With Parker Palmer, I don’t really like being told what to do. I am so glad, in this instance, that he overcame his issues with authority and shared these instructions from Walt Whitman on how to live an authentic life: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise…
read morePhotography by, Greer Snyder One clue my body supplied that I was turning on the 50 mark was my eyes’ seemingly belligerent refusal to make sense of the printed words in my hand. I have worn glasses for reading since about my mid-twenties, but if I concentrated enough, I could still read. But when it…
read moreThe Aracuraria Chilean Pine Tree can live to 1,000 years, with its upside down paintbrush-like shape that might have prevented plant-eating dinosaurs from grazing the forest’s floor. Tasmania’s Trakine Forest is home to the 3,000-year-old Huon Pines, and rivers that nurture lobster-sized crayfish in its currents. And the Japanese Cedar, or Yakusugi, thrive and have…
read moreOne time when I was about four or five, it must have been Thanksgiving, I was sitting with my brother and two other children at the kids table in the back room. It was a communal meal so all the families contributed and somebody brought a dish of boiled peas and carrots. Peas were at…
read moreWhen I was in primary school grammar instruction was compulsory, precise and rigorous. Understand the categories and rules and I could receive an ‘A.’ While I was an exemplary student, I am also mildly dyslexic—I just didn’t know it then. Categorization is excruciating for one with a dyslexic processing brain. And word order? Oy gevalt!…
read moreOn this fourth day into contemplating turning 50, desperately resisting the compulsion to take the easy route and apply the term angst (though it is likely more akin to ambivalence—but, more on that later), I am drawn to consider mercy. A recent entry to a blog I follow reviewed Anne Lamott’s book, Hallelujah Anyway, with a…
read moreOn this day, fifty years ago, Katherine Switzer began the #BostonMarathon. The problem was, women were not allowed to participate. Two miles into the contest, the race director, Jack Semple, fully angered at the realization that a woman had somehow slipped in attempted to physically force her out. Tom Miller, her boyfriend at the time,…
read moreYou may have heard of this resource called Google? Apparently, all the kids are using it these days. I jest, of course, but cannot restrain a groan when my kids lament the lack of speed with which their search tab opens and employ the term ‘google’ as a verb, and I recall those early days…
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