I seem to be pondering this subject a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I had a birthday this week, and whenever you turn a year older, it makes you think a bit more about who you have become. I was talking to my daughter the other day, and she mentioned she’s been falling asleep earlier...
Last week, I had the opportunity to share my new talk, “Ignite Your Bursts of Brilliance,” with some very lovely members of our local writing organization. Since it’s the start of the year, the director thought it might be nice for me to focus on helping people realize their writing matters so they’d stay motivated...
Dani Rojas, a soccer-playing character on the TV show Ted Lasso, is known for his motto, “Football is life!” Dani is a Mexican national playing in England, hence the word “football” rather than soccer. He’s the team optimist, the good guy, the one who reminds everyone else to bring their love of the sport to...
A frequent reader of this blog wrote to me in response to my post titled, “Does Art Need a Purpose?” “Just as beauty is its own excuse for being,” she said, “so is art.” I found the full quote about beauty online. It’s from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson called “The Rhodora.” It reads:...
I’ve had two songs stuck in my head for weeks now and it’s driving me crazy: “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” by Tina Turner and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Seriously, brain? Why that song? I don’t even like baseball. When I was a teenager, I babysat for a lovely family who...
I was listening to an episode of Poetry Unbound, a podcast hosted by Padraig O Tuama who is definitely a person I’d love to have at my dinner party. He mentioned that in Irish when you talk about emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad.” You say, “sadness is on me.” You don’t become the...
My blog posts are created and stored in one long Word document. When I reopen the document to write a new post, I receive a prompt that says, “Pick up where you left off.” If I click that prompt, it scrolls down to the last post I edited. All I have to do is hit...
I’ve never been one to declare New Year’s resolutions or make lists of quarterly objectives. As an artist, I like to keep things fluid so I can embrace opportunities as they arise. Plus, my definitions of “success” have little to do with quantitative results. I’ve tried doing vision boards but could never understand why I...
I’m working on embracing impermanence. I’ve been reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, and she reminds us that impermanence is our natural state. Babies don’t stay babies, people live and die, jobs come and go. But it’s not just reflected in the big things, it’s also the little things that happen every day....
A friend of mine gifted me a pair of earrings the other day. But there’s so much more to the story than that. See, S started out as an acquaintance, someone I’d chat with now and then at a gathering we both attend, but not someone I had ever spent time with outside of that...