“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers” – A quote occasionally attributed to Socrates Nostalgia is a tricky thing. We all know it can warp our perceptions of the
Think about the last time you went into a gas station and got a cappuccino simply by pushing a button. You realize that what you were drinking probably wasn’t really a cappuccino, right? Machines like these are partly the reason why some people order a cappuccino and then ask why there’s so much foam in their drink, not realizing that what they asked for is a shot of espresso with half foam and half
It’s easier to sink than swim. That’s what they don’t tell you. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between sinking and floating stagnant. My father taught me that everything takes its time. No matter how great the desire to motor through every problem until every one of them is solved—a thankless dream by the way—there will always be something you cannot fix just by tackling it. There will
Shortly after moving to my new home in North Carolina I discovered a bleeding heart plant growing in between the bushes in front of the house. I recognized it as a shade-loving plant and happily transplanted it to a shady corner behind the house. As the little flowers emerged I was struck with disappointment and nostalgia, as these were not the same flowers I had come to love in California,
When I was a child, we always sped through the Painted Desert in the Navajo Nation on our way to my grandparents’ house in Sun City, leaving nothing behind but the tailwinds from the car. I scanned that vast expanse of land and sky, the colors of the soil rich with brilliant pinks, muted reds, and sage green, the sky always a clear, crisp blue, colors as uncontainable and free
The simplest definition of “sacred” in the Oxford English Dictionary has always seemed to me to be “set apart,” and that’s probably why I’ve never felt very happy with the word. I’ve never much liked the idea of things being “set apart.” Somehow, in my staunchly Republican family, I acquired a stubborn egalitarianism. But I grew up in places that I’ve recently come to think of as sacred. I grew
