Tag Archives: Racism

FMM 10 3 2025 Walk a Mile in My Skin

“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt. My father was a planner.  Before he moved his family (wife and five children of whom I was the youngest) and all of their worldly […]

FMM 8 15 2025 Thinking with the Heart

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ~ Robert Frost. I can’t say that I have ever been very good at debating on the fly.  Some people are quick, able to respond to taunts and jabs with a rapid response, cutting and accurate.  Me, my best responses […]

FMM 8 1 2025 Too much Noise out there!

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!” ~ Marcus Garvey. Last week we enjoyed a cultural event, attending a play written and directed by a local African American poet and playwright, Darius Daughtry.  This is the second of his plays that we have attended, and one of the most noteworthy […]

FMM 6 20 2025 Amplifying Hope

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” ~ Desmond Tutu. My thoughts have been on my childhood a lot recently.  Ever since I was invited to be the guest speaker at my old primary (elementary in the US) school’s graduation, I have been reminiscing about those days […]

FMM 5 2 2025 ‘A it mek!’

“Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?” ~ Desmond Tutu. One of the great defining features of my life was the fact that my family moved from a city in the UK to the heart of rural Jamaica when I was […]

FMM 4 4 2025 Tan Tuddy!

“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 […]

FMM 1 31 2025 This is just a Test

“In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.” ~ Albert Bandura. I was one of those annoying students who enjoyed exams.  I looked forward (although still with a touch of anxiety) to show what I knew.  Like an athlete […]

FMM 11 29 2024 In All Things, Give Thanks

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche. I have a complicated relationship with the Thanksgiving Holiday.  Like most people born outside of the USA, it was not a holiday which permeated my consciousness until I arrived here in the late 70s.  Since I moved to be with my […]

FMM 11 15 2024 The ‘W’ Word

“The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson. For those who don’t know me, I had a uniquely educational childhood. The youngest daughter of a minister who moved his white family from the UK to the heart of rural […]

FMM 11 8 2024 Our Better Angels

“The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.”~  Saadi. I have no memory of this, but when I was quite young (our family was still living in England at the time), I stood in front of our black and white television and yelled: “Stop talking about Mr. McMillan!”  He was the […]