“I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.” Robert Frost With Teacher Appreciation Week approaching, Alexandra Ballard recently identified “The 27 Best Gifts for Teachers”. It’s a clever list, rooted in her experience as a teacher and thoughtful consideration of items that efficiently and with style enhance a classroom. The article…

I get really sick of hearing about love. I’m not sick of love itself or any less awed by our collective thirst for, yet inability to satisfy, it. I’m certainly not sick of experiencing it, both in intimate and abstract ways. More precisely: I’m sick of the clichés. …

Since my first post on April 1, 2020, I’ve contributed 105 articles to Medium. Some long, some short. Some cerebral, some crass. …

“Spring” William Carlos Williams O my grey hairs! You are truly white as plum blossoms. Spring is an obvious inspiration for art — almost…too obvious. My favorite attempts, though, are the ones that rescue the season from irrelevance-by-cliché by expanding the layers of symbolism that we humans have constructed around…

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.* I was almost 10 years old when I declared that I was a pacifist. Nobody asked (who’s interested in the…

I made a mistake. Instead of going directly to City Hall, the starting point for a demonstration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I got off the bus near Seattle Center, thinking I’d intersect crowds, or at least handfuls, of people preparing the outdoor amphitheater for the rally, the culmination…

A few years ago, I told the story of how Dan Savage ruined my life at an interfaith storytelling event connected to annual LGBTQ+ Pride festivities. It’s a story I’ve told colleagues and friends for years and even published as a reflection a couple of years ago about how Savage’s…

“Jesus Christ, you look like a fucking priest.” As we neared the end of our program in education leadership and members of our cohort were being hired left and right, a few classmates, puzzled by my lack of job offers (one needs an interview to get an offer), looked at…

For their fiftieth anniversary in 2006, my parents brought the family to Ireland. It’s one of those things that a certain generation of descendants of Irish immigrants do. They’d hit a certain age or milestone and know it was time to make a pilgrimage to the homeland, to see the…