Posted April 1, 2021 in Monthly News

Nominalizations' Negative Impact

This winter I have been most entertained by the official state bird of Florida: the mockingbird.

Florida designated the mockingbird as the official state bird in 1927, and the northern mockingbird is also the state bird of Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi.

The first memory I have of mockingbird comes from an encounter at […]

Posted March 1, 2021 in Monthly News

The Warrior's Way

Debra and I are very different in some ways. While we have sufficient traits in common to allow for working together, the way we process information and relate not only to the past but also to our sense of the future differs significantly. Some of those differences are gender based: men learn to process information […]

Posted March 1, 2021 in Monthly News

Frozen Chosen

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors.

All of them are alive in this moment. …

You are a continuation of each of these people.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Anne Lamott was one of the speakers in the Mystics […]

Posted February 1, 2021 in Monthly News

AWE: Potential in the Mind of God

“Suppose we were to share meaning freely without the compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture?” ~ David Bohm

This article has been working on my mind for weeks. The original title was “Attachment to View,” […]

Posted February 1, 2021 in Monthly News

Fly Like an Eagle

The title of my post is based on a song written and performed in the 1970s by the Steve Miller band. It was one of those songs that made an immediate impression on me. Based on record sales and “air time,” it evidently made a similar impression on many others (see “Fly Like An Eagle […]

Posted December 31, 2020 in Monthly News

Adjectives

As 2020 slides into our “past” it is very significant to be intentional about cataloging our experiences in our mind. How will 2020 be remembered? Will it remembered as positive, negative, or can it be remembered as just an experience, without adding any adjectives?

The challenge with adjectives is that we can use them then […]

Posted December 31, 2020 in Monthly News

Adverbs

When Debra selected Adjectives as her subject, I suspect many of you surmised that I would select “Adverbs,” which seems a complementary part of speech.The challenge then becomes how to make the two types of linguistic modifiers work in a way that makes sense. Both are terms describing the way a specific word or phrase […]

Posted December 1, 2020 in Monthly News

Embrace Change: Keep Shedding

Even a spineless anthropod sheds what’s no longer useful and leaves it behind them. Are you not greater than they?” ~ Jason Versey

In my mind, December is always a month of musing about the past. I purposely am writing this article for the December 2020 Beyond Mastery newsletter on November 2 (before the […]

Posted December 1, 2020 in Monthly News

Life's Plans

For one reason or another, the draft of Debra’s article reminded me of John Lennon’s well-known quotation, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” The plans that I made when I was young kept changing. Nothing went quite the way I had planned. I am not even able to determine how much—or […]

Posted October 31, 2020 in Monthly News

T.H.I.N.K.

I saw this quotation in a friend’s daily email, “Lord, keep your arm around my shoulder and your hand over my mouth.” My friend said it was from an email message. The author was not identified. It reminded me of Right Speech, in Buddhism, also called Wise Speech or Virtuous Speech.

According to Wikipedia, […]