I love words. I love what you can do with words. I love playing with words, shaping ideas with them, communicating things that matter to me through them, and affecting the thoughts and feelings of others with them. For all these reasons and more, I love words. But not always. As I’ve said before, I don’t always love words when they come as poems. When words come in poems, they don’t seem to follow the rules, or at least they operate by different rules, rules I haven’t mastered and don’t feel competent at. That’s, in part, why the Saturday poetry post has been important to me. It’s a way to stretch, to push myself to work a...

I’m going to omit our usual Wednesday TEDTalks episode for a week or two to make a little more room for holiday cheer. Today’s feature…a modern day – and rockin’ – little drummer boy named Sean Quigley. Sean, a native of Winnipeg, put together a very fun – and very well made – video of his version of the “The Little Drummer Boy.” What’s kind of amazing is that he plays all the instruments as well as produced the video. And his exuberance as a drummer is, well, seriously fun. As he said in an interview with the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) last year shortly after the video went up and went viral, “Drummer Boy...

The Carol of the Bells, a Ukrainian folk song written by Mykola Leontovych with lyrics by Peter Wilhousky, has always been one of my favorites of those Christmas carols that you are more likely to hear than sing. There are so many fabulous variations that never fail to delight, and the tune has been adapted to reflect so many different cultures (where drums, for instance, in an African version performed at my daughter’s middle school recently). So it was to my great delight to come across two more versions that I thought were, well, just really cool. The first, from the creative talents at North Point Church in Atlanta, appeals to my geeky...

Sometimes it takes an outsider to remind you of who you are and what you should be about. It helps, of course, if that outsider is keenly observant, a generous critic, and gifted with words and, in this case, musical notes. Such is the case with this week’s Unlikely Christmas Carol, “The Rebel Jesus,” by Jackson Browne. Let’s start with Browne as keen observer. A day after describing Mary’s Magnificat as a “rebel song,” I can’t help but appreciate Browne’s perception that her son came to question the status quo, challenge the authorities and customs of the day, and generally turn things upside down. But Browne isn’t...

I’ve said before – more than a few times, actually ☺ – that I love just about everything about Advent and Christmas, and that I especially love the music of the season. Ancient and modern, sacred and secular, I love them all. (Well, not all, but a whole lot!) So in the spirit of the season I want to share a few of my favorite Christmas songs, some of which you may know, others that perhaps are less familiar, but all of which representatives of what that I like to call “unlikely Christmas carols.” They’re unlikely not because there is something wrong or inappropriate about them. Indeed I find each one points out something...