“Like my grandfather’s dairy cows, sheep are the shepherd’s livelihood. But they are also extended family. Sheep belong to the shepherd and there is intimacy created by that kind of ownership. Many of us…

“I know that, for many, this season brings deep melancholy or worse. Being mindful of that fact, may I suggest that if you know someone who is alone at this time of year,…

“Indeed, the location wasn’t promising, competing for space with dozens of passers-by, including a corsage-bedecked nun (with a beard) and a short-legged dog who posed atop a three-foot pedestal for photographs. Very quickly,…

“Whether there was a neuron misfiring in my brain, a synaptic scramble (which I’m willing to this day to acknowledge as a distinct possibility), or whether what occurred was an aspect of reality,…

“No matter what is going on between people, it is always a relationship—nothing happens unless the other person is there with his or her energy. No anger, no harmony, no conflict, no love. No nothing.…

“The tongue is in the eye./It speaks through glints and blinks,/Mama after the stroke,/speechless./One blink meant ‘yes,’/two a ‘no.’/I wanted to read her mind/when that gaze overtook her./In the whites of those fixed…

“You should do something brilliant before it’s too late.”—Mark Kershaw Addison By Mark Kershaw ATLANTA Georgia—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2018—Mark Addison Kershaw says that his influences include James Thurber, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Charles Schultz, Berke Breathed, and…

“Live large. Be you, and bolder than you’ve ever been. Live like you’re dying. Because you are. No guilt. We were all born into the captivity of industrial civilization. No blame. No shame.…

Eating Well Is The Best Revenge By Diana Farr Louis The iconic Greek family at their dinner table. “When I was young, growing up on Long Island, my father used to bring home…

“While Emily Dickinson found ‘a little madness in spring,’ I used to find this lunacy in the fall. Faced with a half-acre of wet leaves, many of which slid between the tines of…