Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

This is not a philosophical question. Or, not entirely, anyway. And yes, as usual this rumination is really about me, not you (unless you want it to be). No, it’s more the question I’ve been asking myself lately as I sit here looking at the blank screen day after day, realizing I feel I have [...]

The Atlantic.com has made a big mistake, in my opinion. They’ve decided to remove all personality and reader hooks from their blogger pages (except for Andrew Sullivan’s)and make them almost unreadable. I guess to ensure that casual passersby keep on… well, passing by. It’s not clear to me why they would want to do this. [...]

(Yes, yes this is an odd post but, strangely, my site comes up first (at the moment) in a Google search for “luddite-ism” – who even knew that was a real way of writing that? – I am so proud, lol. Anyway, from the number of people looking for a definition of that term, I’m [...]

I mentioned yesterday that I thought that to re-brand and renew Human Beams, we needed a new name. I still think that – or maybe at least a good tagline. Anyway, I thought I had found it yesterday. A line of a poem by Langston Hughes just sort of leaped out at me and I [...]

You know how you learn something, and you know it intellectually, you can recite the why’s and the wherefore’s of it, and can explain it to someone else – but you know, and you know you know, that you just don’t get it? Well, that was me – with any number of things (like long, [...]

So, finally – FINALLY! -  my genius has put in an appearance and has allowed me a glimmer of what to do with Human Beams. I had despaired of this happening because, while I have had plan after plan, nothing really seemed to fit. Or, at least, didn’t excite me enough to make it fit. [...]

Don’t eyeglasses come with tiny chips that call home when they are lost? [photo from here]

i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when i came, a monstrous unnamed baby, and i with my mother’s itch took it to breast and named it History. she is more [...]

Almost every time I think of doing the Twitter thing again, I get the whale.   Highly annoying, because my desire to re-enter the stream is very fleeting and by the time I can, I no longer want to. But I miss my friends.

The newspapers spread wide against the wall are so bright it is only a moment later that I notice the small woman framed by them and the old quilts covering the beds, they’d probably bring a fortune today but then they were just old quilts. Who was she? The credits say “Mulatto ex-slave in her [...]