Growing Skills, Sleep Insights & Singing

March feels like that slightly wild friend who shows up with muddy boots, big ideas, and a

tambourine. I’m here for it.

Current Personal Challenges

(Also known as: Character-Building Boot Camp)

• Offering kindness without keeping score

As in: no invisible scoreboard, no gold stars, no “I was nice three times, your turn.” Just

kindness. Period. (Revolutionary, I know.)

• Trusting that delays are divine rearrangements

When plans fall apart, maybe the universe isn’t ghosting me. Maybe it’s redecorating.

• Believing that love wins out

Even when the news says otherwise. Even when my patience says otherwise.

Love is the long game.

Creative Challenge: Dinosaurs Incoming!

The 2026 Library Summer Reading Theme, “Digging in the Dirt: Dinosaurs and Paleontology,” has my imagination stomping around like a T-Rex in tap shoes.

Good news: I already have a healthy herd of dinosaur songs and fingerplays.

Required action: I’m digging up and writing new stories I’ll genuinely love telling (because if I’m not having fun, the velociraptors can smell it). Expect fossils, feelings, and at least one prehistoric punchline.

Building Skills

• March 6 – I’ll be telling a brand-new story at the Chennai India Storytelling Festival and

leading a discussion about it. It’s evening in India… but 7:10 a.m. my Central Standard time. (There will be a recording. in case that’s too early for you.) I don’t think I’ve ever told a story that early before. My characters will be fully awake. I make no promises about myself!

• March 13–15 – I’m heading to Minnesota for Community Singing Leadership Training

led by Tim Frantzich. This is in preparation for leading Community Singing at the

National Storytelling Network Conference in Texas next July.

I am voluntarily putting myself in situations where I stand in front of people and say,

“Let’s all sing together!”

Problem Solving in My Sleep

Neuroscientists say dreams can boost creative problem-solving. During REM sleep, your brain isn’t just replaying the day like a boring rerun. It’s reorganizing information, making new

connections, and sneaking up on problems from angles your daytime brain never considers.

So I’ve started a new bedtime ritual:

1. Think about a problem I’m trying to solve.

2. Review what I’ve tried.

3. Admit where I’m stuck.

4. Hand it over to my night shift brain.

I keep a notebook by my bed because dream insights fade faster than my resolve to avoid

chocolate. The answers aren’t always crystal clear. Sometimes it’s not a solution but:

• A shift in perspective

• A surprising question

• Or the gentle realization that I was asking the wrong thing entirely

Not all dreams are helpful. But enough of them are that I’m convinced my sleeping brain

deserves a raise.

A Joy Trigger

If you need 22 minutes of pure musical wonder, here’s Jacob Collier improvising with an

orchestra in San Francisco. It’s playful. It’s brilliant. It might make you believe in humanity

again.

March is stretching me — creatively, spiritually, vocally, and chronologically

(7:10 a.m. storytelling, really?).

But I’m digging in.

Like a paleontologist.

With a tambourine.