Judy Sorum Brown’s poem, “Wooden Boats,” which on the surface is about the craft of boatmaking, turns beautifully in the third stanza to ask, “Is there within us each …?” By the final lines, it has us wondering if it might even be possible to transform the world

Amy’s belief in savoring each moment of life and saying “yes to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical” guided her throughout her life. This approach became even more important after her cancer diagnosis.

I know very little about Heavy Metal Music. But after reading how Ryan Pfeil’s moving reflection and its connection to “Constance,” the song of the Canadian Progressive Metalband Spritibox, I wanted to learn more.

And like Whitman, from time to time, we glide past the rigorous propriety of sanctioned learnedness and gaze “in perfect silence at the stars.”

At the Grammys, as Tracy Chapman sang “Fast Car,” her eyes sparkled. Equally in evidence was a beaming Luke Combs. For Luke Combs to get the notoriously private Tracy Chapman to join him on stage at the Grammy Awards took some masterful bridge building.

In our lives, we are building or maintaining bridges all day long, even, as in this lovely poem, when we smile back at sticky children in grocery lines.

Think of all the times, you’ve talked with friends about the latest movie or show you’ve seen or dropped lines from movies in conversation. These lines become shorthand in our daily script, conveying meaning or signaling something about ourselves.

After all these years, Mandy Patinkin can still easily recite his most famous lines from The Princess Bride movie. But they’re not the words that mean the most to him.