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What Your Metaphors Reveal About You
One of my favorite metaphors is in Alice Walker’s essay, Beauty, When the Other Dancer is the Self. In it, she writes about her blind eye resulting from a BB gun injury from one of her brothers. She charts her relationship with her blind, scarred eye, from painful adolescence to the moment when her little girl first notices it. “You have a world in your eye,“ says her daughter, carefully observing what is left of the scar tissue. All at once, her eye becomes a metaphor for the internal worlds inside Walker that have grown because of the injury. I have posted a link at the end so you can…
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The Care and Feeding of the Human Spirit
For most of us, the line between soul and spirit is an amorphous one. In fact, many use the terms interchangeably. However, I believe they are two separate, though not unrelated, parts of our identity. Just as God exists in a trinity, so do we, being made up of body, soul, and spirit. Because of this, I think a quick definition of the soul and the spirit is in order. The soul is the seat of your thoughts and emotions. The soul often receives a bad rap. To behave in a soulish way is Christianspeak for acting poorly. But the soul is an important part of our makeup. We spend…
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Step Family Stumbling Blocks: What to Expect
I get a lot of Brady Bunch jokes when I tell people that my husband and I have a ‘blended’ family of six kids. Four daughters of mine from my first marriage and a son and a daughter from my husband’s previous marriage meant that I had three kids in high school for six consecutive years. We married over thirteen years ago, bringing together our children with stars in our eyes and high hopes in our hearts. We wanted to rock step family life. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Was it easy? Absolutely not. But if I had been aware of a few salient facts, I think the process might…
Healing Through Art & Words
