UPDATE: NOW ON AMAZON AND FREE FOR SUBSCRIBERS!

I’ve been working on this longer than any book I will ever write. It first came to me about 18 years ago when I was sitting on a beach on Long Island. One of my goals for 2023 was to finally finish it. Almost there …

“It’s understandable that we can react with fear to what we think our bodies are telling us. Who doesn’t assume a grave prognosis when we go to the doctor looking for answers? It’s as natural as gasping for that first breath, terrified there will not be enough air left for another, and another, and another until we take our last. But denying our body’s messages, or pretending they’re not speaking to us at all when in fact they may be shouting, is an invitation to harm and frustration.

Begin to hear your body. Be quiet with it and let yourself learn its language. You are its first and truest friend. You are the one it longs to communicate with. And when it asks you to pay attention, let nothing be more important than understanding what it has told you. When we become the best interpreter of our body’s language, we begin to live in partnership with it, and to trust it will never lead us astray. We may not always like what it has to say, and sometimes what it tells us will be devastating, but we will listen carefully. The answers are there, and in those answers is the opportunity for peace, acceptance and change.”

From When the Body Speaks, Listen (Chapter 15) 

Discover this and many other ways we inhabit the dreams we call our lives, how we create them day by day, and how we can begin to experience them as the ultimate lucid dream. No supernatural assistance is required, no surrender to powers outside ourselves.

Dreamshaping is not wishful thinking: it is wishful doing. In this simple guide, this dreamshaper’s manual, you’ll find chapter after chapter of simple insights: how the body speaks to us, how we make choices that determine our experiences, how we act, often unknowingly, as the architect, landscaper, set designer and director of our own existence.

Keep reading, and see what simple reflection and observation can reveal about the lives we live, and the lives we create, in which we’re both the dreamer and the dream.”

My interview on the Where Do Gays Retire? podcast with host Mark Goldstein is up now! CLICK TO LISTEN.

Shout OUT Lambertville! America’s #1 Halloween town.

My Medicare kicked in yesterday, October 1. It’s oddly exciting, and depressing at the same time. I can finally enjoy national healthcare, but I had to live 65 years to get it (okay, almost 65 years— my birthday is October 28).

We had dinner with some friends last night who were hosting their friends from Germany. After giddily announcing I was finally on Medicare, I had to explain to them what the excitement was about. Like the rest of the developed world, they have national healthcare. Americans are unique in our effusive celebrations of a Medicare card arriving in the mail. It sorts of says, “Congratulations! You’ll be dead soon.” And boy, do I plan on using it. My first of several October doctors’ appointments is today!

Narration provided by Wondervox.

I’m officially on Medicare now, as of October 1. In addition to the basic one-size-fits-all of Medicare parts A and B, I wanted supplemental insurance, vision coverage, and some kind of dental plan. I am a firm opponent of ‘Medicare Advantage’ plans, which are not Medicare. They are the privatization of Medicare, an insidious corporate takeover of the most successful social safety net program this country has ever enacted, along with Social Security. So … I have a Humana supplemental policy, an annual EyeMed discount plan that I already had, and now an Aetna dental save plan.

The dental plan was the one my husband and I most hesitated over. There are quite a few that offer the same basic benefit: significant discounts for the fees charged by participating dentists. It can be as much as 50 percent lower than the charge for the service. Until now, we’d had MetLife dental insurance, with a monthly premium for both of us at around $60 a month. It’s insurance, which means we had a $150 deductible for the year, with a $2000 cap from MetLife once the deductible was met. So, having estimated our needs in a given year, it made sense to go with a dental savings plan that cost (approximately) $199 annually for a couple. It’s a gamble: if I need a crown replaced or something major, it’s going to cost a lot more, but I’m not paying $720 (plus deductible) a year for it, either.