Entries by Bethany

My Week 11 Check-in

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been working my way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with a group of friends. I am nearing the end, and I have been putting off writing this check-in for three days. But now I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time on it. So I thought […]

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. […]

Why I Started a Blog

When I was thinking about starting a blog–five or six years ago, back in 2009–my student, Kellan, told me that he thought his mom and I were the only people who read his blog. So, I thought hard. What if no one, including my mom, read my blog? What would be the point of it? […]

Be Still Sometimes

I have been reading Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. It’s a book about dying in America, and–for anyone dealing directly with this subject (and who among us is not?)–it is full of gems. One of them, in the chapter about his own father, is ODTAA syndrome: One Damn Thing After Another. Anyway, I went searching this evening for […]