How to Build Resilience to Depression

I wrote this piece for the local newspaper! As we’ve attempted to settle into post-pandemic life, the mental health crisis continues to rage. According to a review by Boston University School of Public Health, rates of depression in the United States have risen from 9 percent, pre-pandemic, to 33 percent in 2021.  With depression affecting…

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My Wish For 2023

Last Fall I read My Side of the Mountain to River. It’s a novel about a boy who leaves the city to make a home in the woods on the site of his great-great grandfather’s failed farm. He builds a shelter by burning out the trunk of a great hemlock tree and he steals a…

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Putting Spark to the Cold Ground

I once spent a night alone in a biologist’s cabin in Garden Valley, Idaho. It was January and the entire valley was padded with a foot of powdery snow.  I was doing a clinical rotation in that small town and the doctor I worked with had an arrangement with the family that owned this cabin,…

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Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith

It’s 10:00pm and I’m finding myself doom scrolling the furniture section of the Anthropologie app. Doom scrolling because, what urgent need have I for an overpriced arm chair at this hour, when I should be sinking into bed under the ceiling fan’s gentle blow with my favorite audiobook humming me to sleep. All that the…

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Week 11: Recovering A Sense of Autonomy

Are your kids back in school yet? R doesn’t start until this Monday, but I’m already sorting through emails and filling out forms—even as I’m writing this I’m getting interrupted! And so it begins… (cue ominous Lord of the Rings music).  I’ve had a few people comment on my quantity of writing. How do you…

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Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection

[If you are just joining in, we are going through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron “a spiritual path to higher creativity”….Feel free to jump in or start back at the beginning. There are posts for each week (chapter)!] I was born under a full moon in Aries. giving me a deep sense of internal…

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Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

[If you are just joining in, this is a book by Julia Cameron “a spiritual path to higher creativity”….Feel free to jump in or start back at the beginning. There are posts for each week (chapter)!] Today marks the start of the last month of Summer of Creativity. I hope you are seeing some changes…

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Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength

[If you are just joining in, this is a book by Julia Cameron “a spiritual path to higher creativity”….Feel free to jump in or start back at the beginning. There are posts for each week (chapter)!] I realized today that there was a little synchronicity during Week 7, which we’ve just finished, and I wanted…

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Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection

I am sitting in bed with a cold La Croix because I have a summer cold this week. Does everyone have a summer cold this week?!? It’s not covid—I’ve been testing. And it feels like a while since I had a regular, boring cold. I have not missed it. River’s home this week and we’ve…

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Jesus and Cheeses

When I told my friend Sofi about this poem, she said, “Jesus or cheeses!? Those words sound the same.” So now I’ve got to write a poem about cheeses…. But here are two poems for a Sunday and one strange piece of art, because why not? Worth Repeating I stumble over and over; it is…

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