I'm excited to share two new chapters in the journey of Original Belonging: season two of the podcast and the launch of my new Substack...

We come into this world as craftspeople. Such craft emerges out of a sense of play.  As little ones, we make sandcastles by the sea, forts out of furniture, fairy hideouts out of firs. Then one day something shifts...

August is a time of threshold. The change in sunlight becomes obvious, as shadows of dusk arrive earlier each evening...

This summer marks the 20th anniversary original publication of my literary memoir, FBI GIRL. Years before its debut, when I was 17-years-old, my mother gifted me on my birthday with a brand new electric typewriter along with her greeting, highlighted by her lipstick-sincere-darn it-smile: Someone’s going to write a book about this family! My typewriter was bequeathed a mission. But it would be decades before I hit the drawing board vis a vis my mother’s words. I was devoted to my unfolding heroine’s journey, off to live in world capitols, enjoy a career in media, pursue graduate degrees, moving around...

Race. I’ll start with my brother, Joe Jr. He was born with Down syndrome and in his youth, participated in the Special Olympics. Track and Field. At the starting line, all the kids in bright colors jumped up and down in glee. With the whistle, they were off and running. Yes, running in their own unique, slower and delighted kind of way. Including my brother Joe Jr. with his big grin. Applause and cheers from the stands, smell of grass sweet, and then around the third minute, one racer tripped and fell. The crowd gasped. I imagined the other racers...

by Maura A. Conlon Her body could wait no longer. That’s how it happens, how a woman Leaves for the hills or the sea, when the One she loves is lured by quicksand,  The quest for heroics, needing to be a lauded one. But far below his crown ascendant shimmered  the sweetest red rose, Perhaps you can smell it, the one—in another lifetime—he might Have draped along her smooth thigh  at night, Peering into her eyes,  Trusting, finally, his own tidal song, how She’d stood at the water’s edge, all along. Waiting. –September swirls, and the sunset sea bathes her body...

by Maura A. Conlon Her studio glows like Grand Central Station in the middle of a plaza in the middle of some Ocean in the middle of the world Astronomers come by for coffee, unfurl their charts Metro bus drivers pull up seeking change for a $20 while composers and candle makers wire light with music as they sit atop the dark. Wild blue wind stirs jagged palm fronds as fashion designers circle Matisse-like pillows and speak of new lines of tartan skirts pleated just above the knees. At the end of the day which never ends Ireland hums a...

Vince Scully was a bard, a storyteller, a conduit beaming out to many the athletic prowess dancing upon the green fields below him. My parents had moved from NYC to Los Angeles in the 1950s, the same time the Brooklyn Dodgers made themselves similar transplants. An eager journalist, I called Dodger Stadium one day to inquire if Mr. Scully might be available for an interview to be published in Orange Coast Magazine. Honoring this conversation with him in the Dodgers press box from nearly 40 years ago. Rest in the green fields of peace, Mr. Scully. Read the article here...

Images tap into the root of our soul, the place of our longing, where we remember how we belong to a force of love greater than what can be uttered upon our tongue. A simple bow to the light that sustains us, to the flow that reminds how each step we take with our hearts illuminated creates new hopeful patterns within the dance of life. Love, Maura...

Our family has loved and lived close to the ocean for generations. Here, sitting, are my great grandmother, originally from Germany, with her daughter, my Nana, and then her daughter, my mother, Mary (maybe age 18 then) all upon the sands of the Atlantic Ocean. Along side stands Uncle Mike. Breezy Point, NY was our family’s ocean place for decades. Family and friends enjoyed the beach bungalow on Oceanside Avenue from1933 to just a few years ago when it was time to let it go.  “All you need in Breezy Point is your bathing suit,”my Nana once said. When my...

When I was a teenager, I used to sit in my corner bedroom in our house in Southern California and talk into my tape recorder, sharing musings, thoughts about life, questions about human nature. So much had happened in our family’s life by the time I was 13-years-old. In May of 1973, my father’s brother, a socially progressive Catholic priest, was murdered in his rectory in Queens, New York. My uncle, you could say, was a “white man.” The person who killed him you could call an “African-American man.” We just didn’t think that way, then. This was a terrible...

I recall a conversation with Irish-born journalist and author, Claire Dunne, who tells me how in 17th-century Ireland, when the old Gaelic order began to crumble, that “war on harpists and their instruments peaked when Queen Elizabeth I edicted death on them.” She notes how Cromwell from England destroyed their harps, and how people were forced to hide their musical instruments in the bogs…I realized how hiding one’s harp is synonymous with hiding one’s soul. The great waiting ends when one doesn’t have to hide anymore. In years to come, I would tell my own story, write my memoir (published...

Ireland, 1987 Taunted by the secrecy and silence within the trauma, I returned to Ireland after I graduated from college and visited my Great Aunt Johanna on the ancestral farm. I decided to surprise her with no advance warning of my arrival. When she answered the door, her shock collapsed into flitting anger: “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were coming, I would have killed a goose?!” We settled in for tea and sandwiches. My great aunt examined the photographs I’d brought from California, inquiring how close our family lived to Hollywood. Then, before I could pull out...