Anxious memories broke into consciousness when I was almost three. They stuck like glue. The article “Memories of Trauma Are Unique because of How Brains and Bodies Respond to Threat” by Jack Debieck explains how the body’s heightened reactions, especially as a child, turned threat into embodied memory. I’d learned similar lessons from Robert Bosnak’s […]

We imagine heroes as willful and disciplined. The hero wins with a smart positive attitude. We accept the top part of this diagram, the “known” part, where we’re consciously working a problem and following our plan. But notice how small the known part is–and it’s larger in this diagram than it is in life. Our […]

My support system is in place, but no one can protect me from vulnerability. When you read this, cochlear implant surgery will be over and I’ll be home recovering. As I write a few days before surgery, I feel the weight of what’s to come. Not the heaviest of weights, but a practice run for […]

  Last winter, I received an email from Mike Goncalves. Mike wrote that he manages a British band called “Our Hollow, Our Home.” Their songwriter and vocalist Tobias Young had been moved by my TEDx talk after his father’s death. Could their band sample phrases from my talk for the lead cut on their upcoming […]

I heard Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk “How to Truly Listen” when I did a google search for deafness. In 2013, five years after my husband’s death, my already impaired hearing took a nose dive. A new kind of grief. Glennie’s voice which I could still hear then was confident and vibrant, full of rich tones […]

                Monarch butterflies arrived in the Finger Lakes in mid June to sip thistle and milkweed nectar, mate, and lay eggs on the underside of milkweed leaves. As I searched for tiny eggs (the little white dot on the leaf on the left), I sometimes found larger caterpillars. […]