There are those deeply magical places that we all recall as a kid; those places that seem misty, mysteriously surreal and yet warmly captivating.  Those places that you’d love to savor again, even if you know they weren’t quite as real as you had imagined them being.  If you’re lucky enough, they continue to hold some small bit of magic even as an … [Read more...]

In large part, Memorial Day has devolved into a weekend that represents the onset of the summer season.  It’s something like the starting gun at the beginning of a race.  It’s the day that officially frees us from the doldrums of winter and gives us some sort of permission to play for the next three months or so until Labor Day reminds us that it’s … [Read more...]

For some, Mother’s Day comes full of rich memories and wonderfully cherished moments.  For others, it arrives with something far less meaningful and far more painful.  However it comes, we all have a Mother.  And the nature of our relationship with our Mother’s varies immensely.  Regardless of the nature or state of it, there is within each of us a … [Read more...]

Over the years I have been privileged to write an extensive array of books, articles, blogs and quotes.  During special times of the year, I search these writings for quotes to both enrich and enlarge our celebration of that particular season. For Mother's Day, I have selected a handful of quotations that express the power, importance and wonder … [Read more...]

We tend to rather blithely categorize times of crisis simply as happenstance occurrences that reflect the frequently volatile and somewhat unpredictable nature of life.  Because we tend to conceptualize crisis in this manner, we readily place times of crisis in this convenient “us-versus-them” category so that our focus is on managing the crisis … [Read more...]

Self-esteem is really the accumulation of beliefs that we have collected about ourselves.  We arrange these many beliefs in some sort of composite much like a tile mosaic.  Each piece is some shard taken from some experience or encounter or event or circumstance that has come our way at some time in our lives.  These many pieces are selected based … [Read more...]

Fear – How We Create It Fear.  We all have it.  Sometimes it’s just this slight apprehension, or this bit of inner angst, or this uncomfortable twinge that we experience.  At other times it’s utterly overwhelming, leaving us helplessly paralyzed and violently shaken right down to the core of everything that we are.  At certain times and in … [Read more...]

We all create expectations.  But how often are our expectations a wholesale surrendering of ‘what could be’ to ‘what is?’  How often are they borne of a discouraged soul and a frightened heart that cannot see beyond the realities of the moment so as to envision a brighter reality standing at-the-ready in the next moment?  How many times have we … [Read more...]

Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss.  We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to … [Read more...]

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’” - Isaiah 30:21 A detour that holds itself out as the road from which it deviated is a path to regret.  Yet, it seems that we embrace such deceptions and spend more time on the detours of life than the road of life … [Read more...]