Clare Consultation, LLCRedemption
These songs of freedom. Redemption song.Bob Marley It’s the season. Spring. Close to the equinox – that moment when day and night balance their time. When winter lets go its weary grip happy, as most of us are, to let dormancy give way to the impulses of sprouts. I’m spending these transitional days in Montana – a place of bold crownings of grape hiacynth, fuzzy promises of catkins. And tomorrow is the day recognized by Christians… Read More
Loneliness and Listening In
Being in positive, healthy, reciprocal relationship is the most powerful predictor of mental and emotional wellbeing. Friendships, love partnerships, neighborhoods, community groups. This fact is increasingly worth considering given the evidence that loneliness in the United States is on the increase. Perhaps the most profound symptom – suicide. Last week, we learned of the suicide of a young man we know from a rural Montana town. Montana has the highest suicide rate… Read More
Keeping Calm
Here’s a paradox for you. We do better as individuals and communities if we calm down. We do better if, instead of anxious monitoring, overwork, worry, agitation and heated opposition we opt for calm. We know this but, these days, practice it too rarely. Instead, we either withdraw or lash out. Another thing about calm – it, like any other great way of being, can be trivialized. Alongside the truth of calm’s… Read More
Standing in Wildfire
Yesterday, my husband Gary and I began a drive to Montana. We live there parts of the year. Just outside a really small community tucked into muscular folds of the Intermountain West. With water and trees, with big mammals like Elk, Moose and Bear – with Eagles and Hawks, and this past spring, with a mama hummingbird nested just outside our window. It was early when we left Portland – the place… Read More
Grief Comes Home
Recently, a friend just older told me something about death that seems now obvious – the observation that sometime in a person’s fourth or fifth decade there is a subtle shift of awareness that shows up as no longer understanding one’s life in terms of how long it’s been since birth, but rather in relation to how much time is left. It’s a shift that calls forward a new relationship with death… Read More
I AM MORE THAN – Leadership out of Montgomery
I want you to know about this! Thanks to the vision of my friend Michelle Browder, and her collaborators – the youth of Montgomery, Alabama – there will be a powerful commemoration of Bloody Sunday – The civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery March 6, 1965. Michelle and her colleagues are pulling out the stops. They’ve created an organization – I AM MORE THAN – and they are working steadily toward a… Read More
Fresh Water Matters
I’m sitting in a room with large windows. Outside fresh water tumbles by, higher on the banks of Rock Creek than usual for August. There’s been way more snow and rain this year than is ever expected for this arid region of Montana. Regardless of the reason and in spite of some of the local folks’ complaints, the water doesn’t miss a beat. Constancy is its nature. Today, Matt Damon did the… Read More
February 1 – Re-imagining Underway
February. The love month. The month my skin has historically hit its most green (being of “olive” complexion – or so I’ve been told). The shrimpy month perhaps made so out of some vague attempt compensate the rutheless grind mid-winter in the northern hemisphere can present whether rainy in Portland, sub-zero in eastern Montana or, this year, astonishingly dry in California and wildly cold where my Mama lives in Georgia. It was February, 2009… Read More
On the Cusp of 2014 – Change and What Endures
Soon the calendar will shift for another roll through dates, through seasons and all the moments we have no way of knowing from here. Each of us lives in our own contagion of this following that. The unavoidable change that is living itself can sometimes feel unnerving — or at least the anticipation of it, the impossibility I already mentioned of knowing completely any change before it happens. I’ve been writing this… Read More
Merry Christmas to All
…and to All a Good Night. With gratitude and finest possible wishes to each of you ~ MC –Red Lodge, MT