Just the kind of day you want for a run, in the woods, by the stream, past peak, sun doing its trick slanting through the trees. Fallen leaves conceal roots and ruts on the trail and other spots are muddy and slick, and I have to pay attention more than usual, focus where my foot will land and the trail will bend, that’s called being in the moment, said to be good for you, and I don’t fall, this...
Savvy guy that I am, I use Google Alerts to catch any mentions of my novels STASH and CLEAN BREAK out there in the Internet cosmos. Just in case someone, somewhere, read one of these two cool books and wanted to tell the world. I’d want to know about it. I might even get in contact with such a dear reader. So I was pleased to get this alert today for David Klein Stash. Sadly, the alert had...
Devastating and essential are the two words I would use to describe this novel from Richard Powers, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of “The Overstory,” another novel I loved. In “Bewilderment,” Astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life in the cosmos while single-parenting his nine-year-old son, Robin, who is on the spectrum and about to get kicked out of third grade for bashing a fellow...
Who knows where I run across these things (searching, scrolling, clicking–the usual way), but this test of your creative powers is quick and interesting. It’s called the Divergent Association Task and it doesn’t measure all types of creativity, but “one specific type of creativity: divergent thinking, which is the capacity to generate an array of diverse solutions to an...
Someone close to me is feeling in a bad way. They’re suffering from a dark brew of disappointment, sadness, and anxiety. I know because they told me. We sat at a table over a cup of coffee and the coffee went down my throat like battery acid when I looked into their eyes and saw the pain radiating out. It was hard to sit there and hear what they were going through. Of course I was uncomfortable...
On a Sunday morning, early, solitude, coffee, others still asleep above you, thinking about the day ahead and you’ve got things to do but nothing absolutely demanding your attention, you turn and look out the window and get this, pay attention to this. I look back down the arc and get snared in how I chose to spend my time, where I put my energy, to what did I devote my minutes, hours, days...
I am calm too
Every so often, not very often, I get out of my own head and observe. Not to gather information and form impressions and make assessments, and not to judge and plot and scheme, but to leave all of that behind and do nothing other than experience sunlight glitter on a stream in a way I’ve never noticed. It’s only a moment or two of my attention but for that moment my breath stops when I realize...
Today marks two years I’ve been fiddling around with this blogging thing. That’s not really an anniversary cake. I’ve co-opted Harriet’s birthday cake again. She baked it herself, but at least I made the icing and frosted the cake. Taking a couple of hours (or less or more) to write a blog post is so unlike the two-year trial of writing a novel that it’s hard to...
I’m really pissed off about the thumping that critical race theory is taking from its enemies. Funny thing is, about a year ago few people outside of academia had ever heard of critical race theory (CRT). Now, almost everyone has, because the conservative right wing has labeled it subversive and threatening (Threatening to what? White supremacy). CRT got its start around 1980 when researchers and...
Some days pass in a whirl of imagination and others are taskmasters hounding me and I get near the end and not once have I taken a moment for beauty, but if I’m lucky and I remember and my timing is right I look a little outside myself and the world shakes me by shoulders and says pay attention fool, the sunset is your favorite color.
Plan ahead if it pleases, but you can see only as far as the next turn you take. One turn and then another. Which way at the fork, how to act, try not to look behind. You alone decide. Under blazing sun through drenching rain over deepening snow against gusting winds. Across concrete sidewalks and rickety bridges and endless asphalt. One turn and then another. Shoved this way, pulled that, and...
A friend recommended The Father to me, with words of caution: it’s hard to watch. He was right. But hard to watch doesn’t mean don’t watch. In this case it means the film is so powerful, devastating, brilliant, and so close to home that the discomfort I experience is illuminating, even reassuring: I am not alone. I watched this film about a man struggling with dementia because I too had a father...
I’m not a big user of social media. I gave up on Twitter a few years ago. Occasionally I’ll share one of my blog posts on Facebook or comment on a friend’s post. I don’t pay much attention to my LinkedIn presence since I’m not networking or building my brand. I’ve never used Instagram or TikTok or any of the other social media apps I don’t even know exist. But there’s one social media...
