Photo Credit: Housing Works Thrift Shops

Kate Spade had it all.

Met a cool guy named Andy. Started a business with him (and they later married). Business skyrocketed and became a household name (at least, in any household including teens or young women).

A New York Times headline describes her as the woman “Whose Handbags Carried Women Into Adulthood,” passionate and approachable.

She and Andy seemed to be unbelievably well-matched partners. He came up with the rough draft. She ran with his ideas and crafted the finished product.

Friends said the couple were “perfect” partners in business and life.

She sold her stake in the business shortly after the birth of their daughter. Even in her absence, the website still seems to draw from her unassuming, quirky, vibrant personality.

The designer told Moneyish last year she wouldn’t trade the time with her only child in exchange for her self-titled brand “in…

When I was out driving yesterday, I was suddenly engulfed in a blizzard.

A pollen blizzard.

The sun lit up the millions of pollen bits and dandelion fluffs floating through the air.

It was the Dance of the Allergens.

And I just laughed. Because those awful things reap havoc on me… and yet they were so beautiful.

Which makes me think about other things that are terrible and lovely at the same time.

When I was a kid, I lived near a very big factory, and I used to love the puddles in the parking lots after a summer rain. Not only was there a rainbow in the sky. There were rainbows in the puddles. Oh sure, you may call them oil slicks. But they were so pretty. The blues and purples and golds. Those beat-up cars left these portraits just for me.

photo by Yair Haklai

Then there’s food…

Shhhhh… good women are quiet.
My mother was a beautiful woman, she never complained.

Denial is a silent violence that aims to make invisible a trauma maybe evident or not, to make it acceptable as normal and allow the victims of this trauma to be exploited from a system of oppression or people in power. Denial is that voice sugarcoated with correctness that asks us to shut up and sit down on our own pain so as to not disturb anyone. Is a silence that yells loudly, because sooner or later it will speak through the different ways we hurt ourselves and others.

It is not a mystery that women all over the world are subjected to a variety of violence and oppression. Women and girls are hijacked, raped, assaulted, murdered, their experiences mocked or banalized and their bodies thrown around like trash. People get outraged asking how this is…

I hear a lot of people talking lately about how they are no longer proud to be Christian. They point to the vocal conservative churches and leaders who support Trump, condemn and exclude LGBTQ people, oppress female bodies and sexuality, exhibit breathtaking racism, classism, sexism, nationalism, and ecocide… and they struggle to call themselves “Christian” anymore, in light of these shameful behaviors by modern American “Christianity.”

I completely understand. The most visible examples of self-identified Christian organizations and leaders in the US today make me cringe— or pale in horror. How could any ethically responsible moderate or progressive Christian want to be associated with such bigotry, violence, and dysfunction?