MSI Press Blog

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -43-   Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.   Ella Fitzgerald   Ella Fitzgerald, the “Queen of Song,” had a legendary career that spanned over half a century. Beginning in the early 1930s, she performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra and helped to form new styles in American popular music. She was noted both for her vocal and artistic range and for her remarkable improvisational ability. Reacting to the formulaic style of big band swing music, Fitzgerald was at the cutting edge of bebop, the jazz movement that turned away from prominent bass lines and featured extended improvisational solos from instruments like saxophone and clarinet or from the voice in the role of instruments. You can...

  We often talk about mindfulness as a solo practice: breath, body, silence. But in a household like mine—multi-generational, multi-family, multi-cat—mindfulness is relational. It’s the pause before reacting. The breath before interrupting. The noticing of someone’s tone, not just their words. Mindfulness in relationships isn’t about being perfectly calm or endlessly patient. It’s about being awake to the moment we’re in together. It’s the difference between “I’m listening” and “I hear you.” Between “I’m here” and “I’m with you.” In caregiving, mindfulness is the split-second awareness that someone’s cough isn’t just a cough. In friendship, it’s the quiet attunement to what’s not being said. In community, it’s the willingness to be changed by what we learn from each other. Mindfulness doesn’t isolate—it connects. It’s not just a tool for stress reduction; it’s a practice of presence that makes relationships more honest, more resilient, more alive. So today, I’m not meditating ...

  Today's meditation from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Dr. Frederic Craigie: -41-   The effort to bring something new and meaningful into the world – whether in the arts, the kitchen or the marketplace—is exactly what generates the sense of meaning and fulfillment for which so many of us yearn so deeply.   Peter Korn   In the range of 65,000 years ago, someone wandered into a network of caves in what is now Spain, finding a suitable wall surface and inscribing images of animals and geometric designs. In ever-unfolding fields of archaeology and cultural anthropology, these images presently claim title to being the oldest examples of visual arts yet discovered. They were made by Neanderthals, long before modern humans appeared on the scene, giving rise to fresh theories about the sophistication of what we have long considered to be barrel-chested, dim-witted brutes. In the following millennia, people arou...