Thinking of the fishes at the other end, I don't like to run paint down the drain. When I paint, I have another piece of paper, or two or four, nearby, and if my brush has more red on it than the current picture can handle, I clean the brush of its excess paint onto the other papers - and those are the starting points for my next paintings. Every painting has a connection to previous paintings, and for some, perhaps it goes back for months.

When I knit, I often use two or more yarns at a time, but don't cut or change them all at once. When I let go of one color, the other(s) keep flowing, connecting the yarn left behind to the sections still to come.

When I cook, I often use something from the previous meals in the new menu. Yesterday's rice is a part of today's casserole. Today's green salad provides a bed for tomorrow's chilled peaches.

The ending of a story I write may be a beginning for a new chapter.

A massage therapist taught me that you never lose contact with the client's skin - you keep one hand on his or her back through the duration of the session so that there is no jolt of disconnecting and reconnecting.

The leaves and needles and sticks and crumbly bark and berries shed by the pines and oaks and pyracantha nourish the roots of the trees or the shrubs or tomatoes for the next season. They maintain the cycle - are part of the new leaves and cones in spring, next season's tomatoes, the azaleas next Mardi Gras. The earth replenishes itself.

Some old-timers never empty their coffee pots. Today's cup of coffee is connected to that day 12 years ago when sis was born and the day it snowed in May. When a visitor shows up for a morning cup, he tastes the history of the family, the community, and the beginnings of coffee on earth in that very first, hot sip.