Good Clean Reads

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” – T. S. Eliot

I sometimes wonder if the reason I have for so long embraced the motto, you never fail until you quit is because I am so unskilled at endings. I feel like the tire that is stuck spinning in a muddy rut when it is time to move on. I have the will and the engine...

“Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”  ~Victor Borge

I forgot that I’m supposed to be having fun; I even forgot that I wanted to have fun. My anxiety levels matched to the first few pages of the daily news. Life was all seriousness and problem solving and I had forgotten how much fun there was to be had. It is easy to get blindsided by the day’s business, the details of caring...

“What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.”  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last night as I was preparing for my talk today, my nerves started to get the best of me and I couldn’t articulate. I would start and then stammer, start over again and lose my thread, stop and start until I lost hope for the trying. I am proud and happy to report that my next choice...

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company… a church… a home. The remarkable...

“This just might hurt a little…love hurts sometimes when you do it right…..Don’t be afraid of a little bit of pain, pleasure is on the other side…” -John Legend

These two lines are some of the best music lyrics I have ever heard and being crooned to in John Legend’s honey voice doesn’t hurt to bring home the message. This is the truth about love and life, that often when we do it right it still...

“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” –Arnold Bennett

I married into a family whose primary operating principle was “If something is wrong, don’t talk about it.” Even as a young woman in my early twenties, I knew instinctively that silence in...

“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”  ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

School politics and reform has always been a vocation of sorts for me. My first child had special needs when she was young so I learned a great deal early on about the magic that can happen in a class room. In one of my daughter’s first immersion classes, Mark, a graduate student in...

“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”  -Cherrie Moraga

There are days when despite our best efforts, stuff, systems and relationships break down. Early morning, I listen for election results. The progressive movement that inspired the country a couple short years...

“Sex is more than an act of pleasure, its’ the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.”  -Unknown

For all the writing, talking and making products for sexual enjoyment that I spend my time, at the end of the day, it is the doing that gives the rest...