At first I thought all this must still be debris from the Japan tsunami. But that was eight years ago and the surf in my remote neck of the woods keeps throwing up snarls of monofilament netting,…

The brilliant part about being an aging female is your growing self-acceptance.  Maybe this is because you don’t feel that ever-present gaze anymore so you’re not feeling as judged. Or maybe…

The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a…

There ought to be an international law against the dirty business of jeans manufacturing. It poisons waterways, mainly in China , prompting environmental groups to raise the alarm against the…

Materialistic. People say it like it’s a bad thing. But there’s not necessarily anything selfish or hoardy or wasteful about feeling deeply connected to materials. If we all started being a little…

Modern science calls it bunk but I am fully on board with chromotherapy , an alternative medicine branded by the labcoats as a pseudo-science.  The preferred term is photobiology now, an…

I’ve made it my mission to shake things up by injecting the handmade domestic — doilies, quilts, sweaters and rugs — into austere, authoritative spaces and places, from pristine galleries to…

​ I have a love-hate relationship with spiders. I will jump out of my skin if I find a big hairy mother in my bedsheets like anyone else but if I come across a particularly elaborate spider web, I…

Since it’s camping season this is an appropriate object-metaphor for how you can go from creative flatlining to flourishing: my Biolite campstove .   I impulse-bought this ingenious little stove…

The 91-year-old CEO of the Commonwealth did not deem 2016 another annus horribilis but it was one for the political history books.   It seems only fitting that these dark days broken up by…