By sheer chance, I just opened a journal from 2021 and felt encouraged by this entry: "The hardest goodbye (at the end of the term) was with C who tried bravely not to cry. It’s easy to assume I don’t mean much to people, that I’m part of the furniture of life. But even that [...]
Sometimes in my morning writing, I ask questions of “Wise Kate” – that part of me that knows more than I do at present. Today, I asked her: “What do you believe about pleasure?” Here’s what she said: +That it’s as necessary as air and water to life, and more than that – to [...]
Do you know what Bards do? They learn stuff - demonstrable, actionable things that can be shared on the spot. Sing a song? Check. Recite a poem? Got it. Tell us a tale? Gladly! This picture shows the evolving repertoire of one of my dearest and most long-standing Bardic Academy students. At present she knows [...]
Yesterday I finished listening to the BBC podcast, “The New Gurus” – or rather, almost finished listening because when the host began to cover things I’d rather not think about, I turned it off. Same with a book I began reading recently. About twenty pages in, I set it down. “Nope,” I thought. “Three hundred [...]
I’m getting ready to teach my first Irish language class through the Celtic Wisdom School, though I’ve taught Irish for about 25 years now at Harvard and a few times at Boston College – and so I’m grappling with the question: Why would anyone want to learn Irish? When I was falling in love [...]
Like everyone else, I do my fair share of typing, both on laptops and in the tiny text box on my phone. But here’s why I write by hand every single day and why I honestly believe it’s in everyone’s best interest to do so, too: It’s calming. It’s a human-paced activity in a [...]
Can you picture your long-ago bedroom when you were about twelve years old? Here’s mine: A single bed over which my mother had very helpfully affixed a reading lamp (thank you, Mama!). A desk for doing homework. Two small bookcases brimming with my favorite books, perhaps fifty or sixty, all of which I’d read at [...]
OK, is it just me or is anyone else completely addicted to the New York Times daily games? Like many, I'm besotted with Wordle, but the one that really has my heart is the SpellingBee. Words + puzzles: my jam! I'm now going to contravene every bit of maternal advice ever drummed into my [...]
