my romantic tryst with cancer

We love as though we know not better. A trick, biology, it claims more worthy selves and gentler aims, And still this doom is ours. We sought late wanderings, and soft light, dims. And then the first embrace, The touch as if those hands were all the world– For such their beauty seemed; He carried gods with him. And these loves, so celebrated, sang, so painted, danced, idolatrized, These seems are but the tantrum of our genes, which we their slaves, embellish– Strunglike puppets, till they break their strings, And all that’s left are our own imaginings. - Kezia Speirs (read on the TTC in July 2007)

By Michelle Singletary in the Washington Post I’ve spent my whole life talking to myself. “No, Michelle you don’t need to stop and get food. Go home and cook and save money. “No, Michelle you shouldn’t buy that dress. You can wear what you have to the party.” “No, Michelle you can’t spend that raise. Put it toward your retirement savings.” I’m pretty good at fussing at myself. And yet, I still have some regrets. I would have more in my 401(k) had I not been so afraid of investing in equities. For years, my retirement account was too conservative overloaded with fixed income investments with low returns compared to the S&P 500 Index. I could just kick my scared younger self. With the help of a financial planner and increasing my retirement savings over the years, my 401(k) is doing well. But my portfolio would probably be worth 20 percent to 30 percent more had I not been so risk-adverse. Last week I asked: If you could, what retirement planning advice would you gi

"The only dream worth having,... is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead." - Arundhati Roy

Dots and dashes: How artist Madhvi Parekh developed her own language to tell stories of her youth Entirely self-taught, the artist depicts fantastical creatures, fables and divine beings in a style often compared to the Spanish painter Joan Miro.  Share  Tweet  Email  Reddit  Print From a distance, Madhvi Parekh’s early paintings look like Kantha embroidery. Dots and lines add up on the canvas to form whirlpools, waves, a stretch of road. These guide the eye to focus on the fantastical animals, mythological figures, trees, and people that populate her work. A new retrospective of Parekh’s works,  The Curious Seeker , at the DAG Modern art gallery in Delhi has 70 works made over five decades, and at least as many examples of how the dots and dashes foreground certain elements and give cues on how to read the work. In  King of The Water , a work from 1980 made on paper with pen, ink and glitter pen, for example, the dashes and dots are dense in the bottom third of the

His tongue shorn, father confuses snacks for snakes, kitchen for chicken. It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap silverware at yard sales. I am told by mother to keep our telephone number close, my beaded coin purse closer. I do this. The years are slow to pass, heavy-footed. Because the visits are frequent, we memorize shame’s numbing stench. I nurse nosebleeds, run up and down stairways, chew the wind. Such were the times. All of us nearsighted. Grandmother prays for fortune to keep us around and on a short leash. The new country is ill-fitting, lined with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves. by Jenny Xie https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/naturalization

The Gift of Death : By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012 Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it. There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map. They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations. Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1%

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.