By Gilah Yelin Hirsch Everybody is creative. Each of us affirms our innate creativity many times a minute by choosing to take the next breath. While this may be an unconscious act, any move toward life is creative. Then, creativity lies in moving away from what we already know. The first step in the creative…
Category: Creativity
What the 1%, And the 99%, Can Learn From the Grinch
By Celia Coates Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is mean and all alone near his snowy cave just north of Whoville, isolated by his self-centered grouchiness. HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS! has been a bestseller since it was published in 1957 when Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) wrote it to counter what he saw as the commercialization of…
An Ode to Joy for Today
By Celia Coates It was a surprise to find an antidote to our current dark divisiveness in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I’d heard the music many times before but, last weekend, reading the program notes and then listening to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s performance (conducted by Marin Alsop) was truly enlightening. Beethoven had gone through a…
Next … ? After Trump’s Election
By Celia Coates This week, half the country is cheering and the other half despairing. I’ve been saying for a long time that I was going to write something about one of my favorite ideas: “just the right wrong thing”. These words became a useful frame, a way for me to view and deal with…
Ordinary Superpowers
By Celia Coates Alvin Schwartz wrote the storylines and dialogue for the Superman strips that appeared in newspapers during the golden age of comic books. Between 1942 and 1958 Schwartz wrote for DC Comics – a company that was a merger of three companies, two of which he had worked for – and Superman became…
Fourth Grade Hero
By Richard Howland When Mrs. Parmelee sat up there behind that gigantic desk, tapping the point of her red pencil, and looking out over the tops of those gold-rimmed glasses like that, we knew somebody was going to die. And the way Bobby Livingstone was staring down at his hands, lying there on top…
Finding Your Creativity
Robin Ha wrote a New York Times best-selling book (COOK KOREAN!: A Comic Book With Recipes) after she discovered she could combine her skills as a professional artist with her enjoyment of making really good food. She learned a lot about herself and creativity along the way. It takes courage to be creative – and…
Let’s Share
By Gilah Yelin Hirsch I was at an 85th birthday party last Sunday and had three conversations with people who were each heading organizations that deal with ameliorating the situation for women (and children) in trauma and domestic abuse. I was shocked to learn that none knew what the others were doing. As I travel…
Junior Howell: Time and Its Value to Life’s Changes
By Celia Coates As a child Jr. Howell had dreams of becoming an athlete, dreams that were ended by a car accident that left him wheelchair-bound. He turned instead to art. This print, “Time and Its Value to Life’s Changes,” is about his struggle to find his way in the difficult years after he was…
A Parable of a Brush Pile and a Compost Heap
By Eva Graves Price As a garden grows older, its owner soon finds the need of space for a brush pile. Plants and trees need pruning, and diseased and dead parts must be burned. What a blessing is fire to cleanse what is foul. A vast deal depends on the sanitation of our lovely gardens. …