Articles by Beverly Donofrio
Looking for Stillness
Two winters ago the world turned flat and tuneless on me, and it made no sense. Home was a lively, supportive expat community in an old colonial town in Mexico. I soaked in hot springs, hiked, practiced tai chi, wrote during the day, and spent most of my nights with friends. There were dinners, concerts, readings, margaritas watching the sunset, but it had all gone gray.
Read about Beverly’s pilgramage at Oprah.com
Relax…You…Are…Getting…Bolder!
A few years ago, when I complained to my latest, greatest, and now past therapist that I didn’t want to go to some party I was invited to, I’d be bored, have nothing to say to people—whom I wouldn’t like and who wouldn’t like me—she pinned me with her penetrating gaze and said, “You're a shy person.”
Learn how Beverly overcame shyness at Oprah.com
The Rapist in My Bedroom…
I was raped one night last summer in Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I live. Water was gushing into [my neighbor’s] house from a construction site next door…I went upstairs, called the builder, then forgot to go back down and double lock the door.
Beverly tells us how she used this terrifying moment to strengthen—instead of lose—her faith at Oprah.com
Potholes
I once attended an African–American Baptist church, where the service lasted two–and–half–hours, there was lots of singing and dancing–in–place, and enough spirit to lift you out of the clouds and make you sunny. The preacher said something I have always remembered, which is a cliché but it was the first time I’d heard it: “Turn those potholes to stepping stones.”
Tomato
I grew up getting lost in the woods at the top of my road and hopping across the stream in the cow pasture at the bottom of it, but ever since the fifth grade, I longed to live in New York City. When I finally graduated college at twenty–eight, I packed my ten–year–old son along with everything I owned into a VW van and moved there. Frank Sinatra’s song “New York, New York” had just come out and I played it on every jukebox in every bar I sat in, dreaming dreams so big they needed a city of nine million to fit into. There seemed no place more glamorous, filled with art and artists; or more edgy, alive, dangerous, and therefore adventurous. In New York I would meet the greatest and the lowliest, the most accomplished and the most failed—many of whom would appear in the great literature I would write: the mark I would leave on the world. I might, oops, I would die one day, but what I had to say would live on forever between the covers my books.