When I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in music, I spent three years teaching general music at a middle school. It was a lot of fun for me, partly because there was no curriculum at all: I could teach whatever I wanted. With my seventh graders, I would bring in musical instruments, show them how they worked, and let some volunteers try to play them. Most of my kids were pretty happy with that - but certainly not all of them. I remember one boy who never stopped disrupting the c

This poem is based on an old article, which I originally posted in 2019. It always felt like it wanted to be a poem. “Ok, Let go.” I looked into his eyes. They were warm, and fatherly. And playful. And sad. I saw clouds across a blue sky, And walks in the late afternoon, When he had said, suddenly, “No, let’s go this way.” And so we did. I saw the glistening shine of his old tears That hadn’t fully dried. I saw the sunset. I smiled, And he smiled back. We caught that same bre

In my early thirties, I attended a spiritual festival in Israel that brought teachers from all over the country. I remember we were in a large indoor space with perhaps 50 men and women, and I don’t remember what the topic of the session was, but it evolved around masculine and feminine energy. The two facilitators, who were a man and a woman, kicked off the session with some dancing. Once in a while, they would call out some kind of theme or idea that we should all dance to.

I would never go so far as to consider myself a master gardener. But we do have some plants in the house. And most of them seem to be doing ok. Or perhaps the fact that we toss the dead ones is enough to explain why most of the plants in our house are mostly green. In any case, one of the annoying challenges I face as a pseudo-budding gardener is that all these plants keep growing: Instead of “staying put”, they get big, they hit the ceiling, they encroach on the territory of

When we were kids, we used to play a game called “whack-a-mole”. I’m assuming many people are familiar with it: A table full of holes, and a little (robot) critter that would pop out of one of them at random, while we tried to hit it with a hammer. Rather sadistic, if you think about it… But the point was to try to guess which hole that “mole” would pop out of. If we were really going to take the game seriously, we might have found a way to stuff up all the holes except one,

She walked with bare feet On hard pavement. Smells of street food swirled around her, Sizzling oil and spices, Children running, Cows and chickens, Vendors calling out To draw their buyers in. Rickshaws buzzed around the innocent pedestrians, Zigzagging on the brink of death, With jeers from the crowd Like an Olympic event. Horns, hands out of the window, And everything forever getting louder, Vibrant-er, More pungent-er Everywhere was er, er, er. And then there was her. A