One of the hard moments in my life as a mother was when my distraught teenage daughter pleaded with me to fix one of life’s bad situations. “Mom, make it go away,” she pleaded. While I can no longer remember what was wrong, two things […]
Author: Elizabeth
Be cool
She fell a little too much in love with me so I had to dump her, but it could just as easily have been me falling in love with her. This story is about what it takes for us to do what we do. Oh […]
Doll baby
Over the weekend my mother and I put a puzzle together out in the common area of the memory unit where she lives. A couple of other women were sitting at a table right in back of us. As Mom and I chatted, I became […]
The shape we take
Personality has always seemed a solid thing to me, as part of the original package as our genes. After all, who we are certainly couldn’t be developed as haphazardly as a bad habit we pick up. And yet as Lao Tzu maps it out, there […]
A spectacularly bad idea
When I was in college I worked in a traveling tent theatre for a summer. A guy from my hometown was also employed with this outfit and so at the end of the summer I caught a ride home with him. His plan was to […]
Full-body immersion
I read a memoir once about a high-level executive who lost her job, sending her into a downward spiral. Her recovery involved a lot of therapy and soul searching from which she learned a great deal about herself. As she went through the process of […]
Leaving your mark
There is a lady who walks her dog on State Street in Portland every day. When she gets to Mercy Hospital, she takes a little detour so she can place a painted rock on the hospital’s front entrance steps or the guardrail going down to […]
Scene 6 — the playbook
I’ve been promising the steps of a self-leadership playbook for thousands upon thousands of words now, spanning across 7 long stories. In an act of unprecedented brevity, here they are in 4 numbers and 4 words: Anchor Identify Integrate Act Logically progressive. Beautifully efficient. And […]
The doodle that gets it done
I managed to lure a co-worker over to my house so she could lay on my kitchen floor for two hours and create this unbelievably beautiful piece of artwork called a mandala. (The funny thing about this arrangement was that Jen Boothroyd, the artist of […]
Crazy loops
I’ve walked under the branches of this tree on my walk for the last 12 years, but it wasn’t until just a few days before the new year that I noticed the loop in that low-hanging one. The way it took that sudden bend up […]
Making sandwiches
When my daughter was in high-school she worked at Bagel Central, an iconic establishment in downtown Bangor. Laid back and sunny with floor to ceiling windows and wire baskets of bagels; racks of Danish, rugelach, muffins and cookies; and glass cases of endless desserts, spinach […]
Deep holiday thought: making a present of being present to yourself
I thought I knew what being present meant, which boiled down to being in the here-and-now, paying full attention to whatever you are doing or whoever you are with, and doing so without judgment. Then I read an article about a man in his 30s […]
