Entries by Bethany

How many irons are there in your fire?

I found this image at And Today’s Idiom Is…,  a blog for non-native English speakers. It strikes me as an excellent excuse for a blog. Meanwhile, I’m trying to remember what my excuse–er, purpose–is. In 2016 I spent an inordinate amount of time reading helpful books. Books about habits and writing and books about writers […]

inaugural poetry

Today I’m attempting to hunker down and work on poetry — all day. What I keep finding myself thinking of, however, being distracted by, is how very very differently some people I love dearly see the world, from how I see it. The publications I read are not reporting jubilantly on the inauguration. Rather, there’s […]

Contemplation and Action

I spent today hanging out with a very bad cold, and reading until my eyes burned. Here’s Parker Palmer on the importance of contemplation and its place in the world — not simply for “intellectuals,” but for everyone: “Rightly understood, contemplation and action are standard features of ordinary, everyday life. Our contemplative action may be […]

Fifteen minutes, three days…

Over the past couple of months I’ve been doing some radical rethinking of how I eat. Long story short, I suspect that I’ve got something going on with inflammation, and I would like to get to the bottom of it. I won’t try to get you to subscribe to anything I’m reading or experimenting with, […]