Tag: politics

Saturday’s Crafty Wrap-up

Current sketchbook used for saving coloring pages; cover collaged by me.

Because of Photo Friday, I didn’t post anything about crafting yesterday, but I did work on something. As I’ve mentioned, the large sketch book where I collect my completed coloring pages will be full soon, even though when I got to the back of the book, I began putting colored pages on the backs of used pages. I wondered if I had another sketchbook as large as that one, and I do, but the front cover isn’t made of reinforced paper or cardboard, so I don’t know if it will hold up to collaging and a lot of use, like the current one.

It’s an old sketch book of our late friend Steve’s. It only has a couple of sketches he started it in, but I’d forgotten I used it back in June of 2012, when I did the 30 Days of Creativity challenge. If you were around then, you might remember that I’d sketch something on a page, then use it for a backdrop with my wee plastic ram being a director of dolls or action figures, etc., doing scenes from different movies. Like, for example, one I did for the movie The Secret Life of Bees. On Friday, after running errands, including having photos printed from those 2012 challenges, I added the photos and explanations to the original sketches. Like this.

After a visit to Texas Art Supply on Thursday, I also started something else that I finished today. I’d found sticker books there with words and phrases that could be turned into poetry (like Magnetic Poetry, but more permanent).

I love these and put together a poem in my Inspire journal (all its pages are related in some way to the Neverending Saga and its characters). I finished that page today. I’m glad I did something creative to end the week, because today (March 8) is Riley’s birthday. One of the ways to resist, overcome, and stay steady when the world is full of chaos, confusion, conflict, and catastrophe, is a far more important “C” word: CREATE. I know Riley would be the first to agree with this. His life was often a series of struggles, and that’s when he sat at the piano or picked up a guitar and turned it all into music and lyrics. And even if the world, or at least some part of the world, will never acknowledge this, humanity does need art and find it healing. Sometimes it feels like the real division in the world is between haters and healers. I’ve learned a lot about that in the last couple of months.


©Becky Cochrane, 2025

One more thing I did today, in recognition of International Women’s Day, is post this composite to Instagram, described as “just a few of the women who nurtured, mentored, and taught me over the years, expanding my heart, mind, and soul. I thank them and all the others whose photos I don’t have.”

Mindful Monday


I got this beautiful image from Mindworks.org. I’m including the link because it’s always good to revisit guidance for improving mindfulness. Some of the words in the image are real challenges for me.

Last night, I was reading my Tom Robbins novel before bed and so much enjoying the euphoria of seeing someone put words together in all the right ways. I checked one of my social media accounts briefly before turning off the lights, commented on a post by someone (who I know only by being a fan of many decades), and my dreams wove crazy stories out of those two reading experiences. They included a song that I’ll now need to play to hear if my brain picked that particular song or its lyrics for my dream soundtrack for a reason.

Anyway, it all made me wake up in a good mood (plus there were two nice dogs snoozing next to me) but then…this…which I probably shouldn’t even post, but it speaks to some of my mindfulness challenges.

Oh, if only ones who told me some of my anxiety triggers would NEVER happen… At least the false idols will be taking good care of themselves.

I’ll be over here gutting deleting that chapter that’s given me so much trouble and trying not to think of real world nightmares for a while. Maybe I can put the words together in all the right ways.

Time management

I’ve likely told some version of this story on here before, but I was reminded of it again this week when I talked to a friend with whom I once shared a workplace, a subsidiary of a large, centuries-old corporation. Corporate suggested that our subsidiary find someone to take on the task of facilitating awareness and discussion of diversity topics. I was a person approached to be “it.” I understood at least two reasons why: my background in writing and editing, and my established willingness to, on my own time, advocate for AIDS/HIV awareness during a period when that was controversial and shrouded in silence. My manager and the company had consistently approved my making a newsletter available on December 1 for World AIDS Day (written on my own time, printed at a copy place, with a red ribbon attached to each sheet with a small safety pin that could be worn, if chosen, all provided at my expense and all MY choice, not mandated by the company or my manager).

I didn’t jump at the offer to be their diversity rep because my experience with the company (including that newsletter!) had already informed me how I could be treated like a lightning rod drawing the ire of anyone who felt somehow “wronged” or “offended” by one, any, or all of the issues that would come up. (If you doubt what a problem this is, have you never read comments on damn near everything you can find on the Internet? Sure, keyboard warriors may feel more emboldened by anonymity, but many of them probably spring from people who feel equally emboldened by position or privilege to exhibit similar behaviors in the workplace.)

