“We don’t need that!� My Zaidie glares at my mother and puts the second of two (yes, two) containers of homemade cookies back in the cardboard box from whence they came. This ritual is repeated over and over with a multitude of food products—salad dressings loaded with fat and sugar, pack...

Gosh, I know that I am getting old as Sunday is here again and another Carnival of Positive Thinking. Here are articles which hopefully will help us all deal with our grief, our bereavement and start us on a path to happiness. Anna presents The Importance of Being True to Yourself posted at The Enga...

Day 1: Bessel van der Kolk is lovely. He's humble, he's funny, and he is the premiere researcher on the neurobiology and/or efficacy of trauma treatments in the world. And cute and brilliant, of course. Here are nearly random gems from 3 hours of notes: With trauma, there are no stories, onl...

His real name was Steven Kimball. But here at Daily Kos and on his own blog, Climaticide Chronicles, he was known as JohnnyRook. After a two-and-a-half-year fight against  acute myeloid leukemia, he died Monday at his home in Port Townsend, Washington. He was 53. (The photo shows him in the Can...

“The hardest part of all this is my loss of security and my lack of control over my own finances and future. I feel vulnerable and completely powerless to change any of this. It angers me that other people are determining my fate. Especially since they are doing such a pathetic job of it.� ~Dawn...

Sometimes the killer of relationships isn’t a lack of trust, a lack of communication or arguing with your significant other. It’s simple indifference. A relationship can survive most things if both people involved in it are committed to the other person and act with respect toward the ot...

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 2 Corinthians 12:9 My heart longs for heaven. Never has that been more true than today. Walking a...

Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Recently, because my son Noah has been diagnosed with Hodgkins’ lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, I’ve been thinking a lot about what cancer is and what it means to live in a world where cancer abounds. Put simply, cancer can be described as rebellion at...

If one dream should fall and break into a thousand pieces never be afraid to pick one of those pieces up and begin again. Fear is the most important concept in that sentence, as I see it today. C. S. Lewis mentioned that grief was so much like fear. For me, his description rings true. Fear is a para...

As widows and widowers, we know how fragile life actually is…in that fragility lies pain. Yet if you think of fragility, isn’t that what makes life so precious ? It is the not knowing, the sense that life doesn’t last forever, the sense that it can all be taken away from us at any ...