Welcome to my blog.
I picked the topic while walking in the gorgeous San Francisco sunshine with my gorgeous friend Mary Trigiani one day, talking about what ties together the erratic strands of my life. Celebrating, we said. Celebrating the beauty of this place (and other places), celebrating life and occasionally death, celebrating friends and families and faith. “You really need to start a blog,” said Mary, and thus it was born.
It was the celebration of living and dying that led me to become a hospice volunteer, later to work with AIDS patients, and eventually to put those stories together with similar stories of hope and courage to create the book Dying Unafraid. Researching Dying Unafraid led me to meet some remarkable people with Compassion and Choices , an organization I work with still (often 40 hours a week.)
It is the celebration of friends that leads me to joy.
It was the celebration of family that led to the little biographical memoir of my father Earl Moreland, Never in Doubt and leads to the serious joy — can joy be serious? Why not — of living with The Great Encourager (that’s Bud, my final husband) and keeping in touch with my flawless children and grandchildren. (Sandy is the only one with a Web site right now, unless I get into Facebooks of grandkids and I’d better not go there as yet.)
It was the celebration of faith that led me to my particular church home here in San Francisco and helped open my eyes and heart to the multitude of other truly remarkable faith communities that come together in the San Francisco Interfaith Council (new Web site under construction), the other nonprofit that currently occupies my days.
So today, with Easter approaching and the celebrations of other faith communities all around in the springtime, it seemed a good time to send this initial blog into cyberspace. I hope you’ll enjoy it, whoever and wherever you are, and perhaps post a note. (What do bloggers do, I wonder, if no one ever blogs back?)
There are plenty of other things to celebrate, despite the troubles of our battered world: books and art and music and sometimes even politics. I’ll welcome your thoughts, but I won’t promise many profound thoughts of my own (and surely not every day or even every few days! Where in the world can blog time be found?) We’ll see. And we’ll celebrate.