem, I will defend beauty. […]
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Nothing living lives alone
I was paging through a book I love and was paused by this: … in this participative universe, nothing living lives alone. Everything comes into form because of relationship. We are constantly called to be in relationship — to information, people, events, ideas, life. Even reality is created through our participation in relationships. We choose […]
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Sometimes it really is all too much…and that’s OK.
I originally published this article in January of 2012, after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Back then I was a life and business coach. Certainly my current work of facilitating writing workshops has me holding space for folks in a different way, but vicarious trauma can happen to anyone in any line of […]
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An unexpected conversation
Today I sat in community and nourishing conversation with independent business women, artists, solo practitioners—sisters in entrepreneurial endeavors. I brought with me my struggle with overwhelm and a question about finding and tending the energy needed to do my work with passion and integrity. I’m so glad I did. It was such a good conversation. […]
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Fourteen Years After
I watched them run into the rubble, smoke and confusion. Saw them disappear through the doors. Running in when everyone else was running out. I remember thinking, “They’re so brave. We’re so lucky to have people like that willing to help.” Then the screen filled with billows of gray-black smoke, the camera angle pulled back […]
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It’s not your fault…or mine.
Life flows tidally.It seems we’re always navigatingincoming or outgoing waves of change. Tracie Nichols In my just-before-sleep reading these past few nights, I’ve been settling my roots into the paradigm-shifting goodness that is Sharon Blackie’s book If Women Rose Rooted. It’s one of those books, you know? Where one reading only scratches the surface. Anyway, […]
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The language of names
We often choose a name that seems accurate for us, but that isn’t big enough to contain our entire life. Margaret J. Wheatley I’ve been thinking a lot about identity these days, as I talk with women clients. I’ve been thinking about the names we use to identify ourselves. About the ways in which those […]
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Don’t let the critical voices win
When I was in sixth grade, I started drawing an ever-expanding Halloween-themed picture. In a few weeks it went beyond a simple drawing into becoming a whole world. A story in images. Bewitched, I drew more sprawling worlds. In seventh grade, I found poetry. Words fell into and out of me creating images from language. I called them wordscapes. […]
Tracie Nichols, M.A. 