Archive for Gratitude

Suzette and her three husbands by Suzette Standring

Let’s get something out of the way.  I’m 68 and I have been married three times.  As they say, the third’s a charm. I am not embarrassed, although the wife of my first ex-husband did try.  At my daughter’s wedding, she loudly said, “I want a picture of Suzette and her three husbands!”   Since […]

International Family Day: Get Vaccinated, It’s What Family Does

May 15 is International Family Day, and a once-a-century pandemic heightens love and gratitude, and now the separation is lifting. Recently, I asked a friend where his wife was, and he said, “She did her two week waiting period after her second vax, and she was out like a shot to see the grandkids in […]

Spring Flowers: A Profoundly Short But Healing Life

Spring flowers are fleeting and fragile beauties. The metaphor for “living in the now,” is a crocus bloom. My dining room is alight in yellow forsythia and daffodils, budding azaleas, and shrub branches full of “pink, pearly thingies.” After 20 years I have a first-ever flower bower for my meal times. Pandemic isolation highlights home […]

Passover and Easter symbolize release from the bondage of despair

Once upon a time, in what feels like a galaxy far, far away, faith was about love, compassion, protection, and building each other up. Those things create a quiet, personal righteousness.  But now a loud, public righteousness is fueled by anger with no room for forgiveness or redemption. Passover and Easter symbolize the power to […]

Your Life’s Purpose: Joy is Enough

“What is my purpose?”  The question is special when you sidestep the great abyss, like I did, surviving a cancerous lung tumor. I recovered fully during pandemic isolation, a big helping of time to ask, “And that happened because…?” I examined my reason for existence.  Find a cancer cure?  End world hunger? Create a global […]