Category: Beginner’s Mind (Mine)

  • Simplicity itself

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, December 06, 2024 “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.”  -Henry David Thoreau When my daughter was about six years old, a neighbor had a few girls over for a playdate and did something so brilliant it became a touchstone for me: With nothing to offer in the way…

  • Cotton candy, chutes and ladders

    Cotton candy, chutes and ladders

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, June 21, 2024 “Because of this inner busyness, which is going on almost all the time, we are liable either to miss a lot of the texture of our life experience or to discount its value and meaning.” John Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living The bottom line? It’s kind of a mess.…

  • Still face

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, March 5, 2020   Every March, when the world is born again, I feel compelled, like sap rising up my arm, to shoot a hand into the air, as if to ask some primal question, as if sitting in the first row of the classroom of life.  I don’t know if…

  • Tiger paws

    Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, June 7, 2019   Sinking down in a theater seat and waiting for the lights to fall, I turn to my neighbor to the right, a middle-aged woman — like me — wearing a cowboy hat and fuchsia sweater. Her vibe is open, the kind of open that might lead to…

  • Game on (part two)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, November 1, 2015 Having registered for Harvard Computer Science 50, an online course famous for changing people’s lives, I left off downloading Scratch, an MIT-generated program designed to teach children fundamental computer programming. The first homework assignment takes me eight hours. I am supposed to finish the nine-week course by December 19. I…

  • Game on (part one)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, October 18, 2015 There’s no happy ending to this story, just to let you know up front. Because in a happy ending version, I am wearing a CS50 tee shirt, my brain is slightly more encephalized (bigger) and I have successfully reinvented and rerouted myself into mini-career number six or seven or whatever…