A few days ago, since I wrote about Fairy Tales, I have been excited about the idea of a 7 Heavenletter book or ebook of fairy tales.

Jochen, I actually did a search on the Heavenletter page on my own!

I found lots and lots of Heavenletters with reference to fairy tales, Cinderella, Cinderella’s carriage, the prince, frog prince, Hansel and Gretel,  wicked witch, wicked stepmother, Pied Piper, Open Sesame. I couldn’t find (more…)

The mystical is not obvious. That must be what makes it mystical. To me, the mystical is like a poem that takes leaps, and you are surprised, and your heart leaps with the words of the poem, even when you don’t understand it. Then later you think about it, and maybe something falls into place. Your heart knew what the poem meant, and then the mind wants to understand too.

Effendi at the Sufi House is a magical storyteller.  (more…)

I have had the feeling that Effendi knows what is in everyone’s heart. He reads hearts. When he talks to me individually in the group, it’s as if I had asked him a question, and he is answering it. (more…)

Thirty years ago I read a love poem by Neruda, a poet from Chile who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

You have to remember I was a different person thirty years ago. (more…)

It is amazing to me what a careless reader I am sometimes. I glance and think I have read. (more…)

Jonathan Kozol was fired by the Boston School System because he brought in a poem by Langston Hughes that was not in the curriculum.  (more…)

The other day I saw Jonathan Kozol, author and education activist, on Book TV. I remember his name from my school teaching days.

The following quotation from his web site http://www.learntoquestion.com/seevak/groups/2002/sites/kozol/Seevak02/html/edad-open.htm will give you an idea of where (more…)

In junior high school, I started notebooks of quotations I liked, sentences and paragraphs that meant a lot to me. I didn’t keep up with these notebooks, but I often started them. Still, the fact that I started collecting quotations tells me now how much words of wisdom meant to me even back then. Those notebooks are long gone, and I cannot recall a single one of the quotations. (more…)

I grew up in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where the Kennedy’s also grew up. The people in the Boston area, which is Eastern Massachusetts, had a Boston accent. The people in Western Massachusetts where I was born did not have an accent. Yet that accent is very dear to me. (more…)

Just grab some spam and you have found a found poem: (more…)