*Yesterday’s Post in Song

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*Today: Go Forth

For most people in our culture October 31 is a day of fun, a day to mock traditional icons of evil, spurn death, costume oneself in an alternative identity. It is a day of acquiring masses of goodies, which is more than gold to children.
For some people, this is a day of fear. There are [...]

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*Reunion

This weekend we had a reunion. It was the best kind, where nobody was showing off, and nobody dreaded being seen as a loser, the very thought of such a thing, in the context, being preposterous. It was the kind of reunion that makes people wish they saw each other more often, and regret having [...]

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*Positive Psychology

About ten years old, positive psychology studies how individuals and communities can thrive. A reaction against psychology as the study of mental illness, it aims to redress the imbalance in understanding human nature and what makes us happy and healthy and peaceful individually and socially.
This reminds me of a book I read years ago: The [...]

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*What About Faith?

Via middle English and Anglo-French, the word “faith” comes from the Latin word “fidere,” to trust. Merriam-Webster’s first definition of faith is about allegiance and sincerity. It’s only at the second definition that we arrive at religion, firstly in God and secondly in something for which there is no proof. That’s where the arguments begin.
I’m [...]

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*Forgiveness

Today is Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holy days. It is the day of atonement, at one-ment, the day that exists to clear the slate between human beings and God. It’s a day for soul searching. And then you get to start fresh.
In preparation, you have to do your own work to clear the [...]

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*Uncertainty

From The Situationist:
[P]eople feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur. Most of us aren’t losing sleep and sucking down Marlboros because the Dow is going to fall another thousand points, but because we don’t know whether it will fall or not — and human beings find uncertainty more painful [...]

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*Why I Write

I write for art, I write for my soul, and I write to make a living.
It took years of carving out time to write while earning a living through other means, years of intense frugality, until I could earn a living with writing. I was grateful when I could, and that humility and gratitude [...]

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*Envy

I am struck by envy today.
I am not envious of greatness; it awes me and it teaches me. But I am envious of luck and I discovered today that a book I greatly admired had quite an element of luck in the making of it.
I am envious of the author.
I’ve had my own share [...]

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*Creativity

Creativity is odd. Just think about it. You start with nothing and then you have something, and it has to be an interesting or beautiful or new something, otherwise it might be skillful, but not creative. Pondering this mystery has been floating around the blogosphere, in Beth’s blog and Litlove’s. As for me, I’m on [...]

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*Front and Back

When I was in university, I used to travel a lot by train. Scenery was sometimes beautiful, sometimes flat and endless, but the most interesting part of train travel was riding by the backs of places, towns, houses, yards, industrial areas, seeing what was put behind, not intended for display. It wasn’t as pretty as [...]

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*On Rejection

I read Animal Farm in high school, like many other students. It was part of the canon. Along with Shakespeare’s plays and a few sonnets. A couple of Arthur Miller plays. Things like that–great literature, you know? Inevitabe. Or not.
T.S. Eliot’s reaction to reading the manuscript of Animal Farm (a parable of Stalinist Russia) was [...]

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