In a world that thinks of ‘a long time’ as the length of a TV commercial break, ‘the future’ tends to be next week (or, maybe, next month…or in election years, November.) This makes it hard to be intensely concerned about anything with an impact we may not live to see. ‘Deep’ is not very …
Did you know that if people in your social network – especially people who are trend-setters in that network — smoke, or drink alcohol, or get divorced, or commit suicide, the chances that you will also smoke, or drink alcohol, or get divorced, or commit suicide increases by 20 – 150%? This is also true …
Donald Trump has decided that the IRS is auditing his taxes because he is a Christian. It is (at least in his mind) a clear case of Big-Government Christian-Bashing. Now, I am not a public Prosecutor, but (so far) I haven’t heard enough evidence to convict him of the Christian charge. And I am a …
Lately, I’ve been noticing scraps. Small scraps. Tiny left-overs. Crumbs, really. I think this is happening in part because my fiber art pieces tend to be small (at least by comparison with, say, a quilt). It is beyond rare for me to use more than half a yard of fabric at any given time. In …
I love seeing the bumper sticker, ‘Practice Random Acts of Kindness.’ (Among other things, it beats most of the alternatives on the bumpers of pick-up trucks and SUVs here in Colorado.) I love the idea of random acts of kindness. But the fact is, 99.44% of them are not random at all. A week ago, …
Those of us who were alive (and old enough to be aware) when John Kennedy was elected President, were born into a pre-space flight world. Space flight was one of Kennedy’s agendas as the nation’s executive, and his youth, verve, and drive were part of what fueled us and propelled us to the moon and …
I’m still thinking about consequences, bottom lines, and legacies [See: The Bottom Line from last week]…and (not surprisingly) that leads me to think about personas. What are the stories I tell about myself that have led me to a personal image that my family and friends, my colleagues and mentors would recognize as ‘Andrea’? What …
What is your bottom line? When all is said and done, what do you consider the primary, the most important consideration, the ultimate value of your life? Or let’s come at “bottom line” slightly differently, What is the benefit (profit, net gain) you are leaving to the world? Or how about this: What is your …
[Spoiler Alert: This post doesn’t come to a conclusion, or offer an answer, or end with a bon mot. It is an exploration still in process.] It wasn’t my first retreat, but sometime early in my experience of silent retreats I remember sitting in the chapel at the retreat house as one of the monks …
In the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice – the feast of Yule – is upon us. On December 22, at 08:04 GMT, the North Pole reaches the point at which it is tilted furthest – 23.5 degrees – away from the Sun. As I wrote exactly a year ago: One breath later, we begin to …