You know what I think of predictions, right? If you need a little reminder of the perils of prognostication, consider that we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of the late Timothy Leary’s 1967 prediction that “Deer will be grazing in Times Square in forty years.” Actually, this morning I was thinking of a line …
Dear readers, perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been quiet for awhile. With springtime’s emphasis on rebirth, I like to think I’ve been hatching an egg, conceptually speaking. A new thought (new to me, I mean) has been taking possession of my mind and I’ve been readying myself to express it. I am beginning to think …
My aunt Ruth passed away this week, may she rest in peace. We shared no blood ties: she married my mother’s brother. But the last two weeks, as she completed her transit from this world, my thoughts have returned again and again to her influence in my life, stronger than blood. Growing up in the …
I belong to a great support group for women artists. There are five of us, all involved in very different types of work. Even though some are visual artists and others make music or write, we’ve learned in our time together how many common questions we face. When Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929 that “a …
The most wonderful thing has come into my life: a new Powerbook laptop. My friend, who’s not a Mac person, inherited it from a friend of his, and generously (miraculously!) passed it on to me. Among its many benefits is that I am now using the newest operating system, which has led me through portals …
Monday is my birthday. (And I’m honored to share it this year with Dr. Martin Luther King, may he rest in peace and may we live to see his dreams come true.) For me, a birthday is an occasion for relentless self-examination, which is how I seem to mark all milestones. I must be making …
One of my greatest challenges is balancing the big world of beings and events with the little world in my own head and heart. Mostly, life consists of toggling back and forth between them, like someone switching between two TV channels. Reading this morning’s headlines about the president’s domestic spying and the prevalence of sexual …
For the last week, every spare moment I’ve had my nose stuck in book friends urged on me when I was in Seattle last month: the sci-fi novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It is a rather wonderful evocation of an alternate reality in which children are brilliantly and ruthlessly trained to serve as …
I grew up in a house without books and now one of my standing jokes to visitors who gape at the library-like appearance of my home is that the main motif of my decorating scheme is books. I’ve never counted them, but I just now did a mental inventory, estimating seventeen six-level standing bookshelves throughout …
The High Holy Days are an exciting time for me. As I consider the year gone by and the year to come, I feel a rising sense of possibility. In our tradition, on Rosh HaShanah, the first day of the new year, names are inscribed in the book of life; on Yom Kippur, one’s \t’shuvah\, …