Dr. Brian G Spare

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.” — E. Joseph Cossman

Copyright 2014 by R.A. Robbins

“As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness — just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breathe it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Writings to Young Women from Laura Ingalls Wilder: On Wisdom and Virtues

Copyright 2016 by R.A. Robbins

“Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.”
-Henry David Thoreau

Copyright 2016 by R.A. Robbins

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
– Mother Teresa

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive.
He who is devoid of the power to forgive
is devoid of the power to love.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty,
believe in them, and follow where they (may) lead.”
– Louisa May Alcott

from  www.craiglockbooks.com

“Together, one mind, one life at a time, let’s see how many people we can impact, encourage, empower, uplift and perhaps even inspire to reach their fullest potentials.”

Christmas can be the most wonderful time, or the most bleak, depending on what’s going on in your life. We associate the festive season with abundance, and as much as it can be an opportunity to celebrate all the good things we have, it can also heighten our awareness of what we lack.

Money, certainly, with so much pressure on us to buy, buy, buy. For some people, a home. Family maybe, or friends. Or a specific family member, now departed, or a specific friend. Like most people, I’ve had some very bleak Christmases in my life, but I’ve never stopped loving Christmas.

Because for me, Christmas is about love. The birth of love in the world, the symbolic baby which, in difficult times, is the gift of hope for a better future.

I think that in the modern world we can sometimes have too narrow an idea of love. We tend…

Soon after I woke up this morning I had a strange experience.

I had dreamed of a homeless man I had breakfast with in San Francisco years ago who told me something I’ve never forgotten.

“Being homeless ain’t about not having four walls, or not having stuff or an address,” he’d said. “It’s about not being from somewhere’s.”

He went on to explain, gesturing with his hand, that me and the other people around him sitting there in that diner, well, we all were from somewhere’s.

“Ya’ll carry that somewhere’s that you’re from inside of you. It’s part of who you are.”

He paused, making sure that I was understanding him and looked directly at me with his pale blue eyes.

“You?” he said, nodding his chin in my direction. “You’re not just you sitting there across the table from me. You’re a person with a place—a fire. It’s part…

Copyright 2016 by R.A. Robbins

“We all have a beautiful light within… We just sometimes forget it is there.”  — John Holland

This Autumn I devised and taught my first memoir-writing evening course. I had included sessions on autobiographical writing in several of my general writing courses, but I wanted to do it over several weeks, with daily tasks people could do at home between sessions, so they could hold the focus and deepen the experience of writing about their own life if they wanted to.

Take-up for the course was so good that I was able to run two groups, and everyone in both groups engaged wholeheartedly with the adventure, even though it took them by surprise.

All kinds of writing can surprise you. In fiction, your imagination can take you places you didn’t expect, because venturing into imagination is venturing into the unknown. In poetry, symbolic resonances may emerge that you didn’t know were there, leapfrogging  the familiar trails of your rational mind across what Jung called the bridge of your emotions. Even non fiction can…