Category: inspirational
-
Happy New Year!
We rise, undaunted, into 2024. No matter what it brings to us, we have hope. Seek out what is good, what is true, what is incorruptible. Bring forth beauty in all it’s ineffable forms. Deny those who would espouse a world of gray futility or of black despair. This is not the future. There is, yet, another rising of…
-
Mutual Aid and Comfort
There have been a few times I’ve posted here in support of friends who needed help, and today is partly about that. Jenn Hast, who is an artist, photographer, and will soon be an accountant (why yes, she is a polymath and Renaissance woman!) is dealing with cancer. The outlook is good, if the short-term…
-
Call for Stories: But Not Broken
Just a reminder that there is a month remaining in the open submission period for stories in this anthology. But Not Broken will be the second of the PTSD anthologies, taking up where Can’t Go Home Again left off. You can read more details about the ideas behind the anthology here, in my first call…
-
To All the Veterans
They all went out, in service of their country. Some came home again. They came home, and went back to work quietly, but we remember what they were willing to do on our behalf. We remember, and are grateful for the men and women who marched until their feet bled, for our safety and comfort.…
-
Why Not?
On my desk I have a few sheets of paper. I printed them out earlier, and now they are lying here causing me some mingled emotional moments when I look over and see them. You see, I suspect most of you are like me. Back in 2020 when the world stopped, or attempted to grind…
-
Dragons and Quilts
Honestly, that’s a story prompt right there! A dragon that hoards quilts? A wee baby dragon with it’s head too big for it’s body wrapped up in a baby quilt? A quilted vest for a dragon visiting the Ice Dragons? I digress. Really, there’s already a book I’d like for you to read. And buying…
-
Encouraging Myself
Well, that took less than two weeks. I started out the year trying to set up some new routines, hoping to get more productive and work on health stuff. Tonight, I’m sitting here staring at the computer willing myself to come up with story so I can write… And feeling like crying because I’m not…
-
A Strange Unyielding Place: Part 1
This is the first in a series of essays I plan to write, which will eventually be collected, along with past work, into a book. I crumple inward on myself. It’s more than a mental retreat, I find my muscles ache with the effort of drawing my shoulders down and in. The autonomous system…
-
Good Morning
I am, to begin with, feeling better. It’s been a long couple of months, and I don’t think it’s over entirely. However, I seem to be back on an even keel, having dumped stressors off my plate with wild abandon until things… got worse. There’s nothing like having the prospect of Very Bad Things…
-
We are Free: V
“For when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority: for that which acts any community, being only the consent of…
-
We Are Free: IV
I intend to persist with the posts on freedom, at least for a little while. It means many things to me. Not just the freedom politically I hold in our great country, to cast votes – and to hold the electoral process to the fire when it should be tested to see if it…
-
We Are Free: III
“Liberty.—The worth of a thing often lies, not in what one attains by it, but in the difficulty one experiences in getting it. The struggle for political liberty, for example, has done more than any other one thing to develop strength, courage and resourcefulness in the human race, and yet liberty itself, as we know…