A Blessing for the Lives We Actually Have

“Blessing” is one of those words I avoided for the longest time. I would never say, “Bless you,” when someone sneezed because, for one, I didn’t really know what it meant, and for another, my family didn’t do that. We didn’t say anything at all […]

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Lonely But Not Alone

Leo Bird knows what it’s like to walk into a cafeteria and be faced with what might seem like a mild dilemma: where to sit. Except it’s not mild, not mild at all. Leo, the college student son of one of my longtime/lifetime friends, was […]

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Remember Why You Like Me?

After a long job-seeking rejection streak, one of organizational psychologist Robert Cialdini’s clients started asking one simple question at the beginning of a job interview which immediately ended his rejection streak. This person went on to get better jobs in his next three interviews by […]

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How Does Your Dinner Taste

Sometimes we get so tangled up in our mind we have a hard time seeing clearly — being able to see where we are — which is why this poem by a young Japanese schoolboy* is so startling: In the middle of Japan, surrounded byThe […]

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Moon Rock

Several lifetimes ago I moved to Washington, DC and married a man who made it a habit to regularly visit the Air & Space Museum. On his way in and on his way back out he would touch the moon rock on display at the […]

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Transcendent

In the middle of the day in a town square in Sabadell, Catalonia, a single cellist wearing a full tuxedo with tails begins playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Soon another cellist comes along and joins in as people milling around the square begin to take […]

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Recognizing Lovely

We all want to feel alive and feel the vitality of life coursing through us but lately my hands have made me aware of the very opposite, aware of vitality slipping away. Lately, these hands have become a big problem in my life. I’ve got […]

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Philip Henderson, Here I Come

Philip Henderson, though I don’t know you, there were apparently a great many things I needed to tell you about myself.  To you, I was an unknown middle-aged woman who showed up in your driveway early one Saturday morning while you stood outside enjoying a […]

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Tight Pants

I’ve never understood how we (I’m acting like I’m not the only one) don’t always know what we’re thinking. For instance, how is it that I woke up in such a shroud of darkness the other day, wore that mood all day long like a […]

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Plum

Something in my mind said “Plum,” so I circled back home on my green Schwinn 10-speed once again. I’d already done this 7, 8, 9 times. It was a beautiful summer afternoon, not too hot for an aimless cruise around town, but those plums were […]

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