Einstein Goes to Portugal—Part 1: Einstein Nature

This story begins with a black and white fur ball, a howling, meowing, fit-in-the-palm-of-your-hand kind of kitten, whose tiny bruised nose once pink has a gash trailing a mysterious path.  “We’ll name him Einstein,” my husband Bill said with the force of one christening a ship, “because he was smart enough to survive the woods…

The Portugal Path

Bill and I love America. We often say how grateful we are we were born in a land with endless opportunities and freedoms … which is why we simply didn’t choose to move to another country.  With hindsight though, God has been preparing us over the years, through the little things for the large. But…

Are You Funny? Or Just Funny?

I thought I was funny. Many times I projected a thought for others’ enjoyment. They’d laugh. Thus, I figured I was funny. When someone didn’t laugh, I simply surmised my tongue-in-check dry wit didn’t translate. That is until recently. Husband Bill had read a book about enneagram personalities. Upon more research on the trusty internet,…

Swans on our Rhine River cruise--photographed in 2014

Why Language Theory Should Be a Required Course

Saturday I witnessed a conversation that went something like this: Husband: I’m concerned it will take something egregious for him to see the truth. Wife: Egregious? What? Husband: As in bad . . . Wife: I know, I know. So why didn’t you just say bad? Just talk so people can understand you. Don’t you…

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…

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…