Awe-Gratitude-Joy
Caring Connections Where You’d Least Expect to Find Them – Wild Animal Friendships
Wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin spent a year traveling all over the world, researching and reporting on the most unusual pairings of friendships across species in the wild: a goat and a hippopotamus, a dog and a tiger, an ocelot and a chimpanzee, a cat and a duck. The hour-long film, The Oddest Animal Friendships, has […]
Joy as an Agent of Social Change – Really?
My mentor James Baraz reminded me the other day of the wisdom of: Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Dr. Howard Thurman Dr. Thurman was as African-American minister, theologian, author, the co-founder of […]
Paradox of Pandemic – Weariness and Wonder
“We Are Not Stuck at Home. We Are Blessed to Have a Home” comes from a sign sent to me by my friend Lynn. There are so many paradoxes these days of coping with sheltering-in-place. A neighbor walking her dog stopped to take a photo on her cell phone of the bougainvillea blooming to bursting […]
Plowing through the Day with Gratitude
There’s much deep wisdom in “being grateful for everything that is going more than all right,” as my teacher James Baraz would say, to plow through despair when things are going terribly wrong. Or even mildly wrong. Or are just wearying. Coping with the losses and changes from this current pandemic can be hard. […]
Delight is Essential to Resilience, Too – A Rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Like You’ve Never Seen or Heard Before.
The CD of the San Francisco Symphony playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony lives in the CD player of my car. In the “old days” of long, traffic-snarled commutes, that was my go-to for shifting my mood while inching through traffic. Now a friend sent me the link to the most delightful presentation of the opening movement […]
Essential Elements of a Very Good Day
Even by 9am I had the inkling that the entire day two Sundays ago might prove to be a very good day. By the end of that very good day, I really had to reflect on what made the day so good? No vacation trip to Majorca or anything like that. (No big dramas or […]
“Have a nice day” – how about even 45 minutes?
It was one of THOSE days. Nothing overly disastrous. Just little glitches and annoyances, one after the other, with glimmers of gladness and goodness before the next wave of yuck. Three-car accident on the freeway, 15 minutes of creep and crawl for us commuters, fortunately no one killed or seriously injured in the accident itself, […]
Bouquets to Art; Deep Bows to Creativity
I recently walked through the Bouquets to Art exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, an annual festival of local florists, garden clubs, landscape architects, etc. each creating a floral sculpture embodying a painting/sculpture in the museum. (As above.) Hundreds of them. And as I walked through, delight, amazement, wonder, and awe bubbling […]
A Shared Moment of “Wow!”
As the final notes of a public performance of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral music faded away, into the deep silence came an audible “Wow!” And that “wow” was from Ronan Mattin, a 9 year-old autistic boy attending the concert with his grandfather, who acknowledge Ronan is primarily non-verbal and later told WGBH Boston radio: “I can […]
Gratitude – Not Because We Should, But Because We CAN
One of those freaky, terrifying moments. Driving late at night on a dark country road. I’m fine in my lane. Another car makes too wide of a turn from an intersecting road and suddenly – oh no! Not this! – the car is coming straight toward me in my lane. I brake and scream as […]