October 24th marks the birthday of Sarah Josepha Hale 224 years ago. Practically every English speaker recognizes her eight line poem by its first five words: “Mary had a little lamb…” Sarah Josepha Hale was…
Posts tagged as “essays”
We reached the top of the cliff, and the blue Pacific spread like infinity before us. “The ocean, the ocean!” the children cried, springing from their seats in delight. There was no place for a…
“The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world—the cause sufficient in and by itself—is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. The worst enemy of life is too much life:…
In 1998, novelist and journalist Jane Futcher and her partner, midwife Erin Carney, joined a Year to Live group in Marin. The impact was profound: based upon the writings of Stephen Levine, the meetings, during…
In 1950 the journal Mind featured a curious proposal for determining if a computer could think. Submitted by code-breaker and computing pioneer Alan Turing, the idea was that an examiner would pose questions to a…
“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.” — John Ciardi My last few trips to the village of Mendocino have coincided with the lunchtime release of the…
I never attended Kindergarten. I’ve had the audacity, over the years and decades, to claim that fact as the underlying reason for every life failure (or life lesson gone awry) that I’ve ever experienced since…
My brother, a successful Internet Technology person living in San Mateo, recently wrote, “I know the Bay Area is back because for about three years no one was going out to dinner and a concert,…
The importance of music can only be truly gauged by its absence. A bride walking down the aisle in silence is an act that thunders more loudly than a hundred trumpets and timpani. Likewise, watching…