Shutdown — One Viral Video and a Sort of Bipartisan Response

[NOTE:  Viral Video from title — http://www.votevets.org/home] [later NOTE:  It’s 10-16 around 10:00 PST — the headlines I see say it’s over.  This is a relief.  Now the clean-up starts.  And, by way of apology for any implication that furloughed Federal workers were not experiencing significant financial and professional stress (but rather were only on “paid vacation”), I offer this link to the real stories of real people — all Federal employees severely… Read More

Annunciation

[Posting from the UK – this second guest blog from Gary Ferguson writing here about the change in “making things fresh.”  His are helpful words – a good, even vital reminder – here where we live on the outskirts of all the bluster and impulse in DC toward shutting down the government.  Read and enjoy — mmc] A number of years ago, while teaching a nature writing class in Yellowstone, I had… Read More

Women Claiming Life with ECT

Today a journalist contacted me.  She’s writing a story on women and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and wanted to know two things — what I know of the history of mental health care for women over the past 40 years, and what I know about ECT. The truth is I cannot claim any expertise with regard to ECT.  But I have listened to women in recent years who have considered or experienced the… Read More

Unlikely Connection – Natural Kindness

On Wednesday of last week I heard a story.  It was a story of a little boy, a four-year-old skipping and playing and laughing because he had completed two chemo-therapy treatments and for the first time in almost as long as he could remember, he didn’t feel icky.  He felt great!  Despite his cancer, and almost as if he’d forgotten he had it, he wanted to jump and run and swing with… Read More

The Paradox of Thrift

My grandparents survived the Great Depression.  My parents were born into the close of that time, but like any time of stress linked with austerity, the aftermath of that economic trauma was evident in newly and deeply established habits of caution. My farming grandmother could make anything out of anything, or so it seemed to me.  She made quilts from squares of rag scraps stuffed with old nylon hosiery (among other softish… Read More