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It Takes One Person to Act
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In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell asserted that studies show someone is less likely to be helped if in trouble in a crowd. In other words, the more people present in an emergency the less likely anyone will help. Possibly because people are all expecting that someone else will act. However, I…
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Being An Expat
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You look back over time with something akin to nostalgia. Walking to the train station, hands plunged deep into pockets of a black winter coat, streetlights blinking through the damp mist. City lights reflected in dark canals. Noise spilling like overflowing Hoegaarden out of smoky pubs, a siren call out of the wintery gloom.…
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Status Update: So Many People, So Much Despair ……… What to do about it.
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Social media opens all these windows into people’s lives. One sees much more than one would like to, a lot of the time. Young people’s anger and despondency and generally hostility broadcast in disappointed detail for all the world to see. Why? How does it help? Are you looking for pity or sympathy? Validation? …
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Owner Surrenders – A Shelter Animal Article
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16 year old owner surrender. Who does that ? It’s tempting to leave it at that question with all the disdain and judgement it conjures up. In our ‘holier than thou’ minds we see some callous Scrooge like character gather this bundle of tired bones and drop it on the shelter doorstep, no backward…
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Shot At Dawn: In Flanders fields the poppies blow
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row ……… They blew in May 1915 when Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, wrote these immortal lines. They blow today. Colorful memorials of a war-torn world entrenched in the bloody, muddy fields of France and Flanders. On route to the World War 1 battle…
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In Your Grief – Thoughts on a Sudden Death
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Let the flowers die unwatered in their vases. Flowers? Yes, they are there. Someone needed to do something. Accept them graciously. Or not. God knows this is bleak, unchartered territory for you ….. You with this gaping hole, groping around in the dark. Sleepwalking. If sleep would only come and the fog dim for…
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You Can’t Parent Happy
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Welcome to the age of parenting in a world that is supercharged with agendas, celebrates success regardless of merit and fast tracks early front runners, deserving or not. My friends and I lament the state we find ourselves in. We are caught in a riptide of super-competitive parenting, a race to create mini-moguls and…
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A Big, Bold Blessing Bag Plan
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Synchronicity (what a beautiful word) is the extraordinary concept of the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that can’t be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer. CNN recently covered it in an article titled, The Other Side : Where do coincidences come from. An…
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Christmas Presents
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What shall I buy for Christmas ? What I remember of Christmas mornings as a child is the tree, or more to the point, all the presents under the tree. My family was not wealthy, but we had enough, and my mother (perhaps owing to her own difficult and deprived childhood) made sure we…
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A Walk in the Woods
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Dogs sit in cages in “research” torture chambers around the world. Injected with diseased cells, force-fed powerful drugs, chemicals, hormones, alcohol ……….. in the name of “science” and “finding a cure”. We turn a blind eye to the inhumanity, buy shares in Big Pharma companies and swallow down an Advil when a drop in…