Thoughts on love, loss, and liberation

It’s so easy to sleepwalk without realizing that’s what we’ve been doing.  Sometimes we experience situations in our work and lives that rock our world and help us see that we’ve been caught in a trance, that our ideas about the world are not necessarily the way things are.  Often it takes a jolting event to wake us up. These wake-up calls often occur through an unexpected loss of something we hold dear―the death of a loved one, losing a job our family is dependent on for support, not receiving a promotion we expected, a betrayal by a spouse.  It [...]

The poet Mary Oliver offers a powerful question in her poem, “The Summer Day.” She asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Quite a fitting question to ask ourselves, particularly at the dawning of a new year. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot these past few weeks. I spent the better part of the month of December traveling on a medical mission in Nepal and then on to India for the remainder of my trip. I stayed in Varanasi at a guest house on the Ganges River with a [...]