The Best Laid Plans

Today I was determined to be serious and work hard.  It made sense; plus I’d had a couple of rather serious conversations over the previous day, about friends who were hurting for various reasons. The weather cooperated by being miserable, drizzling when it wasn’t actually raining.  Yes, I was going to do some real work.
And [...]

Sculpture

These two images are of ‘Ozymandias’, currently on show in the De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA - one of the finest modern art museums in this North East Corner of the US. As you can see the sculptures are huge - that’s the artist Douglas Kornfeld leaning up against it. Ozymandias? [...]

Motorcycle Maintenance

Perhaps this is not the first thing that springs to your mind when you read this blog - so let me explain. A dear friend of mine, a fellow motorcyclist, has spent many years now restoring a splendid vintage bike. It is now close to being perfect - with some discrete modern updates [...]

Iran’s lessons

Plenty has been said about Iran, and I can only say that there are many angry blogs offering solutions, and making demands, and calling names.
I won’t be doing that. I’ll observe, though, that the US is now in a strange place. We, in the US, backed Saddam Hussein all those years before we [...]

The Words we use rob us of Peace

The other day I was talking to a neighbor, who is rather well off, and the talk turned to real estate. Before too long I heard her say, “Well, we’re just about keeping or heads above water.” I found this to be an interesting cliche´. And I didn’t believe it to be [...]

How to find Happiness

Happiness, like sadness and anxiety, is very often a learned condition. We learn how to be gloomy from those around us. Yet if we want to we can also train ourselves to see happiness, respond to joy, to experience delight - and it doesn’t take a lot of work, merely practice. Sadness, by contrast, [...]

How to find peace

I’ve had this experience a number of times now and I felt it might be a good idea to share it, possibly to see if anyone else knew the feeling.
The feeling is like this: I am in a calm, empty sunlit room, and then I become that calm room, and the breeze blows gently, just [...]

Marriage and anxiety in the USA

Yesterday I was interviewed by Garima Singh for her documentary-in-progress on the nature of love and our attitudes to it. Garima is a wonderful person, and was born in India so she brings a double-culture perspective to the topic that is fascinating. India still has a high number of arranged marriages, for example, [...]

Art - busting out all over

For the past few weeks I’ve found myself going to art events; openings, open studio events, and so on, with more on the calendar. Most recently I’ve been to SoWa (south of Washington) to see the wonderful studios in the converted red-brick factory buildings there which a couple of years ago were desolate and ruinous. [...]

Tell the sex of yor unborn child - after just ten weeks!

Today’s news brought me the snippet that there is now an over-the-counter test, called Intelligender, that can tell the sex of the fetus a mere ten weeks after conception. The manufacturers are careful to point out that the test, which measures hormone levels in the mother’s urine, is about 70% accurate, and that major [...]