Hello, my friend. It’s good of you to “come over” to see me here. Your company is cherished and deeply welcome. Please imagine me now, opening the green, wooden door and beckoning you inside. In our increasingly digitalized and decentralized world, I feel more and more that this site is my online home. Here, I [...]
After many decades of studying Irish proverbs, they have become good friends whose voices speak to me with kindness, with sly wit, and with graceful intelligence. They take the long view. Here, at the beginning of the year with a million hopes, desires, and goals swirling in our minds and the kind of excitement [...]
You’ve had this experience, I’m sure. You want to do something, create something, or try something, but before you begin, some drawback or hesitation jumps in and gives you pause. Perhaps you want to write a book, start a business, go to a party, bake a soufflé, or adopt a puppy. Anything! Visions of [...]
I’m going to tell you right now that my way of answering this question is unlike the usual methods for answering it. And I’m also going to tell you upfront that only you can truly answer it for yourself. Let me explain. Our society uses different methods to determine what we call “talent,” which [...]
Who are you “really”? Our minds are constantly doing their best to sort things into categories that will save us time as we build our case about reality. This is a “good thing,” we say, or “a bad thing.” This person is safe or not safe, to be trusted or not, smart or foolish, [...]
You know, we really need fairytales. We need songs. We need stories and poems and proverbs and other expressions of human creativity and experience. This is not extra – a bit of liberal arts fluff, as many claim with a patronizing smile. No, this is central to the development of what I call a [...]
Hello, friends! Today I'd like to share with you a fun way to create a fairytale-inspired poem-story about YOU. I invented this exercise to use with young poets I'm guiding currently and we've all enjoyed it so much. Here's what you do: Fill in the blanks here: "Once there was a X named Y." For [...]
We carry within us many selves and I find it's very much worth asking them questions from time to time. You can talk to the child within you, to the artist, to the happy person, to the king or queen. All that's necessary is to ask a question and listen. I promise that when [...]
I promise I will tell you how, but first I must share a confession: Sometimes, I don’t. Get things done, that is. Sometimes, I simply obey some inner voice that tells me it’s not time yet. That can be scary because almost daily we are snarled at to “just do it,” or “suck it [...]
It may be just late January, it may be the pandemic that drags on and keeps us confined and separate from each other and from so many happy plans and occupations we'd ordinarily pursue, it may just be a chapter of my own story, but lately I've been feeling a bit blue. It's not dreadful. [...]
