Hope in the Face of Despair: Overcoming Feelings of Overwhelm

Is it spring where you are? Tell me what it’s like, please! I want to know that somewhere the sun is gently warming the frozen soul (and soil); that green, hopeful shoots are peeping up; and that warm rains are drizzling life back into roots that rested for a season. Here in Minnesota, vibrant life remains buried beneath feet of ice and snow. It was 7 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of Spring. We are ready to move on—with the seasons, with living—but venturing forth too early into an icy world carries risk. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised to still find chill at five months into a typical Midwest winter, three years into [...]

2023-03-24T20:11:07-04:00March 24th, 2023|Categories: Health, Hope, Perspective, Resilience, Stress, Survival|Tags: , , , , |

What books are you reading this month? How do you choose?

Photo by author   October is National Book Month, and NaNoWriMo starts November 1. I thought it was just me who had books on my mind. October's Hot New Releases   Have you read any new fall book releases? So many highly anticipated books, including Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway. Both books follow the authors’ award-winning success of All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr, 2014) and one of my all-time favorites, A Gentleman in Moscow (Towles, 2016). All the Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, spent almost four years on The New York Times Bestseller List, and sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. Netflix is [...]

Is your head listening to your heart? Think from other dimensions

Shutterstock by Peshkova My twin died six years ago this week. His death was sudden, unexpected, a surprise to us all. He thought he had our paternal grandparents’ genes—Grandpa died after a stroke at 97 and Grandma (92) died suddenly four months later, after telling us grandkids that she couldn’t live without Grandpa. No one really thought about our maternal gene pool; both of those grandparents died before we were born. It’s natural to cling to what we know and what we want to believe. We create our own reality in our mind. Our head often ignores or overrides what our heart tries to tell us. Closing our mind closes off our heart. Despite [...]

Keeping Perspective in a Changing World

Sculpture of girl's face evoking past and present, familiar and unfamiliar. Mark Manders, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN This week, the world surpassed 33 million cases of COVID-19 and 1 million deaths, with 7 million cases and 205,000 deaths in the United States. With just over 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S has almost 21 percent of the global cases of COVID-19. How do we make sense of all these numbers? One million deaths are hard to comprehend and impossible to relate to, unless, I imagine, you’ve been on the frontline caring for thousands who take their last breath on your shift. As a data person and researcher, I’ve been watching the [...]

2020-10-01T18:40:19-04:00September 30th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19, Resilience|Tags: , , , , |
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