“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

Today’s little spark of inspiration comes from a milk carton. This morning as I took the chocolate Silk soymilk out of the fridge, I noted the advice on the side: “Take A Sip Forward,” a sentence that, by the way, is trademarked. The idea is that drinking soy milk is “one small step toward living […] Read More

Allow me to crow. After two and three quarters hours of fiddling, husband Bob and I have succeeded in getting wireless to work at our house on my laptop. We’ve never even been able to use a cellphone here. We’re in the woods and apparently hard for signal to find. This miraculous computing capability was […] Read More

When I was a kid, my mother used to drop pieces of advice on me as they happened to occur to her. One day, she said, somewhat out-of-the-blue: Never buy a business; you’ll come out much better if you start your own. I did do exactly that, when I was twenty-two and started freelancing full-time. […] Read More

Seems to me that though there’s a lot of scrambling going on in these difficult economic days, in some sense the country is on hold. Lots of decisions, actions, expenditures have been delayed. (Yesterday a writer told me about her novel, which was close to sold in October. A well-known editor at a major house […] Read More

My friend Sabine was helping a mutual friend overhaul the inside of her house. They’d been hard at it all morning and then met me for lunch (I, who had merely been sitting at a computer.) Their dust-stirring industry was inspiring to hear about. Sabine had learned a lot of her techniques, she said, from […] Read More

My one meeting, some years ago, with my hero John Updike involved a very small bit of boldness, which turned out well in its modest way. It took place not long after my first novel Revelation had come out. I wrote about the incident at the time for a Research Triangle newspaper. I’m “the local […] Read More