Heather Isaacs

My initials spell "Hi."

Hi.

Spirituality

  • Watermelon Holes

    Every summer when watermelon came into season, we often kept one on the counter to be eaten, slice by slice, over the course of a day or two. My Mom, brother, and I all ate watermelon like normal people: in tire-sized rounds or half-moon ends. But my Dad had the mind-boggingly frustrating habit of digging Read more

  • Birthday Wish: Rosebeam!

    Years ago, a hospice patient with dementia asked me what I was “heart-ing” for. A moment later, she then asked: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Living outside the bounds of time, she asked me this question as earnestly as if we were two schoolgirls imagining our futures ahead of us Read more

  • Ash Wednesday

    Six years ago, on an Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian liturgical calendar that marks the beginning of Lent, otherwise known as the 40 days prior to Easter, my family received its own kind of ashes in the news the doctor gave my Dad. “Vascular dementia.” This is the diagnosis my Dad received that Read more

  • Even the North Star Changes

    Did you know the North Star changes?  I did not know this until a year ago this past December when my friend DeAnna presented me with an extraordinary gift: an artisanal chocolate Advent calendar celebrating constellations of the night sky. What made this gift extraordinary extended well beyond the conscientiously sourced and exquisitely crafted confections. Read more

  • Smell the Bread and Flowers

    Yesterday, I walked a part of the Sonoma coast—one of the most beautiful and dramatic places in the world—and could not, for the life of me, relax. My mind was on auto-pilot with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios. It’s like I arrived at vacation and the only thing my mind had scheduled for our itinerary was Read more

  • Here in California

    “Here in California, fruit grows heavy on the vine. There’s no gold, I thought I’d warn ya. And the hills grow brown in the summer time,” Kate Wolf. Sometimes you hear a song for the first time and it knocks the wind out of you because it gives voice to something you have needed to Read more

  • Grief, Joy, and Thanksgiving Leftovers

    This is my family’s third Thanksgiving since my Dad died, our third without him in the kitchen, without his fingerprint on nearly every dish that we eat, without him speed-talking his go-to prayer that none of us could ever fully decipher. We are without him yet we do our best as a family to not Read more

  • Preparing for the Wrong Apocalypse

    My friend’s brother, a self-styled doomsday prepper who proudly identifies as a “conspiracy theorist,” ran into an unexpected obstacle when COVID-19 arrived. In all his loud preparation for some vague apocalyptic future wrought by liberals, he had somehow forgotten the face masks. When my friend told me this, we both laughed — less at his anxiety as Read more

  • Love Hoarders

    There exists a bedroom closet in my parents’ house where I have stored, over the years, a sizable number of boxes holding things of mine that have not been sensible to carry with me as I maintain a studio-sized lifestyle. But neither are they things I could bear to let go of, a reality I Read more

  • The Missionary Position, Part 2

    For Part 1: https://oddbygod.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/the-missionary-position-part-i When you are thrown into a chasm of despair, I believe in holding on to whatever you need to make it through to the other side. Sometimes rescuing ourselves out of the pit involves a lot of clawing at rock surfaces, blindly feeling for the slightest edge that will bear our Read more