Archive for January, 2005

Design your own emotional epaulets

"My face is a gift, because my shadow side is on the outside, where I have had to deal with it. Paradoxically, I have been made whole through (and with) what originally seemed to be my flaws." –David Roche My husband, John, and I were amusing ourselves at lunch yesterday with a conversation about something we called "emotional epaulets." (What…
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Get off the ship

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do."  -Eleanor Roosevelt In the fall of 1988, I sailed around the world. Actually, that sounds more romantic and rugged than it was. It’s not as if I was hoisting…
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Be nice to bellhops

We all believe in equality as long as it is equality with our superiors. I’ll never forget being on a business trip years ago with a colleague and watching in horror as she—in her gray, beautifully tailored designer suit and heels—literally stamped her foot like a terrible, small child and screamed at a bellhop because he was taking too long…
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Speak up with your one true voice

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” –Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Baptist minister and civil-rights leader. 1929-1968) —————————————— I’ve been thinking a lot about Kitty Genovese lately. She’s the young woman savagely stabbed to death…
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An Invitation to 37 days

3 Jan 2005 It’s a whole new year. I got up very early this morning and as I sat with my first cup of coffee, I realized that I’ve set and broken many new year’s resolutions over the past decade. One that just keeps getting pushed back is to spend some time and energy thinking and writing every day. Rather…
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Finding your (com)passion

”Do not ask what the world needs. Instead, ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.” –Thurmond Whitman  That quote came to me from someone I don’t know, quite by accident. A few weeks ago, it came across my email inbox on a listserv about diversity in architecture. The woman…
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Why 37 days?

In October of 2003, my stepfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died 37 days later.

During that 37 days, I helped my mother care for him at home, since he wanted to die there. Never having been around someone dying before, I didn’t know what to do. When my father died, I was just 19 and sitting in the intensive care waiting room. No one asked if I wanted to be with him; they just asked if I wanted to see him dead after it was all over. It was the beginning of a long realization of how intensively we avoid death, at least in this culture.