Come, let’s ride brightly painted inner tubes, you and I
If you have watched TV commercials for the new teeniny microscopic MacBook Air, perhaps you will recognize this song by Yael Naim. Come, let’s ride brightly painted inner tubes, play cymbals in a field of sunflowers, sing with a gorgeous Israeli-French accent, and realize that there is a whole big …
37days book (“Life is a Verb”) coming this fall from Globe Pequot Press
Maverick writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman once wrote that "life is a verb." It is a sentiment echoed by the likes of Buckminster Fuller and Kevin Kelly. And so it is. Life takes action, not wishful thinking. It takes mindfulness and intention. It takes slowing down and saying yes and being …
N is for now
“Nothing is worth more than this day.” –Goethe In 2008, I am going to be here now. When you unpeel it, 37days is all about now, but I find I don’t live in now very often. I live in then, or when, or one day. I want, instead, to live …
Read more poetry
Two years ago, I attended the North Carolina Writer’s Network annual conference. I was amazed to find hundreds of writers there, all talking about writing. It had never occurred to me that so many people write or that, in fact, people actually study how to write. Go figure. Just think …
Where every day is Now
37 days goes by quickly. So does a life. After a young woman named Meta died this past fall, and in the slightly homebound recuperation following my fall in November, I created a 37days calendar for 2007 to raise money for a scholarship fund in Meta’s memory. The third and …
Write some blues
“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” – Duke Ellington I entered a writing contest six months ago with “Laid to Rest in Suit Number Nine,” a quirky little Southern gothic tale about a fastidious man named Nial who numbered all his suits as …
Frame your storyboard
“Not equal to Not metaphor Nor standing for Not sign.” – Minor White Imagine Beetle Bailey’s surprise. As Aldous Huxley said, perhaps Earth is another planet’s Hell. And maybe on that other planet, gargantuan people sit down with their oil drum vats of coffee, butter their big-as-car bagels, and open …
Save a grocery list
“The palest ink is better than the sharpest memory.” Chinese proverb This luggage tag is what I have left of the ways in which my father’s hands moved and how he grasped his pen, always that blue plastic one with “Modern Barber Shop” on one side and his name on …
Find your saxophone
"Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it." –Joseph Campbell If you’ve read 37 days before, you might have picked up on my love affair with actor Johnny Depp. Beautiful, talented Johnny. Quixotic, funny, odd, quirky Johnny. Did I mention beautiful? Ooh-la-la. What can …
