Category: Uncategorized
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Landing the Craft
Once I was on a plane, smooshing my forehead against the window, watching farmlands pass in a slow-motion scroll beneath me. I was willing the plane to go faster, eager to get home, when another passenger jet shot through the airspace elow, rocketing in the opposite direction at an unbelievable speed. It took me a…
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Gilding the Invisible
When it comes to ornamentation on buildings, architects tend to give up after creating the first story. The truth is, no matter ho much work they put into decorating upper floors’ facades, people just don’t notice things higher than 10 feet. (this is also the reason that towering warehouse shops like Costco or Wal-Mart don’t…
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A Moveable Feast
In the sport of ultramarathioning, racers sometimes run a hundred miles or more at a stretch. The sport’s king is Dean Karnazes, an unlikely athlete who hadn’t done any running until he dead-end life left him feeling so frustrated that he just stripped down to his underwear and ran out into the night. He hasn’t…
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Do Not Judge
1. Do not judge2. Stay present3. Listen4. Do what I need to do to take care of ourselves5. Appreciate the light
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A Little Ambiguity
I you’ve ever been in a book group before, you know what wildly different interpretations readers can derive from the same passage. A screamingly obvious Freudian allegory to one reader will be a hilarious skewering of today’s political parties to another. The discussions are especially fiery when an author leaves a little ambiguity in the…
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Set-Asides
As part of their ethincal code, archaeologists agree to leave a protion of their excavation sites untouched. They do this as a gift to the archaeologists of the future, who may be able to glean more from the area than current technologies allow. As you dig deeper into your novel, you may find that your…
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8. Endurance
Both Heaven and Earth endure forever.The cause of their enduranceis their indifference. likewise the Sage is indifferent,and not being preoccupied with self is immortal. Being unselfish, fulfillment is attained.
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Pressure Cooking
Procrastination, I think, gets a bad rap. To start a project and see it through to completion, we need the pressure and sense of urgency procrastination provides. Sure, in the midst of a frantic all-nighter to get a paper or report done, it feels horribly dysfunctional. But I see procrastination as a terrifically functional way…
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Limen-Aid
An anthropologist named Victor Turnere added a new wrinkle to the disciplines canon in the 1950’s when he wrote about the importance of something called limen. Translating roughly as “threshold,” limen refers to those times like adolescence when we’re caught between two life phases. In these neither-here-nor-there periods, he wrote, levels of energy and disorder…
David Given Schwarm 