Several months ago, I scheduled a reading at the Boonville Hotel. It’s a delightful weekend retreat, and I speculated that guests at the hotel might enjoy my kind of entertainment. Three weeks before the date, I notified the newspapers in the Anderson Valley and Fort …
Last Wednesday, I took BART into San Francisco to attend a poetry reading at Green Arcade Books on Market Street. A long-ago student and friend, Hazel White, with whom I had lost contact for years, was reading from her new book, “Vigilance is No Orchard,” …
My youngest granddaughter, Poppy, has always been intensely stage shy. She was “too scared” to dance in her ballet class’s performance when she was four, then declined piano lessons because she didn’t want “the piano teacher looking at me.” And at her class’s Christmas performance …
If you want to find out how thinking and seeing small can help you survive these trying political times, listen to my KQED Perspectives piece.
Nothing makes me happier than when people tell me their own stories of small. Yesterday, after a book party, a woman approached. “Would you mind if I told you a small story?” she asked. Would I mind? I’d be thrilled! “My name is Mary,” she …
I’m in good company when I see and think small. Among my fellow small enthusiasts: Stendhal: “A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.” Aeschylus: “From a small seed, a mighty trunk may grow.” Lao Tzu: “The journey of …
I’m just back from a week-long writers’ conference on Ambergris Caye, in Belize, where I taught for a week. The morning after I read from my new book, “Small: The Little We Need for Happiness,” two of the writers in my workshop presented me with …
I picked up a book called “Rewiring the Brain” by Rick Hanson at my acupuncturist’s the other day. My own book “Small” is really about happiness, I thought. “This book might be relevant.” I’m glad I didn’t read this before I wrote “Small. I might …
When I picked her up from school on Tuesday, my six-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter told me she didn’t feel good. After we arrived home, I touched her forehead. It was warm. “I think you have a fever,” I told her. I offered her a snack and a …
This morning, the movers hauled away the last of my mother’s furniture remaining in her condo: Several antique end tables, a roll-top desk that had been my grandfather’s when he was a boy, and a highboy my father had always used to store his clothing. …