Note: This may seem a bit too dark for a posting on the eve of the New Year, but it’s intended to be just the opposite – an expression of gratitude for the privilege of being present to welcome in another circle around the sun. I wish you all a year of good health, love, productivity and a major shift in our political landscape. There’s a famous New Yorker cartoon that shows someone peering...
Wisdom is an automatic by-product of age. At least that’s what most people believe, but my experience suggests otherwise. Although there may be some truth to the link between wisdom and age, there are also clear losses that make the validity of that relationship more difficult to assess. In particular, I mourn the loss of daring, the gutsy moves you can only make when you don’t know any better...
My Garden of Delights On an unseasonably warm Sunday morning in December, my wife and I put our community garden plot to bed. We pulled the woody stems of our border flowers and said goodbye to the stalks of kale and chard that were the last survivors in our 10X20 foot plot that had hosted a cornucopia of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, radishes, beets, snow peas, pole beans, bush beans...
Microcosms Move Me When my mother died, I found among her modest possessions my Harvard doctoral diploma, laminated and ready for hanging in my never-to-exist psychologist’s office. Like immigrants from so many countries, my parents dreamed that their sacrifices would catapult me into a financially secure world where I could bask in the respect of others, whom I would greet with callus-free hands...