May is Mental Health Month and a good time to look for new ways to revitalize ourselves. Or just be mindful to make use of the old ways. As good a time as any, is what I really mean; this shouldn’t be a once-a-year special occasion.
Still, we all get caught up in the day-to-day and forget sometimes (many times) to nurture our souls. Continue reading
I’m no poet, but a reader of both poetry and the news. Sometimes they don’t seem so far apart. Here, a found poem, based on excerpts from original reporting in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Continue reading
"April is the cruellest month, ..."
Nearly every year on April 1, I re-read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It’s one of my favorite poems, and while I pay homage to it by quoting and requoting lines from it in conversation year-round, I also like to sit down and read it through periodically. The opening line, quoted above, is of course why I choose April 1 for this pleasure. (Also, April is National Poetry Month, so there’s another reason, though not the one that drives me.)
We have a bunny in our back yard. Or it might be a parade of several bunnies passing through on a regular basis. We have a pond, which attracts birds, bunnies and assorted other wildlife, and of course they attract other wildlife, including at least one hawk.
All of this gives our dogs fits. And they, in turn, give us fits. Continue reading
This year’s Thanksgiving pies: pecan, pumpkin, and peach-blueberry. Facebook just offered me my 2013 Thanksgiving pie photo as a memory, and it shows the same three pie flavors–in the exact same photographic arrangement. See what I mean about ritual?
Holidays bring out the ritual in me, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. Who doesn’t have some sort of ritual associated with major holidays?
For me, it starts with the food:
![Photo by AstroHurricane001 at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.kkish.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/cardinal1.jpg)
Photo by AstroHurricane001 at en.wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons