“Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.” ~  Rabindranath Tagore. My father has been haunting my dreams recently.  In fact, just this morning I said those exact words in my dreams.  Well not exactly, I said my father has been haunting me.  Because dreams […]

“Every moment of light and dark is a miracle.” ~ Walt Whitman. Confession time.  There have been a couple of times in my life when my fantasies have helped me to make a decision.  I realized that I needed to end my marriage when I had started to think my life would be better if […]

“May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.” ~ Peter Marshall. I was a frontline nurse working in Miami when AIDS appeared, with all of the unknowns that went along with it.  In the early years it seemed to be […]

“Why should I be afraid of the pestilence that crawleth by night?” Tony Rebel. Because I am the youngest in my family and the last to leave home, I spent my last four years in high school as an only child.  That wasn’t exactly true, since we always had ‘boarders’, friends from high school who […]

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ~ Alice Walker. I was a bedside nurse in the 1980s, a time when the way the government reimbursed hospitals for patient stays was upended completely.  Prior to this time, any patient whose insurance was paid for by the […]

“… everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.” ~ Louise Erdrich. Some years ago I had an experience which proved invaluable in the classroom: I witnessed a man experiencing the sudden onset of a stroke.  We were at a fundraising dance together, he had gone to buy us a drink each, and […]

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. Evelyn was the first person who befriended me when I was the new girl in school.  I was more than new, I was different, a little girl in rural Jamaica, with an English accent […]

“In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.” ~ Marianne Williamson. I first learned about hurricanes when I was almost eight years old and traveling to Jamaica on the S.S. Ascania with my family and a […]

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. I have always been a lover of words.  Except once when I heard a new word, spoken in a sentence, by a person I had very little respect for.  She happened to be my boss.  […]

“Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,” ~ Emily Dickinson. I always knew I would have children.  Lots of them.  I remember being quite young when I held a baby, she was about seven months old, and she promptly tried to bite […]