With a Full Heart

Years ago, when I worked as a director in a hospital, responsible for marketing as well as community outreach, I was invited to join the local Rotary club. Rotary was (and likely still is) a well attended weekly group with a great cross section of community leaders. Rotary members took part in many service projects,…

I have a friend who has done a lot of work on her “inner child.” She spends time really thinking about that little girl and trying to address some of the issues of her life by coming to terms with her past. While I respect her process, I have never really thought about the little…

Tis’ the season, as they say, and, regardless of your faith tradition, many of us are deeply mired in holiday preparations and food and gifts. As a child, I grew up in an observant Jewish home. We honored the Sabbath, my father was both a regular attendee at services and a person who prayed at…

Once again the news is filled with tragedy. A campus shooting, an attack on a Chanukah celebration in Australia, reminding us of the terrible level of violence in our world. It was magnified for me by having been to a major exhibit on Auschwitz, just yesterday. We spent almost 2-1/2 hours steeped in the history…

In a recent presentation that I attended, someone used the phrase “toxic positivity” and I not only wrote it down but have thought about it many times since. It’s such a powerful phrase and I can, as I am sure you can, think of many examples of this, especially in my professional life. I had…

It is the holiday week, Thanksgiving just days away. I have containers filled to overflowing with cookies for the week ahead. I’ve prepped a loaf of fresh bread to bake when some of our kids arrive on Tuesday. I’ve braved the chaos of the supermarket (where I am convinced that just about everyone piloting a…

I often say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s the time I am most likely to gather as many of our kids as possible around our table. It’s the time that I become obsessed with creating a menu with things that are new each year. Of course, there are items that repeat year after…

Perhaps you, like me, were brought up in a family in which there were lots of political discussions and more than a few dinner-time debating sessions. These did not generally occur when it was just the four of us but when family got together, which was often in my childhood, the back and forth was…