Having just returned from South Florida, where my dear mother, age 74, passed away, I feel compelled to organize my thoughts in pointers that could help others:
1. Avoid dying on or near your son’s or daughter’s birthday. Although it removes the chance your demise [...]

“All that lies about us is foreign to us yet…but here we are, come together, and closer will we come.”
In the early sixties growing up, I spent a good deal of time imagining my little suburban neighborhood three hundred years earlier when only animals and indigenous people populated the land and white men hadn’t begun [...]

In the late 1980s, Marv Weisbord, a pioneer in the field of organizational development began to develop from group psychology theories and his experience in business a process or technology for bringing disparate, often contentious groups together to act in coordination toward loftier, often previously obscured objectives. Marv and his business partner, Sandra Janoff, [...]

Suicide is a sucker punch, he would say, at least for a friend, impossible to withstand with any dignity, without tears and bellymoaning and rage (though rage against what?), forcing you to rethink every conversation you can remember, especially the ones about life, it’s meaning, its folly.
I first met Liam in 1997 [...]

My dad passed away on Saturday, May 5, 2007. This is what I suspect will be one of several eulogies, directed to my kids, my niece and nephew, his grandchildren:
There are so many things I could tell people about your grandfather. So many things that were unique and interesting and special about him, [...]

First, the music. Chris Thile, former prodigy, former mandolin-player with Nickel Creek, now solo artist has formed a band called, How to Grow a Band. Among others, it features Bryan Sutton, the fastest flatpicker I’ve ever heard formerly of Ricky Skaggs bluegrass band. Along with a kickass banjo and fiddle player, these guys [...]

Actually, it beats being home in Philadelphia being pelted with ice. UsAirways decided to dissuade passengers from flying east yesterday by offering to change reservations for free, so I moved my return to Friday and drove up to Sedona, land of red rocks, spas, restaurants and cheerful tourists. What an amazing drive it is from [...]

I wrote this to the author in response to an interesting article that appeared this morning:
Dear Prof. Briggs,
I appreciated your article in Truthout this morning. I’ve read other psychological assessments of George W. Bush, citing his father complex and the dry-drunk syndrome, perhaps not as clearly spelled out as yours.
I’m [...]

There’s really not much external going on in my world, other than what’s happening in my head (and my digestive tract). Hopefully, all that sublimated life energy will burst forth from my prose into this next novel. The experience of living 24 hours a day in a creative endeavor as I’m doing at [...]

Kudos to Al Gore for making an accessible and passionate presentation of what’s happening to our planet and for dropping the petulant, whiny flatness that characterized his campaign for the presidency, but he leaves out one very large fact that is really just too depressing to think about:
The population of the planet earth today is [...]