“Sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to make room for the life that’s waiting for you.” ~Joseph Campbell My new motto? Always have a backup plan. Life rarely goes as you’d imagined. January 16th, 2001. That’s the day my life trajectory changed irrevocably. That’s the day that would lead me…
“AI accidentally made me believe in the concept of a human soul by showing me what art looks like without it.” ~Unknown What is intelligence? I’ve asked this question all my life—as a teacher, a filmmaker, a researcher, and now, as someone losing my vision to macular degeneration. I ask it when I watch students…
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” ~Audre Lorde For most of my life, I asked myself a quiet question: What’s wrong with me? I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t have to. It was stitched into how I moved through the…
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” ~Henry Ford We’ve all been there: happily ticking off life’s checkboxes, certain we’ve cracked the code, until—bam!—life decides otherwise. Divorce papers, layoffs, grief, or unexpected illness—life’s curveballs don’t discriminate. For me, it was a sudden mystery illness at sixteen. What should have been a…
Writer Jilly Cooper, ‘Queen of the bonkbuster’ who brought sex and sharp-eyed social observation to Middle England’s bookshelves with rollicking tales of raunch and rivalry amongst the Cotswolds polo-playing classes, has died after a fall. Queen Camilla, whose first husband Andrew Parker-Bowles was said to have been the inspiration for the invented lothario Rupert Cambell-Black,…
James I of England, the first Stuart king of England, and James VI of Scotland, has had a less than glowing reputation, deemed as odd and effeminate and has been underplayed in comparison to Elizabeth 1 and Charles I. A new biography paints a different picture of an assured intellectual who promoted peace in Europe…
Ah, yes. The to-do list. I have one. Actually, I have multiple to-do lists. I’m a Gemini, so I always need more than one of everything. I’ve written somewhere about my to-don’t list, which is nothing more than all the things I am no longer doing/signing up for. For some reason, I cannot find that…so…
Actress Patricia Routledge, a British treasure of screen and stage, with an extraordinary range, has died. Best known for playing the social-climbing battleaxe Hyacinth Bucket in classic TV sitcom Keeping Up Appearances (“an absolute monster and I enjoyed playing her enormously.”) she also starred in Alan Bennett’s TV monologues, and in BBC One’s amateur sleuth…
The Dark Night of the Soul and the Path to Awakening The dark night of the soul isn’t just words for me. It was a dark period of my life that stripped me of everything I thought I knew. If you’ve been through it, you know it is not poetic or romantic. It is a…
Why Spiritual Awakening Feels Lonely at Times There are moments on this spiritual path that feel like being cast adrift. The old way of being that once felt normal has fallen away. Conversations that once excited you now taste flat. Friends who were once companions feel far away. You’re here, but you are not quite…
