Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Wisdom”
Out the window, Wednesday, there’s still life, flora and fauna, chittering nut hatches, bleating red-tailed squirrels. One of my cats sits at the base of a Doug fir, waiting, hoping, but the odds are against him, just like they are against me, too, in spite of all my pretending that I’ll figure it out, find the answer, we end up the same, dead in the end…
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Is it, perhaps, the most famous cursive signature in American history? And, now that I think about it—and given all the other handwritten flourishes that graces the documents created by the so-called founding fathers—why was John Hancock the one who had his moniker celebrated above and beyond all the rest? The history books offer something of an explanation but who knows if it is even true
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I spent most of this day in my green sanctuary. Away from the world. Hiding out. Holing up by choice. This, the day after the thirty-four guilty counts convicted as felon you-know-who. I weeded. I watered. I fertilized. I scrubbed more green algae from the dahlia fountain. I recycled. I re-planted. I watched birds—goldfinch, sparrows, the flicker—cheep and bounce and hop…
It is always good to have a series of questions to ask the draft of a poem. Interrogating your work is, in my opinion, a key element of the necessary revision process. Thanks to Bob Haynes—an outstanding teacher I worked with in 2005 and 2006 via Writers on the Net—for the insights and wisdom that are below…
After the shock of the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, oh so many of us felt upended, and at loose ends. A wise and deeply soulful friend encouraged me to do some soul searching and craft my personal inner stance, statements that could inspire and guide me when the waves got choppy, when the going got rough. I crafted my angst into words; time and time again during those turbulent years, I would steady myself by taking a look at my words. Speed ahead in time to find us eight years later and, amazingly, shockingly, horribly, things these days seem to be even worse.
This was a week all about the sun. One way or another, millions of inhabitants on this geographic outpost of Planet Earth looked up, grew …
For many years, I have grounded my creative writing work in my singular poetry aesthetic. Below is the gist and pith of it. My poetry is an attempt to exhume moments of revelation along this journey of a constant becoming. I write as part of my attempt to seek (a temporary and temporal) understanding of the peripatetic instants of this life. Through poetry, I hope to explore, excavate, celebrate, and, at times, resurrect. I want to cut to the chase, to the heart of the matter, even it means staring down grief and pain…
It seems fitting to post this nod to an excellent primer about tyranny today, February 29, 2024, after the clearly compromised majority of our current Supreme Court decided yesterday to hear a treasonous criminal’s plea for immunity from any and all crimes committed when he was the (accidental) President of the United States…
I am a firm believer in the value of finding a poetry mentor, someone who will encourage and push you to the next necessary steps in finding your voice, in doing the creative work. When I first returned to writing poetry, way back in 2005 and 2006, I took a series of classes through an organization called Writers on the Net. I was incredibly lucky to stumble on an outstanding teacher, Bob Haynes and his courses, Daydreams I and Daydreams II. …
A while back now—egad, ten years, February 2014!—I was invited to be the Writer in the House at the Oregon Writers Colony in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. Per their website, “Oregon Writers Colony founders built the organization from a small group of writers who wanted a writing retreat at the beach into a nonprofit organization that offers support, networking, and a retreat house for writers
