Carted off by Police, and in trouble again.  Before you see me on FOX NEWS or in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, let me tell you what REALLY happened at the Loebsack's Town Hall Meeting in Cedar Rapids that left me with a twisted knee and crying as I left the meeting.… Read full post »

When he  left, the girls and I thought it would have been easier if he had died.  We would have been able to mourn, but know that he still loved us and had to leave.  Instead, he moved out.  He said he couldn't do this anymore.  He was sobbing.  I was… Read full post »

 Sylvia Steeper Berg with two of her beloved granddaughters, Natalie and Mandi, circa 1984.

I am fifty-eight.  In the past year I have lost two people close to me;  my father and my mother-in-law, Sylvia.  Their deaths were both expected.  They were the same age… Read full post »

 My farm...Mira, Talisman, Debonaire in the pasture.  C. Berg

The sky turned purple as the sun behind storm clouds set tonight.  The air was heavy all day today.  I did my chores, and went around taking picture records of the spring that has finally decided to open up to th… Read full post »

                                Guatemala Highway at Dusk  (c) April 2007 CBerg

Poster in Times Square, the only picture I got of the Dalai Lama in my visit to New York.  c.  C.Berg 2009 

Friday, May 1st.   The plane was doing a little rock and roll coming into our  Detroit layover of twenty minutes (oops!).  Our decent into Laguardia… Read full post »

Days are up and down.  I guess that's life.   I just got back from a fabulous four day vacation Colorado to chaos at home.  Maybe I am over-reacting and stressing out.

I don't want to feel sorry for myself;  I have a great place to live, three comparatively healthy daughters,… Read full post »

                           "A Mirror Morning" in Port Townsend, Washington taken when I visited there for a Writing It Real Workshop with Sheila Bender.(c) 2007 CVBerg

In this picture, I walk along the beac… Read full post »

A song pops into my head most mornings as I wake up.  For today it is "Wichita Lineman."   I consider it a message from my soul, and try to figure it out.  "And I need you more than want you...and I want you for all time...and the Wichita lineman is… Read full post »

 Photograph of program from Wisdom and Compassion for Challenging Times.  c. C.Berg

I wish I could say that I touched him.  Or that he blessed a scarf that I offered to him.  But, not this time.  To be in his sacred presence, to be around his exuberance, ha… Read full post »

Who are you anyway?

Really good question.  I've been trying to figure that out.  When I was the new kid in my tiny Kansas community, the other junior high girls made fun of me calling me "Miss America" behind my back.  What an insult!  It was an insult wasn't it? I… Read full post »

 Me and shadows at Buddah Rock, Shoshoni Ashram, Boulder, Colorado (c)Aug.2007

From H.H. The XIVth DALAI LAMA:

 Every day think, as you wake up,

"Today I am fortunate to have woken up.

I am alive, I have a precious Human Life.

I am not going to waste it.… Read full post »

Letter to My Family, and all Conservative, Liberal, and Indifferent Americans:

I personally am committed to health care reform, not because of politics, but because I see what our current system has done to health care. 

Please LOOK at it rationally from your own experience.

Remember when we r/… Read full post »

I am learning to be honest and direct.  I have always been honest, but not always forthcoming.  Honesty was valued to a fault in my family.  As each of four siblings became twelve, my father insisted on paying the adult price of the movie and insisted that we pay the adult… Read full post »

Hurray, The Fourth of July!  As a kid from Kansas, it meant my brothers lighting firecrackers under boxes and in ant hills.  Crowds of potato-chip gobbling Midwesterners holding their ears and looking up at a less than spectacular spectacle of a fireworks displayed from the Walmart Parking… Read full post »

 You know what they say about "growing old gracefully?"  How about instead, "growing old passionately!"   

My favorite movie of all time, the indie documentary, You… Read full post »

Today, I am flunking weather.  I have had it.  This is just nuts.  More nuts that nuts.  I was in Southeast Kansas,  approximately 200 miles to the south, and it was 68 degrees fahrenheit this weekend.  I leave there, and it's cooler, in the thirties or forties, and I ge… Read full post »

I like men.  I've always liked men.  

I am the oldest of four siblings, and the only girl.  My playmates were my brothers.  We had lots of fun playing in the timber as my dad did his logging.  We climbed on the fallen trees and in general had a great… Read full post »

So, enough with the depression.  I guess that's why in Buddhism there is "non-attachment"  and  awareness.  I have all kinds of quotes from the Dalai Lama that I put up around my house to remind me of what works.  It would be good to read them to myself more often.

When… Read full post »

1.  Barak Obama is President

2.  A warm house 

3.  Friends who forgive me even when I make an ass of myself

4.  Headaches from too much drink because they remind me that drinking kills brain cells

5.  Being able to walk because it is such an efficent way to manuver… Read full post »

So.  Valentines Day.  Mixed messages from my heart on this day.  

I think of the years of Valentine boxes at school....paper covered cereal boxes, decorated with doilies and red construction paper hearts.  The little "penny" valentines that were selected so that everyone in the cl… Read full post »

I sit, looking out into a snow patched yard, a tangle of woods across the street, and think about impermanence.  Have I been holding on to...everything?  I grew up with Depression Era parents.  We didn't throw things away, we recycled them.  We recycled old cars like friends recyc… Read full post »