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In the face of history
I am completely overwhelmed by the situation at the border of this country. I know I’m not alone in this feeling, but I can’t shake that by doing nothing, I am complicit in the atrocity that is this piece of another chapter of our history in the making. It’s easy to look back at other times and faceless, nameless people and judge them for allowing slavery, the systemic slaughter of Native Americans, the jailing of women suffragists and civil rights activists, the extermination of Jews and others during WWII, the forced internment of Japanese and German Americans, the horrific abuse of GLBTQ people and more to happen on their watch.…
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Better Late than Never
I’m late to the Brené Brown game. I have known about her for a number of years (hello, I don’t live under a rock!), and I haven’t actively ignored her writings and TED talks, but I haven’t sought them out, either. I suppose I chafed at her seemingly universal popularity; I’m not a joiner of really…anything; getting on her bandwagon felt too obvious. Too basic. So I passively ignored her work. But Brené was in good company; I pretty much have always ignored all self help, personal exploration books. While my mom and my college best friend were eating them up like happy meals, I was busy touting their irrelevance.…
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A Quick (and Easy!) Getaway
This story originally appeared in the May/June 2011 issue of from house to HOME magazine. I was fortunate when I was growing up that we got to travel a lot in the summers. My dad was a school teacher and my mom stayed home, so we had the entire summer to plan trips. Some years we visited my grandparents in New York, where the humidity would make it nearly impossible to sleep; the beaches were full of people hoping to catch a little relief from the heat, and the black tar on the pavement was wavy all the time. Some years we went West to visit my mom’s side of…
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A Shift in Dreams
This story originally appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of from house to HOME magazine. I have lived in three places as an adult. The little one bedroom apartment in the upstairs of an old house where I brought my son home from the hospital; the renovated 1920s apartment building where he grew up; and the 1950s cottage I purchased nearly three and a half years ago. The first apartment was darling with dormered ceilings and wooden floors. The second apartment was 45 stairs up and had lots of windows and charm. Then I began to look for a house. What I really wanted was a turn of the last…
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Leveraging Your Passion: or Getting a Job and Learning That You Care a Whole Lot About It
This is a version of the talk I gave at the Ladyboss summit in June 2019. Caution: it’s long because it was a 15+ minute talk and it’s not absolutely complete because I made bullet points where I wanted to just talk to the audience. So if you know who I am, which you absolutely may not, you know that I run an organization called The Arts Partnership. If you’ve only vaguely heard of me, you know that I am somehow involved in the arts in the Fargo-Moorhead community. Ask various people around the community who I am and you’ll get everything from a fierce arts warrior activist to a…
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Ghosting stinks
I’ve been recently ghosted by a friend and colleague, and I’m not gonna lie–it has really hurt my feelings. It’s also caused me to dig deep into what my role in all of this might have been. Did I expect too much from her? Was I a disappointment? Did I unintentionally do something that made her feel bad? Bad enough to literally just disappear from my life and erase me from hers? Maybe the biggest hurdle to overcome with being ghosted is simply the fact that not knowing makes your brain go in all kinds of directions that are likely not at all accurate. And all the directions also only…
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Finding my passion by talking about living my passion
I was invited to present at the Ladyboss summit recently. Founders Laura Caroon and Danyel Moe asked me to talk about “living your mission passion.” I could have given that talk in my sleep, and it would have been true…but it would not have been absolutely authentic, and that’s what I’m striving to have more of every single day. I countered that I would be happy to talk about passion, but that I actually wanted to talk about my unwieldy journey to passion for The Arts Partnership. I wanted to unpack my first passion, which was to be a movie star. I wanted to talk about settling into your role…
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Water, water everywhere
How often do you chafe at the daily swirling combinations that include children, spouses, parents, friends, jobs, hobbies, health issues, scheduling workouts, dieting and more in your life?
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Imagining reality
This story originally appeared in Inspired Home magazine January/February 2019. At the end of 2017, I came across a friend’s Facebook post with a video attached, so I watched it. I was quickly immersed in some kind of dream statement video about what she expected in 2018. I did a little digging and discovered that our mutual friend Dawn Trautman had made her a Mindset Movie. I was intrigued, so I contacted her. I both believe in and absolutely don’t believe in the power of sending out hopes and dreams that come back to you and, conversely, sending out fears and anxiety that can also come back to you from…
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The luck of the Irish
This story first appeared in Inspired Home Fargo magazine July/August 2018 In May, I took a dream vacation with my husband, son and his girlfriend to Ireland. My husband is Irish, and I mean that in the literal sense, not in the “he enjoys St. Patrick’s Day, and his great-great grandparents came over from there” sense. I mean he has an Irish passport and the accent, and yes, that’s dreamy, too. But I digress. We have been together almost 17 years, but I hadn’t been to Ireland with him because his immediate family live in England. But this year, we finally found the time and good ticket prices to make…
