Maria Shriver

Yancy Berns

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Blog Posts

• September 13, 2011

  Tips for Transformation

  

  The Ways We Were

  Fall brings with it nostalgia, they say. Perhaps because the world slows down a bit, and we pull out the memories we haven’t spun in a while, for fear of them growing fainter while unattended. We humans don’t like seeing the past vanish, and we don’t like the thought that the world of our youth must by necessity be replaced with another world, and another, and another. This puts us in a strange position, in a reality where progression is unstoppable, where things have been set in motion to run forward to infinity, away from youth, away from simplicity.

• June 16, 2011

  

  "Pop" Culture

  Mothers are easy. Everyone loves their mother, or their idea of what a mother should be: shelter from the storm.

  Fathers are tougher. They start out as "The Other," that other guy that lives in the house along with you and mom. Then, they become (in quick succession) the guy you look up to; the stern taskmaster; the complicated man himself; and finally the (for men, at least) the example that has been set, the earlier version of you, the guy who’s passing you the baton. While mom was teaching you the names of all the dinosaurs, dad was out there doing something – usually this thing called “struggling” that we find out about soon enough – to, one way or another, provide for his family. His is a life in progress, and I think we become aware of that faster than we do with our mothers. Who is this guy, anyway?

• May 3, 2011

  

  Moms in Pop Culture - A Few Favorites

  There’s my mom, there’s your mom, and then there’s Mom. She’s our portal into life, and she’s where we all want to be when our lives go south. Maybe our individual mothers were all-stars, maybe they weren’t, but capital-M Mom is always in our souls. She’s the warm presence we first sense in this world, the benevolent Queen of a land where all edges are soft, all food is mush and it goes right down, and forgiveness pours down free like sunlight.

• April 18, 2011

  

  Poetic Defense: The User's Guide

  So they tell me it’s National Poetry Month. I try to fight cynical thought (I pick my battles), but I can’t help thinking that the words “National Poetry Month” must sound like “National Homework Month” or “National Gout Month” to the average American. Because of the way poetry is administered to us in high school – and I’m not talking just literal poems here, but all forms of artistically elevated thought, writing, and observation – most of my countrymen came away from the lesson with the unavoidable conclusion that poetry and algebra go in the same bucket, and that bucket gets dumped off the pier once you get past the SATs, and then you go live your life.