If you’re a parent, you don’t need anyone to tell you how difficult that role can be. Additionally, the inherent difficulties of being a student are well known. Combined, the roles of being both a student and a parent can be extremely difficult to navigate. 

Your day begins bright and early and usually ends with you being exhausted, often wondering what just happened, and your home looking like a herd of wild animals just trampled through.

As a parent myself, I go through struggles and don’t always feel that I am doing the best job. However, parenting is a learning process and sometimes I have to remind myself that it is ok that I am struggling. It just means I am human.

It is important to follow some basic guidelines that should be universal. Hitting your kids doesn’t work for obvious reasons, but it also has the…

It is with some hesitation that I wish to evoke the hit Netflix series, Stranger Things. What I want to avoid is reducing the wildly creative Spielberg homage into a trite psychological metaphor. And yet, I cannot ignore the fact that beneath the placid — and sometime tumultuous — surface of our lives exists another dimension.

This is not primarily a dimension of nightmarish creatures, although those may lurk there too. Nor is it something we need to destroy in order to rescue ourselves and our loved ones from frightening monsters.

Rather it is that subterranean part of each of us from which what is novel and unknown comes. Without this dimension, I think, life would eventually become boring and two-dimensional, holding no more surprise.

Sometimes we seek this dimension by…

I recently started to dabble in creating ceramic art. This wasn’t something that I had always wanted to do or had spent a lot of time thinking about. I had never even watched a YouTube video of anyone creating pottery. It held no fascination for me. It was a spur of the moment decision.

Then, when I saw that a class at the Craft Center was open, I signed up for it. I attended the first class on a Sunday night, thinking I was going to regret it. This was not how I typically wanted to spend my Sunday evenings. But right from the first class, I was hooked. I left the class feeling a sense of elation. I thought it was just the novelty of it all — I didn’t think that the feeling would last. But almost a year later, I continue to feel excitement and joy whenever I go to the studio and work on creating something. And I realized something else – this sense of joy and peace is the same…

Body positivity can be hard because so much body negativity has to be sifted through first. Our culture inundates us with messages about which bodies count as beautiful, whole, perfect, and acceptable. And inherent in these messages is the flip side: that certain bodies are unacceptable, broken, flawed, and ugly. We simply don’t get a lot of messages telling us to love our bodies or that we are okay just the way we are.

How do we love ourselves in the face of the constant stream of consumerist and objectifying messages saying, “There’s something wrong with you?” We are told that we have a problem, and that it can be fixed if we direct enough energy, time, money and, yes, self-hate, towards changing something flawed about ourselves.

But what if we didn’t have to do this?

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