If you begin to face your fears, something bittersweet is going to happen to you: You’ll grow up. You’ll lose your dependency on the grown-ups of the world because you’ll realize that there is no time, no age, at which fear suddenly fades and you become one of these impervious beings…Fear is the raw material from which courage is manufactured. Without it, we wouldn’t even know what it means to be brave.—Martha Beck, Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

I love Martha Beck’s …

On any given weekend in a million backyards, parking lots, empty fields and sun-baked pastures they gather to worship at the altar of the remarkable, unusual and cheap. Antique hunters, both self-proclaimed and by profession; full-time mechanics and the shade-tree version of handy-with-a-wrench, roam the aisles for bargains, for treasure, for great deals and the “once-in-a-lifetime” sale.
Fleamarkets. Yardsales. Thrift sales. We’ve all been. And the thing I find fascinating is that with all the experts, all the collectors, all the people with the mind set that, “I might find a …

A few summers ago I was visiting Maine and stopped in a small campground office. On the walls of the office were posters with crabs and lobsters on them. Not unusual, except there was a big red circle with the universal slash through it to indicate “No Crabs, No Lobsters.” It being Maine and all, I asked the owner about the posters. He laughed.
“Have you ever seen a bucket of crabs or lobsters?” he asked. “If one of them tries to escape the others will see it and pull …

I still have to sign the contracts, get my marching orders and the usual stuff you do when you get a new job, but I’ve just become a hired blogger. It looks like I’ll be writing once or twice a week for Change.org’s website on homelessness. I’m joining a great staff, most of whom, I noticed – are from the west coast and upper east coast. There’s one other writer from Northern Virginia (Arlington), but I didn’t see any writers who hail from the south. Whew! All the more topics …