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Gifts. I often tell the following fable. When I read my post from 2019 and talk about each of my children and their gifts, I am reminded of this fable once again. The Animal School: A Fable by George Reavis Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the…

Resolve. EtymologyMiddle English, from Latin resolvere to unloose, dissolve, from re- + solvere to loosen, release — more at SOLVE 1a: to deal with successfully : clear upb: to find an answer toc: to make clear or understandabled: to find a mathematical solution ofe: to split up into two or more components especially in assigned…

Smell. In A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman describes this challenge of smell: When we see something, we can describe it in gushing detail, in a cascade of images. We can crawl along its surface like an ant, mapping each feature, feeling each texture, and describing it with visual adjectives like red, blue, bright,…

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth SLEEP. (Shouty capitals because this is an important topic.) I normally walk with the dogs with my husband, bright and…

Poetry. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost wrote: A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words. I discovered…

(Dis)connection. In 2019, I wrote about getting internet…soon. Well, we did not actually get it until this past fall of 2022. Living without it made us pay attention to other things – mainly ourselves. I wrote: Intentional and unintentional connections and disconnections. After doing some reading on the brain development, especially in teens, it’s amazing…

Practice. I love this old post from 2019. It is about the time my son perfected his pancake-making. He has since succeeded and failed at many types of inventions in the kitchen. Last night, he made me a lovely french toast breakfast and simple prosciutto toast and honey dinner. I don’t think he remembers his…

Fools. Better a witty fool than a foolish wit. -Feste, Twelfth Night, I.5.328 In 2019, I wrote: In Elizabethan times, the twelfth night was a holiday known as the Feast of Fools. Feste represents the festive spirit of the play, and he makes an important contribution to the action. Feste says, “Foolery sir, does walk…

Cities. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. – Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino For most of my life, I have lived in a city. But for almost seven years, I have lived…

Today, I am doing a reiterative post on day 16 from mayBE 2019. The theme was on handwork. When you read that post, you can learn about how my life as a mom was once about mending, stitching, and making – in every sense of those verbs. I had found this quote: “When you can…