Musings from Ballantine 666
For me, romantic comedies set at Christmas are like chocolate pecan pie – treacly and high fructose. I wouldn’t want more than a couple pieces a year, and when someone asks me what my favorite kind of pie is, I never say chocolate pecan, but I usually think about it. You know what you’re going to get, and you know how you’re going to feel afterwards.
The demographic for the Hallmark Channel is women between the ages of 25 and 54.
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...“Hope is the thing with feathers. / It perches in the soul.” – Emily Dickinson
I have been thinking and talking about hope a lot this year, and especially in the last few weeks. There have been many times that I have felt profoundly hopeless, but strangely, I find the little bird in my soul reawakening as we head into the final month of 2020 and the bleakest, shortest days of the month.
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My dad just sent a picture of a majestic buck standing in the yard of my childhood home, with my parents’ dormant vegetable garden in the background. Right now, with the blog and the book ever-present in my mind, I was reminded of my first ever attempt at writing an essay for Superman and God, one that arose from an advocatus diaboli argument Jon and I were having one Sunday morning at the IU library.
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...Near the end of her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, psychology professor Kristin Neff asks if you could go back in time and change something, would you do it even if it meant you would no longer be you? For a lot of years, perhaps decades even, my answer would have been an emphatic "yes!" But recently, a series of experiences and decisions conspired to bring me to this moment,
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