Creating a strong and loving family requires skill, commitment, communication, and clarity. It requires consistently making the right choice (which works on every occasion). Today, I share a marvelous Irish folktale gleaned from the collection of Bab Feiritear, a warm-hearted storyteller from Dunquin, County Kerry, Ireland. I'd love to hear from you: 1. What wisdom [...]
There's a beautiful dance between the literal and the metaphorical in the Irish imagination. Today, we consider Irish holy wells - of which there are some 3000 in existence - and what they teach us about being, ourselves, a source of goodness, friendship, humor, and kindness in the world. Thank you for tuning in! Tell [...]
I am an ardent fan of Irish proverbs and carry dozens of them in my mind. This one, though, I think needs just a bit of tweaking to help us harvest its dose of encouragement. Tell us in the comments: 1. What is one identity that you think our society regards with a fixed mindset [...]
Just a quick word of encouragement from a "found" poem, discovered in a sheaf of papers recently. Can I just say again: I love my students. I feel so lucky to teach them. And I feel lucky that every day I sit at the piano and help someone to sing or play the piano or [...]
Do you know what Bards do? They learn stuff - demonstrable, actionable things that can be shared on the spot. Sing a song? Check. Recite a poem? Got it. Tell us a tale? Gladly! This picture shows the evolving repertoire of one of my dearest and most long-standing Bardic Academy students. At present she knows [...]
I’m getting ready to teach my first Irish language class through the Celtic Wisdom School, though I’ve taught Irish for about 25 years now at Harvard and a few times at Boston College – and so I’m grappling with the question: Why would anyone want to learn Irish? When I was falling in love [...]
The night was cold and windy and the hedges on either side of the narrow road that runs outside Ballyferriter, a town near Dingle in Ireland, were emitting a preternatural sound. My hair stood on end. I was twenty, my head full of tales and romance, and it’s not too much to say: I was [...]
Like everyone else, I do my fair share of typing, both on laptops and in the tiny text box on my phone. But here’s why I write by hand every single day and why I honestly believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to do so, too: It’s calming. It’s a human-paced activity in a [...]
Can you picture your long-ago bedroom when you were about twelve years old? Here’s mine: A single bed over which my mother had very helpfully affixed a reading lamp (thank you, Mama!). A desk for doing homework. Two small bookcases brimming with my favorite books, perhaps fifty or sixty, all of which I’d read at [...]
How do we really change our lives? What defines the moments when we leave behind one stage of life and enter another? While it’s comforting to think that we achieve a desired change by making a well-considered plan and calmly executing it, in my own life, the biggest changes have followed from the words, [...]
