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  My friend Jennifer turned me on to a really cool art project–shared journals. You start with two notebooks and each person fills out three or four pages with drawings, collage, or words, and then you trade. You write on, paint, and otherwise interact with the other person’s pages and then do three to four more of your…

“American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the Nielsen Company — almost 80 messages a day, more than double the average of a year earlier.” I was surprised–sort of–to read this in today’s New York Times, in an article that reports…

This weekend I hopped on a train and visited Ananda Ashram, a yoga retreat center in the Catskills. I’d heard about it for years but never gone, and am now wondering why my friends didn’t just drag me up there sooner. It was lovely–leafy, peaceful, with swans and geese and clean food and yoga and…

“The only thing that can fulfill you is being yourself and that’s inseparable from now, the field of now. That frees you, it liberates you from the world…then you walk around with much less heaviness…at the moment humans are very heavy on the planet, wherever they step life gets exterminated and that has to do…

Today “Dr. Beach,” a.k.a. Stephen P. Leatherman, released his annual “best beaches” list. At the number one slot–Hanalei Bay beach in Kauai, Hawaii. It’s a choice close to my heart. I lived in Maui for several years after college, and I recall my first thoughts when the plane touched down on the tarmac in Kauai–“This makes Maui…

At my local Whole Foods, they have these incredible, huge green olives that are slick with oil and fragrant with chunks of garlic and lemon.  I can barely contain myself around them – though they’re so garlic-y, they are best eaten either alone or in the company of others who like them as much as…

Did you know that in the original Middle English, morwening (the word we say today as “morning”) meant the coming of sunrise?  In other words, according to Wikipedia anyway, in its original meaning, morning was a verb.  It was another way to describe the act of the day dawning, a new beginning. How might you…

When Holly and I were talking about doing these listening tips, my biggest conversation pet peeve surfaced. It’s this: When you’ve started telling a story and the listener immediately chirps in and goes on with a related or semi-related tale about themselves, never acknowledging what you’ve just said. I imagine there’s a linguistic term for this (do you know it?), but…

Valerie and I were talking about what a rare, precious thing it is to find a good listener these days.  So we decided today to each offer a tip on listening, the process by which we take in the world around us and try to hear what’s real. Here’s my tip: Take a moment to…

Last week I wrote about how to prepare for scary medical tests as I personally ramped up for my annual CT scan that makes sure I am still free and clear of the cancer stuff. But now that I’m in the foot-tapping, knee-jiggling, and nail-flicking stage, I realized I left out a crucial part of getting tests–waiting…
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