I ultimately decided to take it on. I don’t feel like sharing the negative impact that choice sometimes had on me, because what was more significant, to me, at least, were all the things I learned as I researched the “months” related to diversity. (I’m not sure we had all of these back then, but possibilities are Black History; Women’s History; Arab-American Heritage; Jewish American Heritage; Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage; Military Appreciation and National Veterans and Military Families; Caribbean-American Heritage; Immigrant Heritage Month & World Refugee Day; Hispanic Heritage; LGBTQ Month or National Coming Out Day.) None of these would have bothered me, and I valued learning so many new things. (Also, tip: The more you learn if you’re creative, the more you can populate your work with people who and experiences that are not you or yours. Including the villains.)

I was grateful for that opportunity to get to know people not only in our smaller company but also people in corporate and other subsidiaries. I learned about challenges people faced that I would otherwise have been unaware of, and I learned about colleagues’ accomplishments and what they valued and respected about their identities. (Regrettable bonus: I also learned which people would never get any of my free time outside of work and some who were “unsafe” for employees who were part of traditionally marginalized groups. It emboldened me to communicate that I was a safe person and place and to practice rigorous discretion. Turns out that matters a lot in the workplace.)

What does this have to do with time? I’ve been trying to find better ways to respect my own time. Nobody’s paying me for it anymore; I get most of the choice in how I use it. I’ve started being more honest with myself in recognizing and acknowledging the reality of those who don’t respect or value my time so I can allocate it better. I’ve been weaning myself off of social media and being more deliberate in how I use it. Just as I eliminated most of my content on Facebook in 2016 and ended it as a contact point, I did the same with Twitter in 2022. I still have an account on each site because I want to keep my name free from possible misrepresentation (my name being connected to published novels, short stories, and anthologies, and to this website).

I recently opened a Blue Sky account to interact with some people or organizations who’d once been part of my Twitter world. I’m spending very little time on it, and have used it so far only to post to a “20 day challenge: share covers without any commentary or reasons, etc., of books that impacted you in some way.” ONLY twenty? This has been a painless way to ease onto the site.

Similarly, I’d once replaced time spent on FB with time spent on Instagram, though my own posts on Instagram have become sporadic and inconsistent. February is was? for me, remains Black History Month. Though I rarely post on Instagram anymore, I decided to use every day of the month to recognize Black history in some way (dolls, art, and coloring pages have always been part of my Instagram account, for example).

When they say that never in the history of the world have people who banned books been the “good guys,” I agree and add to that people who ridicule, forbid, and seek to eliminate awareness of what I believe are among the greatest assets our country has: the experience and value each individual or group adds to our national character. When power starts using our differences to marginalize and divide us, they are never “the good guys.”

If I’ve been willing, since 2020, to give every day of October to a skeleton with a fictitious voice and family history to indulge my creative self, my February is well spent featuring something I find more meaningful. This choice hasn’t brought a lot of engagement to my feed. It could be the algorithm, but I can see that consistently over 97 percent of the people who view my posts follow me, and most of them don’t hit that ❤️. Could be an indicator that my energy and time have little value on Instagram, and maybe it’s time to ease away from using it as a public space, too.

Mindful Monday


Shades of gray.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Speech given at the National Cathedral, March 31, 1968.

The first photo is mine, contents of one of my boxes. Background for the above quote to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day is from a photo of my 2006 acrylic on canvas painting “Enlighten,” filtered to be gray.

The skies are gray this morning, too, as our bad weather begins to roll in. My mood’s a bit gray, as well. I have no “fear of missing out” today. My hope is to maintain limited exposure to any media, including social media and news, and find a more creative purpose for my time.

Do intentions matter?

Over the past few days, I’ve seen too many photos and read too many stories from the city of my ❤️, Los Angeles. My heart aches for all those homes lost. People lost. Businesses and jobs lost. The daunting prospects of recovery and rebuilding. Not everyone there is wealthy, nor are all those neighborhoods filled with the residences of celebrities.

I’ve seen videos of terrified wildlife fleeing from fires, including a cougar with her two cubs running behind her—so beautiful, so scared. I’ve seen horses being rescued and taken to shelter in safe sites, and offerings from other communities of the number of horses they can take in. Many pets have been placed in shelters until their families can figure out where they’ll be staying or going next.

So many have lost their homes, all their homes’ contents, and sometimes even their vehicles. Meaning to be reassuring, people offer, They’re just things. They can be replaced.

Not all things can be replaced.

