Portrait of an Artist:
Fact and Fiction from the Art Fair Circuit
Field of Dreams
Big, Bold Sculptures Hit It Out of the Park
Healthy Food, Healthy Communities
Gaining Ground and Growing Power
Just Cause
What Happens at Home Stays at Home
Shavin: Worry is my new state of mind
It's an interesting world, this world of selling a house and looking for a new one, of deciding whether your life is best lived somewhere other than where you have been for 20 years, or in your current home, where you think, but cannot possibly know, you would be happy for the next 20.
For a while, gratitude replaces my terror
Last Saturday at Keystone College in upstate Pennsylvania, I sat down with Buddhist author Whitney Stewart and Muslim NPR commentator Arsalan Iftikhar to discuss our respective spiritual beliefs and how those beliefs impact our writing.
Shavin: Inner conflict never stops
There's a battle going on in my head, and I'm embarrassed to say about what. I'm going to fess up, in the hopes that (as Drs. Oz and Phil suggest) pain exposed is pain deposed. The battle is between two long-standing rivals: the unshakable belief in my general superiority and the unshakable belief in my general inferiority. There, I admitted it. (Thus making me superior to those who fight the same battle but deny it.)
Shavin: Bracing for a public appearance
When I was in the fifth grade, I got invited to my first boy/girl party. It was at Selena Coleman's house, and while I liked her, I did not want to go to her party. I was a recluse, a loner, never happier than when I was at home on my bed, pondering my lack of friendships.
My Life: Children live in a world of worry
Every now and then I am reminded of what it was like to be a child, and I am so happy to be grown up. Because I worried constantly when I was little. I believed adulthood would be a pageant of unremitting anguish with the added stress of a credit card, which (as I understood it) both was and was not money, which both was and was not mine. And there were other grave concerns: The thought of leaving my parents' home horrified me. How would I find the store or know how to cook? In choosing Hunt's ketchup or Heinz, did I simply buy what my mother bought, or was there some scientific method I'd yet to be taught that would objectify these and other important decisions?
Shavin: House shopping is a never-ending fantasy
It's that time of year again, when a young man's attention turns to girls - and a middle-aged couple's attention turns to houses.