Posts Tagged: author

RIP Mary Oliver, Beloved Poet

January 18th, 2019
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Mary OliverMary Oliver/Photo Courtesy of The New York Times

Mary Oliver, described by The New York Times as “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet,” died yesterday of lymphoma at the age of 83.

If you do nothing else today, please go read one of Mary Oliver’s insightful poems and after you read it, allow your brain to meander around in her words and freely think about it.  Allow yourself to wallow in her beautiful and clear thoughts; as though you were floating along on a soft, fluffy cloud.

Mary Oliver is infamous for writing the following line of poetry:

Tell … Read More

The Rainbow Comes & Goes

August 9th, 2018
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This beautifully written and touching book offers up the belief that troubles will inevitably come into your life but those troubles won’t always stay with you. Good times will return and while the rainbow may not stay as long as you would like, there is beauty and hope in knowing that it will always come back to you. Stay calm when you find yourself in the midst of a crisis for these can became moments of rebirth. And rejoice, yes, rejoice, when the rainbow comes back to you. This insightful outlook on life comes from a mother and son who… Read More

Pat Conroy

March 11th, 2016
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Photo Courtesy of CNN The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story’  ~ Pat Conroy In the midst of all the hurly burly reporting of election politics that’s boldly been crowding our daily headlines,  there was a sad piece of human news last weekend that I felt got lost in the shuffle: Pat Conroy, a courageous man and super talented writer, lost his battle to cancer and died at the age of 70. I say courageous because that’s the first word that comes to my mind when I think of him and his unusual ability to intimately… Read More

J.K. Rowling: On Failure

October 19th, 2015
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The renowned British author, J. K. Rowling When life is zipping along and everything seems to be working as if it were a lean mean beautiful machine of happy events, it’s difficult to imagine that it won’t always continue that way. And for you it is my fondest wish that happy events constantly fill your life. And I do mean constantly! But sometimes the plan of life changes and tragically, marriages fail, jobs are lost and loved ones lose their battles with illness.  It feels as though everything is in a painful disarray and everything seems complicated; making no sense … Read More

Someone by Alice McDermott

September 4th, 2014
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Someone  by Alice McDermott was given to me as a Christmas gift but I purposely set it aside because I knew that I wanted to savor every word of this novel.  I knew it was going to be special and I was right. I thoroughly enjoyed reading McDermott’s award-winning book, Charming Billy, and so I was familiar with McDermott’s incredible gift of creating characters that you feel you know, sentences that make you stop and go back and reread them several times and her mastery of quietly leading you into her magical stories. Someone is set in Brooklyn in the… Read More

A Changed Life

March 19th, 2014
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Aging.  Knowing that it’s happening to all of us is not very consoling.  I see the effects of the years of living on myself, especially when someone takes a picture of me.  I definitely don’t like it and I wonder how I arrived at middle age so quickly. I know that sounds so cliché but it’s true.  I see those grey hairs working their way out of my scalp and for now those bad boys get dyed.  I also see lines starting to form on my face in places where I don’t want them but I don’t hate them so… Read More

Top 10 Reasons To Be & (Not To Be) Pope

March 13th, 2013
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Cardinals Gather In Sistine Chapel to Vote On A New Pope Black Smoke.  White Smoke. Cardinals.  Conclave. It’s all part of the Vatican lingo surrounding the pagentry and tradition of electing a new pope to shepherd the millions of Catholics around the globe. Behind the closed doors of the infamous Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy, 115  Roman Catholic cardinals on Tuesday started the mysterious business of coming together as a conclave to vote for a man to become pope and succeed Benedict XVI who last month became the first pope to resign in six centuries. You don’t have to be… Read More

Revisiting Maurice Sendak

January 16th, 2013
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Maurice Sendak is known as an internationally renowned prize-winning children’s book author and illustrator but he also has a message for adults too. When children read his most famous book, “Where The Wild Things Are,” they run around and play as if they are monsters, just like the ones in Sendak’s book.  Spontaneously and instantly, children enter Sendak’s world with love and abandon. Adults may want to join the children in their play but their “adultness” sometimes holds them back.  “Oh, that’s a child’s book” or “I can’t play like that” or “I shouldn’t play like that” are some of… Read More

It’s A New Day

January 2nd, 2013
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Photo By Jonny Valiant I’m not making any resolutions for 2013. I feel when I do make resolutions that I’m setting myself up to feel bad if I don’t stay true to the resolution, no matter what it is. Instead, my goal is to try and treat each day as if it were a “new year” and do my best.  I expect that sometimes I will achieve my best in those twenty-four hours and sometimes I will not come even close. But the next day will be a new day and an opportunity to try once again to put myself… Read More