Not the dreaded Mean Reds. Just classic blues. I’ve got a case of them. The thing about the blues is that you can run and occupy your time, your mind, and fall in bed too tired to even read. But those blues? They’ll sneak into your dreams. They’ll leave their taste in your mouth when [...]
You’re not the least bit terrified of what happens before you’re born. Why, then, are you so terrified of what happens after you die? ~www.twitter.com/maitri The world ends. And the world begins. And ends. And begins. Working with families that have suffered a death makes me more familiar with death than I suspect most people [...]
Swollen, red eyes The ego threatened. Or can it be that it is not the ego at all but a real threat to your very livelihood? And does it matter either way when the answer is the same: Tis time. Time to move, grow, fear. Time to be the best you ever dreamed possible. 0 [...]
Bob Dylan once sang that “[W]hen you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Years later, he sang, “When you think you lost everything you find out you can always lose a little more.” Since they are both Dylan lyrics, the incongruity of these two lines has continued to have me scratching my head. Dylan [...]
We love people for who they are on the inside: how they treat us and others and how they make us feel. We want so much to have that love in a tangible way—so we can touch it, feel it, know it is real—that we fall in love with the person’s very humanness: You love [...]
As I was driving to work yesterday, I was tuned to WTIX and heard an old Chicago song (I can’t now for the life of me recall which song it was). Then I switched to NPR and heard Garrison Keallor read this poem by Michael Blumenthal. And in the span of that six or seven [...]
Time passes in New Orleans the way sap drips down a tree: oozing ever so slowly. Her days are long Her summers, endless. And each year is filled with repetition and tradition. As minutes pass into decades and we all grow older if not wiser The city maintains her divine continuity. Things do change for better and [...]
With a sprained ankle and a bruised ego I turn to my garden to lick my wounds and salve my soul. Relationships change, friends disappoint, clay feet are discovered. So in I go back to myself, like a groundhog seeing his shadow. Back to my yard, my own sanctuary, to tend to my own garden. [...]
In my career There are stops and goes As so decided by learned judges. And so it goes in my unopposed practice I get few stops and lots of goes. But the stops Leave their marks on me Not unlike the purpling of my sprained ankle. The stops leave me feeling as though I am [...]
There is this. This that is larger than any sole practitioner’s office. The tales, the legacies, the advices recalled with a chuckle and a shudder: “Old Man Sawyer used to say to me, ‘If you are gonna drink at lunch, make it gin martinis. Let people know you are drunk and not an idiot.’” 0 [...]