This week, I have a guest blogger–my good friend Brian Fay. He’s a retired professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University, a thoughtful guy, and a good buddy. He talks about paying attention to our souls (our basic attitudes or orientations toward life, reality, and the universe) and “gerotranscendence” (which, to Brian, definitely doesn’t mean leaping … Read More
I can’t bear to think about the election. Also, I can’t bear not to. On average, I get twenty emails and two texts a day about it, asking for money or asking me to volunteer. (I have no idea how many phone calls I get a day because I just don’t answer.) I force myself … Read More
It started as a prank. My husband loves them. The first Christmas I spent with him and his kids, he rented a Santa Claus outfit. Around 2 a.m., after we finished wrapping the presents and setting them under the tree, he stuffed the costume with newspaper and laid it on the sofa. He placed … Read More
Across most northern countries, August is the slow-down month. People take vacations. They sip gin-and-tonics beside a lake, a river, or the ocean. They read or chat amiably outdoors in deck chairs and don’t move much in the heat of the day. Evenings are for messy barbeques or lobsters on picnic tables, with corn and … Read More
Here’s a great epigram I saw recently on a tee-shirt: … Read More
For the generations who’ve grown up with the internet, blogs are old news. Every hip business has a blog; influencers have blogs (or they used to, before they turned to Twitter, Instagram, and vlogs); every activity or interest has a core of people who blog about it. In fact, I started encountering blogs accidentally a … Read More
A year ago this week, I drove away from a much-loved job into a new life of being retired. When I said so yesterday to my husband, he said, “It’s been a year already? That’s gone by fast.” I agreed, but added, “Also very slowly.” He knew what I meant. The travel part of the … Read More
Thoreau writes in Walden (with delightful consciousness of his irony) that he has “traveled a good deal in Concord.” This spring, I too have been traveling a good deal in my hometown. And like Thoreau – and a lot of other people now – I’m doing most of my traveling on foot. Luckily, I live … Read More
One of my favorite sci fi novels, Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, imagines an “ambiguous utopia” (as the subtitle tells us) on a small moon orbiting a capitalist planet. When the novel opens, the society of Anarres is several generations away from its founding by a bunch of rebellious “anarcho-syndicalists” — and still evolving . A … Read More
This pandemic has shown us some very ugly sides of human nature – and also some delightful ones. I’ve loved some of the neologisms, especially “Covidiot” (the twentysomethings who party in large groups) and “quarantinis” (martinis with lemon, honey, and an optional dose of vitamin C). We followed the recipe from the internet (minus the … Read More