I invite you to join in it! I guess everybody has a guilty pleasure. Mine happens to be long showers: long and cool in the summer; long and hot when the weather turns cold. I love the feeling of water cascading over me; it washes away stress, anxiety, even depression. In fact, I’d definitely call […]

What are the roots of Halloween? How did the celebration get started? It all began with the pagan celebration of Samhain, a word meaning “Summer’s end” in the Brythonic branch of Gaelic. The pagans of the British Isles saw the date as the official end of summer, and one of several “thin times” of the […]

When you work as a freelance writer, you need to be able to turn on a dime in terms of style. Like a yogi or yogini, you are required to stretch yourself regularly and assume all sorts of new positions. One day, you might have a deadline on an academic journal article in which you […]

As self-employed writers, it’s easy to feel as though we should always be working. After all, relatively few of us are so fortunate as to have enough regular, ongoing gigs to keep us gainfully employed full-time. We know that once our current project is finished, we’re going to have to immediately bid on the next […]

Being stressed out is a natural outgrowth of contemporary lifestyles. When stress becomes chronic, it can trigger a variety of mental and physical health problems. The way we respond to stress remains virtually unchanged since the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, yet the kind of stress we experience has changed a great deal. Our bodies […]

A humanist and a priest sit down for a holiday meal. No, this is not the setup for a joke, as much as it may sound like one! It actually describes what happened at our recent Thanksgiving celebration. These ceremonial feasts can be tricky; sometimes they’re the only time certain family members and friends of […]