I recently reconnected with an old friend from my New Mexico years. We spoke of old times, and he reminded me of San Geronimo's Day. This annual feast is an amalgam of Catholic and native customs. It is also one of the rare occasions when outsiders are permitted to witness some of the pueblo's religious practices, including a bare foot sprint that is part race and part dance.
As the parent of a feisty and sometimes defiant three-year-old I often find myself in battle mode, having to make constant tactical adjustments based on the situation. There are two forces at play in our house: what we, her loving parents, would like to see happen, and what she, the stubborn, strong-willed daughter, would like to see take place.
There’s a certain expectation that comes with asking someone how they are. You expect to receive a simple “good” or “fine” or maybe even “could be worse.” So it catches you off guard when instead you receive an entire life story of what ails them in that moment, including why it ails them, how they got there, and what they wish would happen.
As we learned from the widespread propagation of “fake news” over the last several months, we believe what we want to believe. Fake news and sensationalized headlines are nothing new, but they rose to the forefront of our national dialogue during and immediately following the election.
Click to view the January/February 2017 issue of Neveh Shalom’s Chronicle Please note that the file is large, thank you for your patience.
Do you know that point at which you’ve read something so many times that it starts to lose its meaning? Maybe it’s something you yourself have written, and you’ve reached the saturation point when you need to hand it off to someone else to edit.
I try not to allow myself snark. It's a lovely, seductive and ultimately diminishing emotion by which you make yourself feel better than others, if only in some small way. Most of us engage in snark at moments. Some of us get caught thinking about the world in this way a great deal of the time. It would be easy to dismiss the quality of snark as either, "that's how people are," or "well that's not a particularly attractive personality trait."
