Tag: behavior

  • If Only For A Moment…

    On Sunday, Mother’s Day, during the second hour of a four-hour gig, something extraordinary happened. As I stood beneath a tree playing my trumpet, a hummingbird suddenly appeared. It circled around me three… maybe four times, hovering right in front of the bell of my trumpet while I played. Then it flew upward and landed…

  • The Discipline of Presence

    I said this to a group of colleagues the other day. We were talking about the apparent apathy we see in students—and in many adults. “Failing to show up is giving the world your consent to move on without you.” Their response was thoughtful. They said the line had weight—but maybe it was too harsh.…

  • Mirror, Mirror on My Desk…

    We spend a lot of time looking outward. At expectations. At what other people are doing, saying, or thinking. We compare, we react, we adjust. Most of our day is shaped by everything happening around us. But we rarely stop and look inward. There aren’t many moments in the day where it’s just you and…

  • Alone at the Happiest Place on Earth

    Most people would say the Disneyland Resort isn’t a place you go alone.That doing so feels equal parts pathetic and depressing. And maybe… on paper, it is. But I did it anyway. I was there for a two-day excursion—an Arts Education Leadership Summit. Work. Professional development. The kind of trip that comes with lanyards, schedules,…

  • Little-Known Facts About Me

    If you look back long enough, you start to notice the strange little things that were always there. Not the big milestones. Not the obvious moments. The quieter details— the ones that didn’t make sense at the time, but somehow explain everything now. I don’t usually sit around listing facts about myself. Feels a little…

  • Pieces of Eight

    Education has been my formal career for the last twenty-seven years—but teaching? That’s something I’ve been doing since.. geez I can’t even remember. Coaching, community art classes, day camps… if there was a group of people and a semi-organized activity, I was probably in charge of it. Not officially, of course. Just… spiritually. Looking back,…

  • No Schedule, Just Sunlight and Shortcuts to Nowhere

    I grew up in the 70s and 80s, in a city that felt like it was still learning its own edges. Streets weren’t lined with development yet, and blank spaces—lots of dirt, weeds, and sun-baked patches of ground—were waiting for someone to claim them. We claimed them. We ran through them. We made trails, shortcuts,…

  • Scraped Knees and Torn Jeans

    There was a time when play was king—not the quiet, sit-down kind, but the loud, dusty, borderline-dangerous kind that required sunscreen you never used and rules you barely followed.  It was the kind of play that guaranteed you’d come home a different person than when you left… mostly because parts of you were now missing…

  • Throwing Words Into the Wind

    Let me tell you a story…something I learned about myself, and only fully recently acknowledged. This won’t be a confession of weakness, nor a tale of courage or inner strength. Those are just labels. And the truth is, labels are strangers to far more people like me than most realize. If anything, this story is…

  • The Longest Day – Sanitized, Signed In, and Socially Distanced

    I’ve had long days before. I mean, who hasn’t. Everyone has a horror story or two about work, some more drink worthy than others. A friend and I were recently comparing notes over coffee, as one does when caffeine doubles as a therapist. The conversation inevitably twisted itself around the question: who had the longest…

  • A Little Bit of Us in Everything

    I saw this quote today, and it resonated with me deeply:“We are writers, my love. We don’t cry. We bleed on paper.”I have no idea who wrote it, but it hit me anyway. As a creator—writer, musician, photographer, cook—it applies across the board. Our emotions are always on display through our work. Not always overtly,…

  • Kinder Chronicles, Room 3, 1974

    Teacher’s log, Kinder Day 31 I used to think I was in charge. That illusion lasted exactly four minutes on the first day of school—right up until Little Tommy licked a purple marker, declared it “grape,” and asked if we had any crackers to go with it. We did.We always had crackers. Kindergarten, in those…

  • Between Me and Myself

    Sometimes the quietest conversations are the ones we have with ourselves.They come in fragments—moments of memory, glimpses of people we’ve loved, the echo of a voice we thought we’d lost. This is one of those conversations. It started with a dream, a few small visits from my mom, a song that kept coming back, and…

  • Freedom on Two Wheels

    Back in the day, a bicycle was freedom. It was far more than a way to get from here to there. We treated our wheels the same way our dads and big brothers treated theirs. Well… at least I did. I grew up watching my old man in the driveway on weekends, tinkering with his…

  • Why I Create…

    Sitting with myself this morning, coffee in hand, I asked, “Why do you create?” …and the reflection in the mug stared back, quiet, like it already knew the answer before I did. “Why do you create?” I asked again, slower this time, letting the words curl in the warmth of the coffee steam. And the…