• A Drink and a Prayer

    How do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? It’s a complex holiday. St. Patrick was born around 400 AD in Britain. History tells us he was kidnapped, became a shepherd who heard voices from God and had a profound religious conversion which he then shared to convert many Irish to Christianity. No beer, no snakes, and probably…

  • New Role Models for Girls Everywhere

    Who are your role models? This year, girls and women have three wonderful new role models. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to, and accepted by, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman, for non-violent peace work in women’s rights. The peace prize is awarded based on Alfred Nobel’s criteria to those “who shall have done the…

  • Impulse or Intellect?

    If I didn’t let my intellect frame my decisions, where would impulse lead me? One of my very earliest memories is from before I could walk, so I would guess under a year of age, when I had the impulse to be alone in the snow after a tremendous blizzard. I crawled off into a…

  • Fifty Days at Fifty Years: the Spring of Social Media

    The snow is melting off my winter garden this morning and the small Japanese fern emerging quite green in the corner says new growth is not far off now and may have already silently started. Today marks fifty days of my experiment with social media and this was also the year I passed fifty years.…

  • Reflections on James Baldwin Now

    Two contrasting films of the inspiring author James Baldwin were screened at the Brecht forum in the West Village, NYC last night with curator Matt Peterson of Red Channels. One, a South Florida TV interview of Baldwin by a TV personality and history professor with a small live audience, was focused on his political views.…