When you were four, or five, or six,
Before life played its grown-up tricks,
You learned a thing or two each day
That years of fuss can tuck away.
You poked a seed beneath the ground
And wondered what that speck had found…

Long ago, a friend told me her fiancé had given her a huge gift. He was multi-lingual and had many dictionaries. He told her he went through every one of them and removed the word “divorce.” Removed…

There is salad dressing in my refrigerator that dates back to the Bush administration. And there’s a plastic container in the back that’s growing a chemistry experiment but I’m afraid to look, so I just leave it there. I know when the milk…

When I moved from Tokyo to New York, I was a young mom with three children under 3 years old. I was too busy settling down in a new home, in a new country, in a new continent to notice much about the weather. I didn’t know then how much it would…

In the week since I’ve returned from walking the Camino in Portugal and Spain, my social media has been packed with advice about walking the Camino. What to pack, what to wear, which shoes are best, which backpack I need, whether to use poles and an endless assortment of other things I apparently can’t live without…

A common belief is that our happiness and wellbeing are in direct proportion to our circumstances. When things are going well, we’re happy. When problems or challenges enter in, we’re miserable. And we’ve all said things like, “When I lose weight, I’ll…”

I’ve just come back from seven days in Cyprus for my sister’s 40th birthday. It was a really joyous occasion and the first time in a long time that I’ve had some proper downtime. Leading up to the trip, it was all systems go, with last-minute preparations for the birthday girl, as well as making sure everything was tied up with work…

When women begin looking back over their lives for wisdom, there is often a season they would rather skip. The diagnosis. The divorce. The loss that rearranged everything. The years they simply survived. “Surely,” we think, “there’s nothing worth sharing in that.” I’ve come to believe the opposite. Some of our hardest chapters hold our deepest wisdom…

I’ve spent a good portion of my life around music and musicians, and one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to like somebody to make beautiful music with them. I’ve played with musicians I genuinely enjoyed being around, and others whose company I could have done without. But something remarkable happens when somebody counts off a song…

I once apologized to a chair. I bumped into it, and “sorry” came out before I could stop it. If you’re a woman of a certain age, I suspect you’ve done something similar. We apologized for interrupting, for asking questions, for taking up space in meetings. After 30-plus years in corporate life, “sorry” was practically my middle name…