Everyday Insights
-
Sagebrush
Sometimes, we talk about our funerals. I want the congregation to sing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Dad prefers “How Great Thou Art,” and Mom’s choice is “I Believe in Christ.” Mom wants sagebrush to be part of the floral spray on her coffin. When she was a young adult, she visited a friend in Washington, D.C. They traveled to New York City and she found herself powerful homesick. She’d never seen roll-up security gates on storefronts, and the amount of people and concrete was overwhelming. On the drive back to Utah, she rejoiced when she could see wide open high mountain desert vistas and smell the sharp, clean…
-
The Sun is Gonna Shine Again
Steve Martin has a bluegrass band. Yes, that Steve Martin. He plays the banjo and sings, and if you dig bluegrass, I think you’ll dig Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. Martin and his colleague, Edie Brickell, wrote a beautiful musical titled “Bright Star.” Set in the 1920s and 1940s Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s a poignant story of love and loss. Some friends and I saw it this week, and the music has been echoing in my mind ever since. As I wrote that sentence, my brain had a hard time wrapping itself around the fact that, yes, I was at that show on Monday. It’s Saturday, and things…
-
So Much Depends
There were too many perplexing questions needing answers in my day and I was overdone. Attempting sleep, I took deep breaths and quieted my mind. As I cleared out space, into the vacuum came William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.” In my sleepy state, it wasn’t words that came; it was a scene. A red wheelbarrow in green grass, dew sparkling, sun streaming. A slight breeze, sounds of grasses humming, birds calling drowsily. And I, drowsy too, drifted off. The next day I read the poem. so much dependsupon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the whitechickens Ah, so sparse, so unfettered by capitalization and punctuation. Clean. Crisp. Only…
-
Ciao and Chow
Last year, I was lucky enough to become acquainted with a delightful professor of Italian. I helped Marie with revisions to Italian department curriculum, and she in turn gifted me friendship and food. The woman is a wizard in the kitchen. She cooks, bakes, and is the only person I know who makes gelato. Saying she makes gelato is hugely understating what she does. She has studied, invested, and practiced to the point that she’s a true gelato artist. Marie called my office one afternoon, “I have the gelato. I’ll bring it over just before five so you can get it home and in the freezer.” She breezed in with…
-
Creating a High Light World
On my ‘to read’ list is a book titled The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. I recently listened to a podcast in which Tierney stated that we currently live in a “high bad” world, where “merchants of bad” in the media work to make us think the world is worse than it really is. This checks out, right? A preponderance of media today focuses us on the depressing and depraved when what we deeply crave is the enlightening and excellent. I want to be a purveyor of light. By that I mean one…