life lessons
November 17, 2009
- This is a great article from the Wall Street Journal called “Story Time: The Heck with looking foward. There’s value in looking back.” It is about the wisdom of telling stories from the past to younger family members as “a deft way to transmit lessons about life while strengthening generational bonds.” It also includes this provocative quote from Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust ...
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August 4, 2009
- Earlier today, you would have found me cross-legged on Elle’s bedroom floor, folding the top flaps of a box together with one hand, holding packing tape in the other. Sealing away for a few weeks some of the odds and ends that string together the life of an eight year old girl. As I ran the tape across the top of the box, I noticed familiar writing, the boxy all-caps print that belongs to my ...
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June 19, 2009
- My little sister says when I was in high school she could always find me holed up somewhere inside or outside the house with an apple in one hand and a book in the other. I wasn’t interested in television. I wasn’t interested in magazines. I wanted a book on life that was full of adventure, far off places and made me wonder what was going to happen next. I wanted endings that made me feel ...
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June 8, 2009
- This Lightning-blasted Tree Reminds Me of God's Power. “In God we trust” appears on our currency. These words are controversial. They prompt some people to fight for their removal, while others insist that they belong on our money and everywhere else. I ask: Do we trust God? If so, which one? I’ll explain. I recently had a flamboyant lesson in paying attention. Paying attention ...
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May 22, 2009
- They pile into the car, arms full of backpacks and folders and reports cards. The word goodbye fresh on their lips. As I navigate the school parking lot, I adjust my rearview mirror so that it fills with their two faces. Today would be a tough day, I knew that much. The last day of school, their last day at this school. Elle* broke first. “I’m going to miss her,” she cries out. Tears. “Do ...
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May 19, 2009
- I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here. Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows - the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one ...
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April 27, 2009
- Some stories go on, even when we wish they would end.This, I know. My fingers tingle with wanting to snap the book closed. My mouth opens to declare well, that’s that so I can get on with the next story, whole and separate and not tied to the last. A brand new Once upon a time followed by the middle and The End, with a flourish of script. But that’s not how it goes. It’s not a new lesson, ...
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April 8, 2009
- ... And what I'd like to share with yours.With prom season, school graduations etc. just around the corner, and as the parent of a teen, I felt it was important to share.Today, my sixteen-year-old daughter's school was surrounded by EMTs, police and fire fighters. A helicopter hovered above the campus grounds. The coroner came first, then the hearse.There was a car crash on campus involving drunk ...
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March 28, 2009
- I look out my kitchen window just in time to watch a cactus wren fly toward a small saguaro cactus and then land on it, quite safely. It always amazes me to see this, and I wonder, every time, how does the bird know how to land without getting hurt? Without thinking it, this line is in my head - the way a desert bird knows how to land on a cactus - and ...
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March 8, 2009
- I picked my son up from his baseball practice yesterday. I had sat there and watched his practice for a bit seething inside. My son had gotten the very short end of the stick this baseball season due to little league politics and fathers coaching sons to make sure they make a team. I read a quote on the side of a Starbuck's cup from a woman named Brenda Stonecipher, that sums up what we ...
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