I thought of my decades of photos, my own and my mother’s. My father’s art. My lifetime of journals. My father’s military records. My mother’s genealogical records.

I thought of all the mementos and items Tom’s parents have saved his entire life and given to him on special occasions. His rocking horse. His family Christmas ornaments, including some from his grandmother. His parents’ art.

My teddy bear. My dolls, and I don’t mean that massive collection of Barbies so much as my baby dolls and the dolls my father brought back from Korea and Japan. Some of the Barbies do have deep sentimental value, too.

I thought about Tim’s violin, built by his grandfather. The portrait of Rex done by a local artist and gifted to him by Laura. The plant he brought back from his grandmother’s funeral that he’s kept thriving for several years. Lynne, too, has two plants, one that came through various relatives from her grandmother to her; another that was her mother’s, who died in 1978. I thought of the carousel horses that were gifts from her late husband.

Debby lost some very precious keepsakes related to her children during our flood in 2017, and a couple of things I valued from my teenage years went missing, maybe inadvertently thrown out with larger items. We’ve lost a lot over the years, but we’ve never lost everything, as is happening to so many right now because of the L.A. fires.

Some things can never be replaced because most of their value exists only in our hearts and memories. Sometimes, when our hearts are broken, those things give us something tangible to cling to, just as our companion animals give us the will to be strong, to keep going.

Yesterday, I watched a video of a stranger, maybe someone’s neighbor or a passerby, as she realized she saw movement on a property, and used her hands to pull two surviving fish and two turtles, all struggling, but alive, out of someone’s koi pond in their yard next to their burned down house. She put them in a cooler that she filled with their water to transport them. (There were others, fish at least, that hadn’t made it.) Imagine losing everything but what you could take with you, and then being reunited with those four little survivors, and what they might mean to those people. The kindness of that woman is immeasurable, and she’s just one of so many who are trying to do something, anything, for their fellow Angelenos.

There’s so much heartbreak in these losses, but there’s also heartbreak in the vitriol from the usual choir of cruelty. I can’t understand, don’t even want to understand, how people can be so small, so hard, instead of just kind. Even in thoughts. In words. Just kindness. It costs nothing to be kind.

Do intentions matter? Yes. I absolutely believe they do.

Over these days, I’ve turned to music from the CDs that live in the sanctuary closet with a lot of the things I once used in my practice. They’re meant to comfort. To help someone relax. To be a channel to healing. I have more, but these were ones I pulled out so far.

Enya, The Celts, 1987 and re-released in 1992; Watermark, 1988; Shepherd Moons, 1991; The Memory of Trees, 1995; A Day Without Rain, 2000. Loreena McKennitt, The Book of Secrets, 1997.
Loreena McKennitt: Parallel Dreams, 1989; The Mask and Mirror, 1984.

I’m grateful for artists and their music, as I am for all those who provide the movies and television shows we watch, the books we read, the art that intrigues us. So much of the creative output that entertains and enriches us comes from that concentrated part of the west coast.

There are two realities I hold on to. First, our strength and resilience are the reason we persevere and rebuild. It’s how San Francisco has come back from earthquakes. How New Orleans came back from Katrina. How New York came back from terrorist attacks. I’m picking big cities because right now it’s Los Angeles, but across the Midwest, the Northeast, the South, the West and Northwest, this same spirit has driven us, as it will North Carolina and other areas impacted by disasters, whatever their causes.

And second, the abundant kindness we show to those who experience catastrophe reflects the best in us. Whether we give our time or material support or let our thoughts, words, actions, and prayers come from kindness, infused with the energy of good intentions, we get to choose to be a part of one another’s healing instead of their suffering.

Sunday Sundries

Things that are blue.

Clockwise from lower left: the man in the moon; stones of lapis and sodalite; incense burner; the Blue Dog Cow Parade Cow from Amy; a perfume bottle; my favorite hand sanitizer; a Beatles car perched on my “Write The Poem” book; and to the right, the ‘famous’ vase, gift of Jim.


From the book, I chose “Write a poem about A Voice.” The word associations the book provides are murmur, whisper, holler, soft, husky, sultry, conscience, instinct. Because I’d chosen blue, because of the musician I write and so many of my characters, because of how I think, I had only one direction to take. Here’s what I wrote:

a voice

it starts with a whisper
of chains and of whips
backbreaking labor
heartbreaking goodbye
it grows to a murmur
soft change, husky hope
sultry with promise
resolve to survive
makes it a holler
the:
buddys and muddys
bessies, ettas, and kokos
blind boys and sonny boys
mas and sisters
ones with initials
ones with three names
ones with last names
they never asked for or wanted
holler holler holler
to prod the conscience
of all who will listen
to all who will hear
a voice
the voices

December 29, 2024
©Becky Cochrane

Today’s offering

Off and on since early this morning, I’ve been putting together a post that was intended to be fun with photos and commentary. Then I read an article in which hate, once again, will be affirmed and rejoiced over by those who hate.

