When it’s heartfelt, it feels good to say and it certainly feels good to hear! But sometimes the abundance of our lives seems to drain us. Sometimes we’re sad. Sometimes we’re distracted. It’s hard in those moments to remember to take this natural medicine. But it helps to know how gratitude impacts our brains on…
Can and should the concept of normality, and therefore the expectation of it, go on retreat, not just during this time of pandemic, but always? Should the use of this word, currently said with hesitancy and a catch in the throat, be banished always to the category of the trash heap? For myself, or that…
Two weeks ago, my blog post Word of the Year talked about how beneficial it can be to name the outgoing year with a single word. It can act as the period at the end of the year’s sentence—the summation of a whole year of highs and lows, insights and feelings, growths and setbacks. I…
“We may have ten possible images of tomorrow and for each one of these there may be ten images of the next day, giving a hundred possible images of the day after tomorrow and a thousand of the day after that, and so on, which means that the uncertainty of the future increases rapidly as…
A few years back my Grandma gave me a lovely book of daily meditations called The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have by Mark Nepo. (My Grandma knows all the good books!) This book is written as a daily reader. Each day there is a…
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. —Christina Rosetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter” How silently, how silently The wondrous gift is given So God imparts to human hearts The…
Each December as one year comes to a close and another is just a glimmer of possibility, I try to encapsulate the outgoing year—and how I experienced it—in a single word. The year I regained my health by losing weight, went skydiving and took a pilgrimage to Italy with my mother, my word was Joy.…
I have a lot of milkweed in my wildflower garden and around my yard. Milkweed seems to exhibit a kind of faith growing where they go, persevering, relinquishing what is not needed, and bringing joy like caterpillars and butterflies! My plants had their start with one of the FSPA sisters, and I would like to…
“People are hard to hate close up. Move in.” —Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness Abandoning hatred allows, or rather, demands a look closer at the lives and experiences of people who have beliefs much different than our own. Can I really be a good person because I’m compassionate and then decide that someone else is…
“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.” —Barbara Kingsolver This may sound strange, but 2020 has been a year in which…