Can we sing Stairway to Heaven?
My friend Melissa is a choral conductor and because of that, she is uniquely attuned to communicating intentions. She uses things like tempo, tone, phrasing, and volume to help her choirs understand the pieces they are performing and to convey that emotional understanding to their audiences. It is her vision that is interpreted. Communicating emotional […]
Uncle Jeff – and a few trillion gallons of water.
Some of my earliest memories involve my Uncle Jeff. Uncle Jeff was my dad’s cooler and less risk-averse younger brother. He was a Marine and an attorney and wore stylish clothes and big sunglasses with his big dark hair. And when he and his family came to visit us from California, or met us […]
Harmonizing your primary chord
I’ve had a lot of conversations lately about work/life balance. People trying to find it, replicate it, master it, sacrifice for it, beat it into submission. One dictionary defines balance as: “A condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” It’s the ‘correct proportions’ part that can trip us up. Mary […]
Brielle – and being true.
Author and podcast host Polly Campbell recalls a story of helping her 7th grade daughter navigate 7th grade. “It was while my daughter was settled into the passenger seat—essentially trapped for the 15 minutes it would take to get home—that I gave her some advice. She was feeling lonely and sad thanks to friend drama at […]
Becoming our own wayfinders.
I have spent the majority of my life in a ‘grid’ city. According to Wikipedia, “In urban planning, the grid plan, grid street plan, or gridiron plan is a type of city plan in which streets run at right angles to each other, forming a grid. The grid plan dates from antiquity and originated in […]
Little Lila and some wild Yeses
One of my nieces has three beautiful children. Very early one morning, when the two oldest were 6 years old and 4 years old and the youngest was a newborn, my niece was woken up to the musical sounds of “Who Let the Dogs Out, Who? Who?” blaring from the downstairs family room. She went […]
A Bouncing Boulder – and Emma Woodhouse.
When Darren was young, he spent a lot of time with his siblings at his favorite Grandma’s house, who lived close to them in their small southern California town. One such day his older sister and one of his older brothers were down at his Grandma’s creek and they started teasing him. Darren, the feisty […]
“Flinging yourself straight into life” – or not.
Fyodor Dostoevsky in the book Crime and Punishment, writes “Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid – the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.” Sometimes I wish I was a ‘fling yourself straight into life!’ person. Some of you reading this post […]
Baker’s Chocolate and my DNA.
One of my favorite things to do is bake recipes from Depression or War-era America. I know it sounds kind of strange, but I love the creativity of it. Bacon fat instead of butter in a sugar cookie? Ok! Vinegar instead of milk in a chocolate cake? Sure! Mayonnaise instead of eggs in brownies? Let’s […]
Your Own Personal Order of Difficulty.
During the majority of my lengthy career in education, I, like many teachers and counselors you know, had a second job. One of them was a brief stint with a prestigious company offering high-end ACT prep classes. It was taught in a building in the heart of downtown and when I drove by that building […]