Everybody who tells me that NO, THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, please stop. It’s been happening, is still happening, and will get worse. You can close your eyes and ears and mind, but you can never gaslight me into believing I don’t see and hear and recognize the cold, hard evidence presented every day.

So I don’t feel like being funny. I will take a moment to recognize that my forever Muse would be eighty were he still alive today. In his honor, I’ll go back to the world sprung from my imagination, where hate will never win.

What’s up, Thursday?


Same old thing. Not enough sleep. Should have eaten breakfast sooner. No interest in reading all the post-mortems because everybody’s a political genius after the fact. Mopped the library. Finished a coloring page from that book on the right. Thinking of a woman I know who loves horses. (A real person I used to work with, not a character.) Suspect there’ll be a lot of coloring in days to come.


Must sleep. Perchance to dream. May it be something to inspire my writing.

words for today

I will now get to learn how to manage depression and anxiety. I’ll be seriously curtailing my online time. This morning, I read the social media post of a personal friend. He’s a really good human. A gay man. Gifted. Smart. Compassionate. He was being encouraging to people who feel wounded by the election results. Reminding his readers to take the long view, knowing there are still ways we can make our world a better place for ourselves and the marginalized. There was nothing hateful in his words. Nothing objectionable. But his comments began filling up with people mocking him, verbally attacking him. Gloating. Even low-key threatening him.

I’m sure he’s not surprised. I’m not surprised.

I’ve never tolerated hatefulness on this blog since I began it in 2004. I will ask you do not comment here or speak to me elsewhere and tell me ALL [fill in the blank with whatever descriptor you identify as] are not like that. I know. I’ve been around a while. I’m not the one making hateful generalizations. In so many places in my life, I have to choose my words and remain kind with people I know, people who are friends and family members, who vote in ways that literally threaten the health, peaceful and full life, and happiness of people I love. Their choice.

But never try to justify to me that chaos, division, demonizing, mendacity, and mental, emotional, and physical cruelty are okay. Hide yourself in a cloak of something abhorrent to me, and know that even then, I will listen, for a while, anyway, to all the things you say and all the things you don’t even realize you say, and the only, ONLY, point when we are done is if you begin to insult and demean me or the ones I love. If you don’t like me, respect me, or love me, for who I am, step off. Find a better way to fill your time than wasting it on me. (I have people in my life who build me up. Who comfort me. Who started bright and early this morning sending messages of love and commiseration, and the reminder that I can breathe with them. We can speak frankly whether we’ve been friends since we were eighteen, or since 1989, ’92, ’93, ’94, ’97, 2005, 2007, 2011, or 2015, I’m there for them. They’re there for me. We connect in so many ways.) To them (or you if you need to hear it) I say:


And to the others of you…
If your candidate won, celebrate. Sit at home with a big smile on your face; have some champagne. Crack a beer. Grill your favorite meat. Call or gather with your likeminded friends and repeat all the things you’ve been saying out loud since 2016. Actually, since 2008. You’ve gotten what you wanted. You’ve taken the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, (as of this writing, the jury’s still out on the House), and you’re already anticipating how all your “enemies” will be punished, controlled, vanquished. Do that instead of traveling social media and finding the accounts of strangers (and celebrities, because they are your very favorite targets) to pester them. Go and live the idyllic life you’ve been promised.

Today, I’ve spent lovely hours with my dogs. (Starting at about 4:30 am, when they began nudging Tom and me to GET UP. He took them out but then made them come back to bed and wait for breakfast.) They’re all a little crazy in all their different ways, but they have so much love to give. I don’t mean to aspire to craziness when I try to be more like them. It’s just a bonus, I guess. I showered, dressed, left the house to wash my car (the weather is lovely), make a bank deposit, and grab Starbucks.

My heart hurts. I want to be nice to myself. I’m not sure if I have the focus to write. There’s so much I’m unsure about. But I sure am grateful for the love in my life. I’m grateful for the values and strength I was given by my family, and the family I’ve made since. I feel far away from and lonely for many of them, but I also feel the love. Thank you.