Have you ever heard, “it was like a game of cat and mouse?” I have, and it has never been in the context of the larger, stronger party spending an afternoon torturing the smaller party and then finally eating their head. Maybe it was a strategic negotiation and one side had a lot more power,…
My spiritual practice centers primarily around Jewish holidays and rituals. I say primarily because really it’s complicated and not only did I grow up in different faith traditions, I also feel like there is a lot to learn from different traditions that can help us generally get closer to living a spiritual life. No one…
I screwed up. I know I screwed up and the resulting unhappiness is entirely my own fault. And I’m still irritated at the TSA or whatever the version of the TSA person working on the US side of the Canadian border and yet wearing an “I’m from Canada” or whatever badge and vest ensemble is.…
I am not a loyal listener to any particular music radio station. Most of the time I am on NPR, but when I do take a break from being informed about the world I dart around among six or so stations, hoping to avoid commercials and maybe hit a spot on the playlist with music…
To “help” means to assist someone in moving in a particular direction or to serve someone food or drink, so perhaps it is not reasonable to expect someone to respond in a helpful way if the help we are asking for does not fall into one of those categories. Over time the word “help” has come to connote much…
I love the Miss Manners column. It is admittedly part schadenfreude and part uppity judgement, but there is another part that is closer to self-improvement to make sure I’m not part of the broader social etiquette decline. Sure some of the directives are anachronistic and just don’t make sense for the 99% of us who…
You can feel the change in the air and in the sun. The afternoons are warm but there is a different heat to the sun, there is a crispness to the morning fog that matches the first leaves that have fallen to the ground. All the children are back in school, there is a consistent rhythm…
Most of us I believe think that we have cognitive ownership and control over our bodies. Our mind may acknowledge and react to something in the body, “oh look my leg is broken, that hurts,” but our body is independent of trauma in the mind – you can not will your leg to be broken,…
The night before we left the closet was almost empty, there were a few hand-me-down business suits that really were not needed, at least not right away, and the drawer of miscellaneous socks that were mostly ignored and certainly not needed. There was a big pile of clothes on the floor, the things that had…
(tales of the animals part 6) None of my pets speak English. In fact they don’t speak any language at all save however it is that they communicate in their species specific way. The cats speak cat, the dogs speak dog that seems to be about it. Any yet there is a lot of cross-species…
Faith Works 