Category Global health and disparities
FMM 2 3 2023 The Best of Us, the Worst of Us
“We’re one people, and we all live in the same house. Not the American house, but the world house.” ~ John Lewis. The best authors pull you in with their first sentence. It was Charles Dickens, that great storyteller, who has one of the best first sentences of all times, which inspired the title of […]
FMM 12 30 2022 Casting Long Shadows
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” ~ John Muir. The week between Christmas and the New Year has always been special to me, mostly because my birthday falls in this week. Today is extra special because […]
FMM 12 23 2022 Catch the Spirit
“A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. With Christmas almost upon us, it has been interesting to reflect on the strange absence of […]
FMM 12 2 22 Not my cup of tea
“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.” ~ Joseph Campbell. I don’t know when I started to drink coffee. In my childhood (born in England), tea was naturally the first choice. It is introduced to children in a form more milk than tea, poured into a saucer to cool faster, […]
11 18 2022 Citizen of the World
“We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.”~ Haile Selassie. My grandmother was born in Patagonia, Argentina. Her parents had […]
FMM 11 4 2022 The Sound of Silence
“Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees.” ~ Thomas S. Monson. I traveled to Jamaica with my family in 1963, sailing on the SS Ascania. Our journey was extended by several days, as we had to observe protocol, and allow a killer to exit the Caribbean before […]
FMM 10 21 2022 Full-blooded Jamericans
“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This week saw the birthday of my firstborn, and, as such things often do, sent my thoughts back to my early years in Miami, when big roads with wide […]
FMM 10 14 2022 Poets and Pragmatists
“Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” ~ Sigmund Freud. I still own a book of poetry that was sent to me by one of my aunts when I was about 8 or 9. The title called to me, ‘The Littlest one, his book’ since I was the youngest, […]
FMM 9 30 2022 Special Gifts
“Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it.” ~ Florence Nightingale. My first nursing experience was on a gynecology ward, run by an old-fashioned ward Sister (Nurse Manager, US style). She was close to retiring and had not changed the way she ran the ward […]
FMM 9 23 2022 Bright Shiny Objects
“We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson. As a church minister, my father was not one to be openly political. Ministers were supposed to be neutral, not sharing their views or […]