How Cartoons Taught Me About the Wild World Beyond My Fenced-in Backyard

In our old house with all of its charming characteristics, unseen openings allow entrance for mice. The first time I noticed pieces of oatmeal in a little trail leading to the door of the attic, I thought “How precious.” I imagined the animated mice Jaq and Gus in Cinderella with their cheek pouches bulging and…

Searching in The Word

What Makes a Story Compelling to You?

The Compelling: “The Time I Let Myself be Taken Captive—Because I Didn’t Want to be Rude” by Megan Iacobini de Fazio caught my attention with its title. I identified with Fazio not being rude to my own detriment and already dreaded where she was going with it. I figured her outcome was good because she…

Creating a path

Up Close and Personal? Or So Far Away?

So much of our lives and our relationships are narrowed down or broadened by our perspective. Like artists who can paint the same scene in multiple ways, we also view life from our individual vantage points. Vantage point is all about the perspective where the artist is standing in relationship with a vanishing point in a…

A Richly Textured Life

Must the rough always be made smooth? Or so it appears in life, or at least with our public facades and selfies. In art texture with all of its diversities is noted as one of the seven basic elements of art, valued for its smooth and rough, its many values (more about that later). In truth,…

Our History is Our Art in the Making  

Look carefully at the photos that follow: What do you kinda see in the first one? Then with a new perspective? Finally, its far-reaching strands? Can we grasp the power of seeing one’s almost completed blueprint in action, one strand connected to another into its ultimate design? I could have missed this tenacious spider’s artwork…

Introvert or Extrovert? (Both are needed.)

Have you ever taken the Meyers-Briggs Personality Test? If so, once you saw “your letters” identifying you as an I-introvert or E-extrovert, or an Amnivert, a borderline, like I am, how did it make you feel? Defined? Labeled? A typecast? I wasn’t bothered at the time because I knew I loved being with people sometimes, while coveting…