OWLcourage
a blog invested in hope and creative possibility

Story is so central in human existence that it often goes unexamined. It actually has two dominant meanings, which in my experience often get merged, confused, and in time build contradictory narratives. Both meanings refer to an account of something. The first is an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. The second is an account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something. In both meanings, someone is providing an accou

I did not anticipate Humor 2.0 would show up so soon! Go figure!! In 1986 I was awarded a three-year Kellogg Foundation Leadership Fellowship, a life-changing opportunity and experience. Among other adventures, Kellogg required that we take (and explore the outcomes of) a huge battery of self-assessment tests. They also included in our fellowship a one-week intensive at the Center for Creative Leadership, involving even more self-assessment, with both qualitative and quanti

The picture above is the graphic image of the title of this blog: Yin Yang. Because I had committed to using only my own photography in “OWLcourage”, the image is a cropped photo of my Yin Yang necklace. I have been trying to convince myself that this is better than clip art. I only wear jewelry that expresses something I hope to manifest. I wonder if that counts as a good excuse for this dicey photo. It does set the stage for my summary description of Yin Yang. Yin Yang is

Above is a picture of my “walking sticks”, pretentiously posing under the signage explaining the history of Rocky Fork Metro Park in New Albany, OH where the sticks spend most of their work time. These “walking sticks” are also called hiking sticks, trekking poles, walking poles, Nordic walking poles and ski poles, names shedding light on their origins. My Physical Therapist called them “assistive devices”, a label that explains how they became the focus of this blog post. T

I picked this title, “Humor 1.0”, because on my personal list of concepts shaping my understanding of courage, humor is near the top. So, there are many iterations of this topic still to come. This one highlights an early personal lesson about humor that shaped all my subsequent discoveries about it. In a prior posting on “Words” I noted that my brother Bob, three years my senior, was a source of several powerful life lessons. Here is another story about his role in my pathw