Heather Isaacs

My initials spell "Hi."

Hi.

  • The Club of Holy Book Destroyers (Revised)

    Note: I originally wrote this in 2012. But this past week I just streamed both seasons of Twin Peaks and felt the need to revisit the essay. Because, well, Agent Cooper is everything I want to be. A few years ago, an obscure pastor in Florida held a Quran in one hand and the promise… Read more

  • Three Beds With Three Televisions

    According to the Alzheimer’s Association, the number of people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia in the United States may triple by 2050, from the staggering 5 million people afflicted at present to as many as 16 million. Even now, it is unlikely any of us can avoid being touched by this disease at some point… Read more

  • The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Final Week

    (The last of four installments. A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 3) At an IHOP parking lot in Fresno, I get out of my jeep and stretch my legs; they are shaky and light after driving 2400 miles in three days. Exhausted and defeated, I am returning a month sooner than… Read more

  • The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 3

    (The third of four installments. A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 2)   From Edgerton it was a short 200 mile trip Rapids City, South Dakota where I splurged on two nights at a quirky little hostel called Robert’s Roost. I stepped past a man doing yoga in the living room… Read more

  • The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 2

    (A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 1) I left East Glacier–close to the Canadian border–and headed south into central Montana, traveling through Glacier National Park on Going-to-the-Sun Road, which is quite possibly the best named road in the world. For fifty miles, feeling high on the bliss of the previous day,… Read more

  • My Acid Wash Jean Skirt Prayer

    It was an honor to be asked to pray. Every Sabbath morning during the summer, the entire camp gathered in the outdoor amphitheater situated on top of a hill in the central Sierras with a beautiful view of Wawona Dome to the east. Sabbath morning worship was literally and metaphorically lighter than its emotionally intense… Read more

  • The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 1

    “A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure. It’s ridiculously easy to find,”  William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways. In the late summer of 2000, after graduating from college with no plans for my future (my entire strategy of waiting for Jesus to return before making any important life decisions was… Read more

  • Help Is On The Way

    Before I begin, I must say that I encounter things in my hospice work that I do not pretend to understand or explain or defend. Much of my career I spend at the edge of not knowing. Often, I feel like Sorcerer’s Apprentice doing my best in the face of profound powers and mysteries to… Read more

  • Storm Cloud of Witnesses

    One January morning several years ago, I drove a stretch of Hwy 29 more familiar to me than almost any other after years of traveling up and down the Napa Valley visiting hospice patients in their homes. But on that day, exhausted and soul-weary, I was on my way to a retreat in Mendocino where… 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