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Lifting the rocks off my chest
Despite the fact that Heart was wailing out "How Do I Get You Alone?" to the lunch crowd and servers were chatting loudly right outside the door while entering with tabs and returned credit cards, the audience was rapt. This small group of mostly men, who initially felt to me like they were not necessarily going to find this talk valuable, stayed with me for 26 minutes.
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Standing on the rocks of others
And then to really test you, as all **brilliant ideas do, someone in your life invited you, under the guise of prestigious and highly selective, to something that would subject you to ridicule, belittlement, dismissal and disdain. And like all trials, there was an advocate for you, and like a real trial, it was a real lawyer. But back to the situation: it so assaulted your home state and thus you, because you were synonymous, that you could hardly stand at all, much less on a rock. And that had to be. That experience caused you to think so hard about it all that you finally came to where you…
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What’s weighing you down?
Farmers, then and now, have an interesting and repetitive spring task: they pick rocks. Every year, regardless the number of years a field has been worked, farmers must pick the rocks that have risen to the surface over the winter.
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Lucky 13
On a Monday or Wednesday in mid-March, 2008, Dr Marry and I were walking our pup Lilly. He had recently found out he had been hired for a tenure-track position at MSUM, so we had a measure of stability that we'd never had before, since his positions had all been temporary, first as a post Doc and then as a fixed-term professor. I know exactly where we were on the walk when a feeling of absolute certainty spread over me, and I said, "You know, if you asked me to marry you again, I would have a different answer." (The first proposal is a story for a different day.)
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Springtime despair
In many ways, I regret the surge of frantic energy around work, as if we have to make up for the past 15 months right now. RIGHT NOW! There is no making up for it. It was both a lost and a blessed period of time. I want to hold on to the gentle, quiet pace. My safe little bubble, where I joyfully lived for these past many months, is being forced open. I'm watching my hopes and dreams, routines and patterns dissipate out the open doors and windows, and try as I might, I'm afraid I'll never catch them and bring them back close to me again.
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The ouch zone of spring
Springtime is Mother Nature getting into her ouch zone. She's breaking away from what is known and trying out fantastical new ideas. She's throwing color, scents, sounds and tastes at us at an almost dizzying speed. Sometimes she moves too quickly and tender buds are frozen in an early spring snowstorm. Other times, she puts it all on the line, and the entire lush bounty arrives, survives and thrives weeks early.
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Now I’m married to an American?
I hurt his feelings terribly one day when I said, "Become a citizen, but you'll never BE American anyway." What I meant was that he will never have our Manifest Destiny propaganda, I mean spirit; he'll never tromp through the world with our sense of clueless, boisterous entitlement. He'll always have a sense of empathy for the underdog because his dad had to sleep on a park bench when he first arrived in England because no one would rent a hotel room to an Irishman. He'll always be comfortable with multiculturalism because, for all their ongoing struggles with race, England does seem to better embrace it than America does. He'll…
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Life Lessons from afternoon tea
You will find yourself reflecting often on that three-tiered platter of exquisitely designed sandwiches, scones and desserts. Engage in small shifts in thinking, intention and action and you will find the same thing: these are experiences that change you, in small ways at first but, taken as a whole, in ways that stay with you long after you've moved on.
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Digging my own hole to fall down into to rise up
But here's the thing: I know that if I did the hard work of tracing that scribble labyrinth, I would actually arrive at the straight line going forward because I never lifted the pen when I was making it. That means there is some logic and connectivity to that mess, no matter how convoluted it appears from here.
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Bridging the brand gap
Pretend you're a famous Hollywood actor: they work with assistants, private trainers, chefs, stylists, hair and make up artists, publicists, lawyers, managers, agents and more. You didn't think they just showed up on the red carpet like that did you? Hollywood A-listers are the epitome of the phrase "it takes a village." Find your village.
