the irony of focusing my heavy camera on airy mountain clouds while trudging along those steep trails to our purely self-imposed destination. As I viewed the images that I had made, I thought back to those hikes and wondered, were the clouds gently bemused by my continuous striving against gravity as I scrambled over and around the rocks that impeded my forward progress? Can I perhaps treat challenges more as clouds than as rocks? I realized that I have that choice of mindset: I can view life’s challenges as rocks to be pushed uphill like Sisyphus. Alternatively, I can step into a more cloudlike mindset, one without sharp boundaries, that is ephemeral, that has the ability to sh... posted on May 9 2024 (213 reads)

following is an excerpt from Christian McEwen’s In Praise of Listening (October 2023, Bauhan Publishing).] Alice Cozzolino is an extraordinary cook; one might almost call her a “food whisperer.” For most of her life, she has thought of herself as “one who feeds.” It is a skill that reaches back to very early childhood.  When Alice was a girl, she and her mother would make pasta e fagiole every week. The night before, the two of them would sit together in the kitchen sorting beans. Her mother would pour them out across the table, the pea beans and the lentils and the navy beans, all mixed up together, making one pile for Alice and another for her... posted on May 20 2024 (1,121 reads)