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

We watched a documentary about Ralph Lauren last weekend and I was reminded how a story can change the world, or at least for the people who encounter it.  The story Ralph Lauren wanted to tell was of timelessness over trendiness, the style of Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, and the American west. As one writer…

“We die. That may be the meaning of life,” said Toni Morrison in her Noble Prize lecture. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” How would you assess – or measure – the language you offer your family, colleagues, friends, neighborhood, strangers? Are your words… Cynical or encouraging? Ambiguous or…

We celebrated our wedding anniversary with wonderful friends in Philadelphia last night and over dinner our friend shared how she cultivates her vegetable garden using a philosophy called “succession planting.” I was curious what that meant and she explained the idea is you seed the soil every two to four weeks so you have a…

Alexander Calder is one of my favorite artists and known for inventing mobiles and creating dramatic sculptures called stabiles found in public spaces around the world.  During a tumultuous time in our country in the 1960s, Alexander and his wife published in the New York Times a full-page ad titled “Hope For,” where they described changes…

In Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Pitchfork” he describes the joy he felt in throwing a javelin. Then he makes this fascinating observation, he writes how “perfection” in the throwing of the pitchfork was “not in the aiming but the opening hand.” In other words, what’s most important in what we set out to accomplish isn’t…

“Tempt the soul to rise,” suggests poet Seamus Heaney. We often think of temptation as a negative thing, that which leads us towards a questionable moral decision or action. But curious about Heaney’s idea, I checked the entomology of the word and one source noted how it goes back to a 14th century word atempter which means…