Results
The Big Fresh July 11, 2015 Catching Your Breath

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.                                                                                                   Henry James “You’re so lucky to have your summers off.” That...

The Big Fresh June 27, 2015 Giving Thanks

Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.                                                                                                  Estonian Proverb This spring I mailed three boxes of professional books I’d accumulated over the past few years...

The Big Fresh June 20, 2015 Turning Children into Scholars

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.                              ...

The Big Fresh June 13, 2015 Abandoning Big Things

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.                  ...

The Big Fresh June 6, 2015 The Wow! Scaffold

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.                                                                                                    Mary Oliver  Sugatra Mitra, a professor of educational technology in Newcastle, England,...

The Big Fresh May 30, 2015 Borders

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.                                                             Maya Angelou I was visiting classrooms in the Pacific Northwest this fall when I saw a...

The Big Fresh May 23, 2015 Starting with “Secondly”

Stories are as important as food and love.                                                                                Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie In her beautiful TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her childhood perception...

The Big Fresh May 16, 2015 From Obligation to Appreciation

It is impossible to feel grateful and depressed in the same moment.                                    ...

The Big Fresh May 9, 2015 A Pile of Stories

The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor.                                                                             Hubert H. Humphrey Some of the best writing I read every day comes from the...

The Big Fresh May 2, 2015 Navigating Boston

Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.                                                              Henry David Thoreau I recently went to a conference at the JFK Library in Boston with my colleague...

The Big Fresh April 25, 2015 What We Crave

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.                                    ...

The Big Fresh April 18, 2015 Messy Inventions

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.                                                                                      Thomas Edison My nine-year-old sons love to invent contraptions created from Legos. Rarely do they follow instructions...

The Big Fresh April 11, 2015 Perspective

The present moment represents all moments.                                                             John Zeisel It was a day my mother’s dementia was weighing heavily on me.  Donna, a caregiver, must have seen it in my...

The Big Fresh April 4, 2015 True Horizontal

Let yourself be drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.                                                             Rumi There is a beautiful scene in Cutting for Stone,...

The Big Fresh March 28, 2015 The Devotion of Reading Teachers

If you plan to build walls around me, know this — I will walk through them.                                                             Richelle Goodrich Reading teachers are a devoted, dogged, stubborn type, aren’t they? Last...

The Big Fresh March 21, 2015 Taking Detours

Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to take.                                                             Paulo Coelho I recently was in the midst of studying the novel Lord of...

The Big Fresh March 14, 2015 Eating an Orange

In this moment, there is plenty of time.                                                                          Victoria Moran A writer’s life is a necessarily slow one. To write, I need ideas, inspiration, and details, the collection of...

The Big Fresh March 7, 2015 The Power of Play

People tend to forget that play is serious.                                                             David Hockney If you visit the Galapagos Islands, one of the first things you notice is that sea lions are everywhere. They...

The Big Fresh February 28, 2015 The Ketchup Incident

Forever is composed of nows.                                                             Emily Dickinson Sam asked me, “Mom, did you hear about the ketchup incident?” “No. What’s the ketchup incident?” I asked, pausing as I chopped...

The Big Fresh February 21, 2015 What Comes First

Most of us can easily do two things at once; what’s all but impossible is to do one thing at once.                                                        Mignon McLaughlin This winter I started hosting a...

The Big Fresh February 14, 2015 Joy’s Path

When I was 10 years old, I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought...