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 […]
All posts filed under: wellness
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 […]
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 […]
Rocket boosting
When former CNN host and current inspirational speaker and author Mel Robbins was 41 her life fell apart. She was unemployed and bankrupt with a failing marriage. Staying in bed was her plan, until one day while watching tv, a rocket shot across the screen […]
Scene 4 — Rabbit
Greg Pickle was the first kid I knew who had real life tragedy strike. We were in third grade when his mom crashed the car and killed his little sister and crippled him. He would forever after walk with a limp. And I would look […]
Blueberry Face
When you put a bowl of blueberries in front of a 2-year-old, in about 5 minutes you can probably guess what their face looks like. So when I said, “Hey, Blueberry Face” to my granddaughter, Zoe, as she happily fisted blueberries into her mouth, I […]
Animal intelligence
A few lessons from the wild… Owls Awareness. Cats Eat more fish. Groom regularly. Enjoy more naps. Act as though nothing is your fault, even if it is* Roosters and birds Get up and get going. Ants Don’t give up. Fish Go with the flow. […]
Be cool. 