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Does the culprit stare you straight in the face, or are the demons long buried deep in a well sealed with a heavy lid? Does an unsettling realization surface in your consciousness when you try to resist? Do you secretly desire a flash of insight, a clearer understanding, a map?

Mirror, mirror, on the wall we query, hoping for reassurance, validation, the ok that we can continue in the safety and confines of inertia. With any luck or divine guidance, what reflects back to us from the kind mirror will be a gentle nudge, a taunt, a dare – today might be the day to start! Start what? I’m guessing you already know the answer, or if not fully formed you are at least aware that something in your life might need to change. For example, I confess that I, along with many of my colleagues and students, occasionally practice the dark art of perfectionism masquerading as procrastination. Read More »

The plane taxis down the short runway alongside the water’s edge. When it reaches the end, the pilot makes a slow 180-degree turn, halts momentarily, then proceeds full speed. The huge aircraft lifts off with the thrust of its engines, climbs through scattered clouds, banks and heads out to sea. She peers down on the rough Atlantic swells, far from the gentle Caribbean side where she spends her days and languishes by night. She glances back at the mysterious peaks, pays homage to the jungle-covered hillsides and watches the pattern of galvanized roofs and multicolored cottages recede until they disappear. She strains for a last fleeting glimpse of the island through the floating wisps of clouds and wonders – how long before she will return. Read More »

At midnight Dec. 31, 2012 I fly over Artic islands and Ungava Bay into the New Year just before crossing the Atlantic on my way to Amsterdam. I marvel as we soar over vast northern regions, hurtling through the night sky. I imagine swirls of snow and flows of ice forming patterns down below. I stare at blue upholstered seats packed with passengers around me, row upon row, bin after overhead bin, and movie screen after movie screen all lined up for strategic viewing. It strikes me that patterns pervade (or invade) our lives. Not just visual patterns like rows of parked and logoed aircraft lined up at gates for loading, patterns that sparked this whole run of thought, but stock market patterns, flight patterns, weather patterns, holding patterns and complex patterns of behavior. Read More »

In the summer of 1993, a young Reuters photographer covering a story in Mogadishu, Somalia was stoned to death along with 3 other journalists. Before his death at only 22, Dan Eldon had accumulated thousands of photographs and created dozens of journals filled with his images, writings, memorabilia and drawings. Eldon’s mother Kathy assembled 17 of his journals to memorialize her son’s vision. Dan’s life and death and creative legacy reveal a pure and inspirational journey. His sister Amy recalls, “Dan would push my boundaries and challenge my fears.” The compilation of his life’s work, The Journey is the Destination has sold over 200,00 copies. Read More »

Certain punctuation and formatting conventions barely get our notice, but omit or cancel any of these and we tend to react. It’s useful to know the rules of punctuating as hammered into you in school – useful so that you know the effects of specific marks, what they can do and more importantly, what they can’t do. If you are in control of it, punctuation is an extension of one’s voice – the tone and flavor of the writing.
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We are a culture obsessed with balance. Don’t upset the balance, eat a balanced diet, monitor your credit card balance, balance the books, your fate lies in the balance, engage in a balancing act between this and that – family and career, life and love, work and play, dreams and reality, balance the equation. The prevailing mantra – don’t get off balance! Read More »

In Wuthering Heights country a few weeks ago, I walked miles in the pelting rain, my green wool scarf the color of the verdant fields wound tightly around my neck. I holed up a week in a romantic stone grange listening to the winds howl through the cracks of the recessed windows. I could write the song of those winds now and the stories that they hold. Read More »

The experience of creating this website may go down as one of my greatest learning experiences. I resisted the idea of having a site for years, thinking all kinds of convincing inaccurate thoughts. This sophisticated form of procrastination allowed me to reconcile not taking the steps required to make it happen i.e. not taking stock of my achievements and non-achievements. I also knew that I didn’t have the marketing and technical skills required for the task. I thought that perhaps I would just wait for the day that I miraculously woke up and had somehow acquired this expertise from the I-Cloud or facsimile! Read More »

Art manifests our deepest passion, our unanswered questions and our willingness to walk on shaky ground. Attempting to segregate art from life would be like plucking the stars from the sky, holding the sea from the shore, or eliminating the subtext from your conversation. As Tim O’Brien says of his fictional memoir, The Things They Carried,  “…life gives us stuff. It gave Conrad the ocean, which he used in his stories. Life gave Updike domesticity and divorce and the suburbs, which he uses as material. And life dealt me the Vietnam card. Yet I don’t consider myself a Vietnam writer, any more than Morrison considers herself a black writer. We’re writer writers. And we use what life gives us.” Read More »