A politician once told me, in talking about a panel he’d been on where some too-amazing stories were told, that he “hadn’t had the opportunity to rescue any children from burning buildings lately.” Most of us haven’t. And yet, most of us do run into plenty of opportunities and needs for courage. I just ran […] Read More

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” —Charles Kingsley, nineteenth century English minister who wrote The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, as well as being chaplain to Queen Victoria. Quoted on The […] Read More

How many women who graduated in 1955 wind up a full-half century later as National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a founder of a company that is designing an undersea vehicle to allow “full working access to the world’s oceans?” Often referred to as “Her Deepness,” Sylvia Earle is highly likely the only one. And she is an […] Read More

My 22 year-old nephew Walker and his girlfriend Caitlin, both UNC students, came over for lunch today. She had never been to our house. From 9:30 until 1, Bob and I madly scurried, getting ready. Mostly that meant near-renovating our house. He took more than a wheelbarrowful of papers and books out of the kitchen […] Read More

Oh, dear, oh, dear, I lost a Follower. What that means is: there’s some cyberspace way people can sign up to be Followers of particular blogs. I guess that means subscribers. On my blog “dashboard,” I can see how many this blog has. Well, today I saw that this blog is DOWN ONE Follower. I […] Read More

A delightful discovery, recommended by friend Sabine: the TED site and its speaker series…and the talk on “A different way to think about creative genius” by Elizabeth Gilbert, the wildly successful author of, among others, Eat, Pray, Love, three verbs whose order I regularly forget. TED is a conference that aims to present “the world’s […] Read More

“The authentic self is the soul made visible.” Sarah Ban Breathnach It does take courage to make one’s soul visible. But why cover it up with something much less interesting and alive? If you like this post, please bookmark it on del.icio.us, share it on StumbleUpon, vote for it on Digg. Thanks so much. Read More

Just read a new book that could radically change the world if enough people paid attention. Could certainly do good things for the world of any one reader. Kickback by Robert Urbanowski is a philosophical cousin of a book I co-authored, The Healing Power of Doing Good. Note Kickback‘s subtitle: “A remarkable new law reveals […] Read More

On Facebook, which I find baffling, I’ve been “tagged” to tell 25 random facts about myself. (Facebook reminds me of the floor of the NC House of Representatives the first time I went there to cover a story as a reporter: people popping up randomly all over the place in one big room, busily clustering […] Read More

Lately I’ve been wondering if it’s better for all of us if I cut back and spend as little as possible, or continue spending as usual, or do what I can of next year’s Christmas shopping now in order to spur the woeful economy. So far my own income has held steady in these trying […] Read More