Fighting through a maze of rocks and winter’s dead leaves, this harbinger of spring, two crocus blooms, purple and gold, determined to be seen and I saw them, surprised and pleased. War and death and disease and hatred—and still, hope springs eternal.
That’s right, it’s Pi Day—March 14, or 3.14. Or 3.141592654 and on and on, with no repeating pattern. What does one do on Pi Day? Bake pies. For those who may not remember Euclidian geometry, Pi, represented by the Greek letter π, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. For any circle, the distance around the edge is a little more than three times the distance across. Two...
Thank you Julia and Owen for helping bring our snowy friend to life. It’s funny how this guy can brighten your mood.
Maybe you do too, but I have days firmly in a dark place. I wake up that way. The writing goes poorly, or I say something I regret, or the news of the world has me down. Maybe Prince Happy keeps telling me how life is good, but I’m still feeling like the man in black. With all the light I have, still the shadow looms. I know the playbook. Get mindful and meditative. Savor, savor, savor...
I’m not a good meditator, when it comes to closing eyes and focusing on the breath and clearing the busyness of my mind. I get restless, I get bored, and even if I have what I might call a “good meditative session” I don’t notice any positive aftereffects. But put me in front of my fire, close to the heat, and I’ll watch the flames perform. Where will the tongues will flicker next and which piece...
“And so we shall have to do more than register and more than vote; we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with enthusiasm.”Martin Luther King Photo by Steve Schapiro Sadly for Martin Luther King, Jr., even the first part of his desire—to register and vote—is beyond reach. The second part about creating leaders who...
Even though the temperature befitted an Ice Age day, I needed my daily dose of fresh air and exercise, and so into a nature preserve I ventured and began walking along a snowy and icy trail. My mind began to wander, daydreaming like I tend to do, and then I realized I’d gotten turned around and wasn’t sure which trail I was on or direction headed. I experienced this weird sensation of a time...
Like everyone else, I’ve been impacted by Covid, although I haven’t had it yet (that I know of). And like every other writer, I’ve had a fair amount to say about Covid. At one point I was wondering why characters in a novel I was working on weren’t socially distancing or masking. I waffled on whether to include a crowded cocktail party scene—even though the novel takes place before the pandemic...
Black coffee wisping steam and a task list on my mind for the day. I’m hoping for a good one, with stretches of purpose and productivity, because I hate to admit yesterday scored low on the getting-things-done meter. Last night’s sleep: less than satisfactory but could have been worse. I’m here, I’ve shown up early. That alone is a check on the list. I nonchalantly part the curtain and almost...
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...
