If you're looking for a project to invest in as part of your family holiday giving, please take a moment to look over this simple, profound way to help change the world...one girl at a time.   The Girl Effect Check out the YouTube video.   Besides the main video, there are 4 vignettes well worth watching, of young ...

'What could be worse than being born without sight? Being born with sight but no vision.'' --Helen Keller This the final in the series about re-thinking giving.  Part 1 was about the need to have better ways for both for-profit/donors and non-profits to help each other.  Part 2 was about  who is it that we're giving to, ...

Visit for a plethora of poems about the November 23 prompt: childhood memories on the move, south mother with  crushing sadness worse in winter loving the warm sand and gentle breezes palm bay me, two, sitting on the john somewhere south of the mason-dixon line feet dangling huge palmetto bug crawling across the floor towards ...

This is part 2 in a series in re-defining giving. Part 3 will be some creative small-dollar but high value gifting concepts, websites, stories.  It will be posted November 26.   Part 1 discussed how cross pollination between the for-profit/donor sector and the non-profit/charity sector needs to be more evident. This is a ...

As I live into the pilgrimage of Patti Digh's 37 days exercise on what we might be experiencing if indeed we had 'only' 37 days to live, I've found myself going through layers of experience.  I'm dreaming a lot, and not remembering any of them. I'm all over the place in my daily life--content, anxious, exasperated with myself, feeling sick in ...

 “We have a lion problem in Spring Canyon,” my neighbor Keri says to anyone who will listen -- neighbors, strangers, wildlife officers. We do not have a lion problem. We are blessed with the presence of mountain lions in the canyon behind our houses. It’s a fairly deep canyon, 200 feet, and two miles long. There are plenty of deer in the canyon, ...

Solstice weekend now and forever will have a more personal meaning. This 2 part post is about my dear friend Katrina, who like the hurricane,was a force of nature. Katrina died of cancer at the age of 51 in 2003 on June 19th at 11:45pm, 15 minutes before the solstice.  The gifts she gave me in her courageous life and ...

So on a post last week, ''The Dog's in Heaven and the Cat's in Jail'' in a follow up comment, I came to Geronimo's (aka Damn Dog's) defense.  I wrote about 4 things that he has been teaching us about living and loving.  Here's one I forgot, and since it's an important one, thought I'd write a whole post about it. Lesson ...

Poem of the Month Club: Tulips for the Soul of It  This guest blog is from Karen (Krayna) Castelbaum. Krayna is a psychotherapist, psycho-dramatist ,spiritual director, dream diva, poet, artist, and all-round mensch. Plus, she’s a lot of fun to hang with! She’s who influenced me, unduly, to go blonde, and we jumped into Blonde-World ...

At the office where I work, we do a Secret Santa/ Harry Hanukkah/Kerry Kwanzaa routine where we draw names and then for 2-3 weeks in December we look for any and all opportunities to do really sweet and cool things for that person.  I have found that doing this helps me look more closely at the co-worker for whom ...

Once upon a time, that Jewish mystic the Baal Shem Tov sent a group of his students on an important mission to help a needy couple in another town. When they returned, he was not so interested in hearing about their mission as about the minutiae of their trip—what they ate, where the slept, how they traveled, etc. They didn’t understand the ...