Anna Billings's Page

To Fife
that sleek and beautiful stallion
majestic Morgan with a smooth chestnut coat
who graced us with his quiet nobility
for more than thirty years,
whose presence took root
in the deep earth of our everyday lives.

We miss you.
We miss your soulful eyes,
your elegant, feisty prances
your slow glides
and silent surveys of the pasture
your playful whinnies
your intelligent kindness
your patience
your beauty
We miss you.

Here is a poem that says it best —

When Great Trees Fall
B… Continue

Here's a fascinating website: Wordle, a tool for creating "word clouds" from text — visual configurations of your written material that are quite amazing. It's creator, Jonathan Feinberg, says this about the tool (which he calls a "toy"):

"The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use how… Continue

One year ago, the sad news of a great teacher’s departure resounded around the world. John O’Donohue — author of Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom; Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Yearning to Belong;… Continue

In celebration of the shortest day of the year when the sun sits lowest in the sky, turned at its farthest angle from the Earth — the day that offers us the longest time in darkness. In the Northern Hemisphere, that day is today, December 21, 2008.

This brings to mind reflections on our Earth’s relationship to the Sun. First of all, it’s fascinating that the Earth (with us on it) rotates daily (giving us night and day) and makes a complete circular journey around the sun every year. Then consid… Continue

We humans have an incredible capacity to learn. More than the acquisition of skills, information, and knowledge, that capacity helps us mature and evolve — engaging our curious, creative minds, stretching our awareness, and deepening our understanding of the world and ourselves.

One of the most potent vehicles for learning is communication, facilitated for us humans through language. Words are the tools of our species, a product of our undeniable interconnection. Language has the power to clari… Continue