It’s refreshing to feel those serving you have had even two minutes of training dedicated to gluten free (GF) realities. It’s the simplest diet at this point in U.S. food trends, so there’s no excuse not to have the knowledge if you make your living serving food. When I told the first server on the line at Blaze Fast Fire'd Pizza that I was GF, the others heard it quickly.
Posts tagged #issue 68
Abandonment Blues — An Adoption Memoir
I was adopted when I was six months old. My adoptive mother told me this when I was nine. Whenever I asked whom my birth mother was she said that she didn’t know. After she died at age sixty-one, when I was thirty-five, I found letters from my birth mother amongst her papers. I found her, we met her once, but she would never tell me who my biological father was.
Meeting the Heretic — Social Justice and Technology with Professor Kentaro Toyama
Smartphones. Skype. Tablets. Email. Apps. Technology weaves itself into our lives, penetrating every aspect of daily living, making most of us scramble to keep up with its continual metamorphosis. Memes go viral, and we become absorbed with football players on bent knees, or “fake news,” peeling back the skin of society to show us unspoken underlying feelings and beliefs. Few of us have time, or take time, to evaluate what place we want technology to have in our lives and how it affects quality. We are racing to keep up.
From the Ground Up — How Groundcover News Took Roots on the Streets of Ann Arbor: A Conversation with Susan Beckett
Susan Beckett is the publisher of Groundcover News, a street newspaper sold in Ann Arbor and throughout Washtenaw County directly by vendors – many of whom are experiencing challenges related to poverty. Groundcover’s stated mission is: “Creating opportunity and a voice for low-income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty.”
Coffee with Chris Forte, Author of The Humble Warrior
Chris Forte is a Birmingham-based yogi, author, spiritual fitness coach, former Division I athlete, and creator of The Humble Warrior podcast and memoir. On Christmas Day, 2014, in the midst of his marriage dissolving, Chris hit his knees on the floor and heard, “Book, blog, podcast.” He spent two years doing yoga and meditation every day, attending Hay House writing and speaking conferences, and getting certified as a yoga teacher. His book, “The Humble Warrior: Spiritual tools for living a purposeful life” came out in June 2017.
Balance Massage Therapy — The Business with a Healing Touch
Balance Massage Therapy (BMT) celebrated its ninth anniversary this past October. Founded in 2008 by Josie Ann Lee and Christin Lee Draybuck, the business has grown dramatically, from five massage rooms and five therapists when they opened, to eleven rooms and sixteen therapists, who now give more than 10,000 massages per year.
Making Friends with Your Subconscious in Creative Writing
There are such depths within us all — how do we, as writers, access and use the material that is in our subconscious minds? In her book, Archetypes for Writers, Jennifer Van Bergen affirms that “Writing takes place in the subconscious…. The subconscious actually operates — in everyone — as an independent mind. It perceives, processes, and retains things that never enter the conscious mind at all.
SoulCollage® — Discover Your Wisdom, Change Your World
SoulCollage® is an intuitive practice that gently guides us home to our own inner knowing and guidance. It captured my heart at an impromptu offering during a spiritual retreat over six years ago. With SoulCollage®, there was immediacy, a sense of synchronicity, and an alignment with everything I loved: the creative process, spiritual practice, and inner cultivation. I was surprised by its simplicity. I wondered how collaging images to make a deck of cards could tend the soul.
City of Crows
I’m preparing to leave a corvid hurly-burly. Beneath its restless swirl I lean against an oak tree, attempting to be unobtrusive. Nearby, under the storm of wings, a man is standing, his back to me, profoundly rooted, silent by a stone marker. We both wear coats as black as the feathers of the birds. Above us, they arrive: alighting and arising, some perching on branches, others in perpetual motion and outcry.
Considering a New Year’s Resolution? Forget Weight Loss, Work on Posture!
Thanks to the combination of a month of eating holiday treats and the annual New Year resolution ritual, January is one of the busiest times of the year for fitness professionals. For the next few months, my fitness center will be bursting with people who have decided that this is the year they’re going to solve any number of things that they think are wrong with their bodies.
