a daily blog on well-being and how to feel better by Mark Barger Elliott…

 I walked by a sign yesterday for Expedia which offered this line – “Have friends in other languages.” The point was, of course, use Expedia to travel in order to find and to make these friends. But the ad also reminded me how easy it is to remain in a circle of friends that is…

Last night at work we screened a documentary where a woman was playing the harp as a means to assist a 90-year-old in her final days before she died. The two woman were on a virtual call and it began with musician saying, “This feels like a gift.” And I thought, what a wonderful and…

John Donne is considered one of major authors of the 17th century. He was a renowned poet and became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He is perhaps best known for the phrase, “No man is an island.” I recently finished Katherine Rundell’s wonderful book about Donne, Super-Infinite, where she points out Donne believed in…

“Love the words,” expressed the poet Dylan Thomas in a play we saw last night. His point was if you “love words” then they will serve you well.  In an interview Thomas related how his “love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them,…

What is the pace of change? Sometimes change occurs in a single moment. A letter arrives. You meet someone. News is shared. Change also unfolds in a segment of time, like a season. Spring is different than winter.  And sometimes change can take years, as little as one or two. Over the weekend I was…

Billie Eilish won an Oscar for the song “‘What I Was Made For,” which was a theme song in the movie Barbie. This weekend I came across a video of Eilish explaining that she recorded a “gazillion” takes of the word “how.” It appears in the line, “I don’t know how to feel.” In other…