Miscellaneous
The beauty of nature’s balance
Our first winter back in Ottawa after 27 years in warm Sri Lanka has been quite eye-opening. Watching all of the plant and animal life adapt to the freezing cold; seeing the plants and seeds fight to stay underground; witnessing the roots sprout as the ice thaws—all of these things were magical Read More...
No one else can sing your song
Voices are so personal. They mirror our story – our gifts, doubts, history, mood, identity, and secret dreams. Every time we speak, we are revealing something about ourselves – the things we’re proud of and perhaps the things we most want to hide. When people hear that I am a voice coach, Read More...
Free time
What do you like to do with your “free time”? Or, perhaps more apt, do you get any time that is free? Time during which nothing has been planned, time that is okay to spend lost in thought, time that is completely…yours? For adults, such time is often seen as a luxury, a bonus. Having it Read More...
The healing of Congo
Congo is like a microcosm of the entire planet, taken to its extreme. One of the most beautiful places on Earth, it is also among the most troubled. By Charles Eisenstein Today I received the following letter from my dear friend, Cynthia Jurs. For the last two decades she has traveled all Read More...
Learning peace
Think about this: we don’t know how to do peace on our planet very well. That’s why I like the words of the Dalai Lama, “When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.” It’s important to understand that we need to learn how to do peace, Read More...
Interview: Documentary filmmaker Emily James on direct action climate change
By Adrienne So at ecosalon.com Award-winning filmmaker Emily James is something of a sensation in the United Kingdom. Originally from Berkeley, California, James moved to Britain to get her professional degrees in film and television at Cambridge University. While her work covers a variety of Read More...
The Batman Massacre: Will it wake us up?
“Thank God for this article by Michael Nagler. I have never needed ANY scientific proof that watching sick movies results in sick behavior. It’s the people who think up the sickness that goes into sick movies that are the initial criminals. It’s all to do with the money making machine that Read More...
Deep time
One of the most human and humble things we do is to reach across generations. When my mother graduated from high school, her father gave her a watch. On the back, he engraved “for all time.” I asked her about it the other day, but she doesn’t remember what happened to it; and yet, it Read More...
Olympic peace
Wasn’t the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics stunning? I loved what Danny Boyle conceived and realized. Particularly, I loved that peace got not one, but two mentions. One was evidenced by the photograph above. The other was created to seem like human replicas of the original Read More...
In my own voice: The brilliance of Karly Wahlin
In the winter of 2009 my friend and recording engineer, Matthew Zimmerman, called to invite me into a remarkable project that was being recorded at his studio, Wild Sound, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A 24-year-old composer named Karly Wahlin was seeking a producer for a collection of ten of her Read More...