Adversity is rarely seen as a blessing. In fact, it often feels like the exact opposite of “blessing”. At the end of May, I left my home community of Ellicottville, NY with the intention of settling in northern Michigan. Our family lived in Boyne City, MI when the kids were young and we still have…
For the past three weeks, I’ve been participating in Mike Dooley’s 21 Day Visualization Project. The daily meditation assignments take a little over 6 minutes. I usually listen to them twice because they feel so good. That 15 minutes is usually my very favorite part of the day! Today is Day 20. My assignment was…
Today, my two beautiful daughters are graduating from high school in one of the most unusual periods in modern history. Both girls attended their senior year online, so they weren’t expecting a formal in-person graduation with their classmates. However, they had been eagerly anticipating a big graduation party with karaoke, friends by a bonfire, lots…
I had a pet. It was actually not so much a pet as a dangerous and destructive rodent. It lived in my chest. It fed on self-righteous indignation. Sometimes it had a voracious appetite, other times I hardly knew it was there. I tried to ignore it, hoping it would go away. Just when I…
Mother. It’s hard to imagine a word in the human language that evokes a more diverse collection of emotions. That collection of emotions is deeply individual. No impetus in the human experience is more profound or formative than that of “mother”. When I was a child, my mother was fiercely devoted to fostering independence. When…