ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
Sometimes (I mean often) I’m a geek for etymology. If I get a word stuck in my head, which happens frequently, the way I start gnawing on it from every angle, mining it for every meaning, is almost compulsive. This…
WIGGLE ROOM
I don’t know where I heard this metaphor about grief — that it’s like a ball in a box with a button inside. When loss is fresh and raw, it’s as if the ball and box are nearly the same…
PLACING TRUST
I was reminded recently of Aristotle’s assertion that to extend trust is more valuable than to be trustworthy. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit, because I find it so darned provocative. It was an especially unexpected and interesting…
SOFT in the MIDDLE
A man walks down the street, says “Why am I soft in the middle now? Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?” - Paul Simon Paul Simon wrote this during or…
THAT’S THE WAY I LIKE IT
I can’t tell if this is an interesting etymological revelation, or if it’s something that everyone else has always already known, and I’ve been slow to notice. At any rate, it’s taken me fifty years to think about the fact…
AND ANOTHER THING…
I’m not coming up with my usual smart answers. I’ve been racking my noggin’ to craft a clever and pithy framing for it all. I’ve scoured shelvesful of poetry and mysticism. I spent half a morning opening various spiritual books…
MIND THE GAP
I was utterly charmed by the way English was spoken in London — the particular words and phrases we’d hear every day, the “Britishisms.” Sometimes I’m sort of a sponge with my environment, so I had to watch out for…
THE BEAUTY OF IT
There was a video on social media a few weeks ago in which a high-school student filmed her classmates and teachers, stopping them in the hallways and classrooms and cafeteria, telling them: “I am working on a project about things…
Mystic or Manilow?
Several years ago I created a short quiz for a class I was teaching. I presented participants with lines of verse — some were contemporary pop lyrics, others were bits of sacred poetry from various traditions — and invited them…
