The near-full moon hovered above three massive outdoor screens. Thousands of people looked at the screens with anticipation. At strobe speed, each screen flashed drum skins, guitar frets, backlit Joshua trees and saguaros, and the faces of older men. Heart-pumping rhythm pounded through acres of speakers and shattered the desert air. Like LSD-fueled geysers, fireworks blasted millions of rainbow sparks into the dry, windless sky.
The next 40 days of the Christian season of Lent is a time when we sacrifice guilty pleasures like sweets, alcohol, television, shopping and social media. But,… Read more “Lent. 40 Plastic-free Days”
With the made up word Memortality, the book’s protagonist is a paraplegic teen, Minerva Rus, who has an unnatural ability to bring back the dead by simply remembering them. But she’s not the first with this unusual ability. Memortality is a romp through a web of everyday people with not-everyday paranormal talents.
We’ve apparently become a nation of fat drunks juggling bullets and razor blades in smoke-filled rooms.
Will history determine that 2016 was a year of balancing a scale or tipping it dangerously close to the fire?
And so it is with me and the rest of humanity.
Perhaps this is why the desert drew me in over and over this year. I know the desert well. I grew up in the desert — both in life and metaphorically. The seemingly endless light that heated the soil beneath my feet and cast mirages before me was both a gift and a trick. Sorting candor from myth consumed much of my time.
What are ways that we can give without membership, dues, meetings, committees, and landing on the mailing lists of the never ending mailers thick with dynamic photos of sad faced children, seniors citizens, dogs, and panda bears?
Paralleling a planet in flux, American voters (and European voters, for that matter) are like the Arctic — in meltdown. Conspiracists, nationalists, and folks swaddled in a coat of angry fear, won the day. That bottle of champagne in my refrigerator remains uncorked.
Fast forward to today’s social media and current state of humanity’s soul, we now have a plague of contrary people behaving as trolls and things that go bump in the night. It’s as if a thin-shelled pod opened inside that voodoo shop and millions of troll spores ejected into the air attaching to the already angry and disenfranchised soul of lost citizens.
How do we, as volunteers, recognize burnout in ourselves and others? The symptoms include being tired, stressed, resentful and cranky. And the worst symptom is when you no longer get that feel-good benefit from volunteering. When you ask yourself, “Is all this effort worth my time and energy?” you have already burned out.
The Muse Pallet 