Just outside my window the garden brings hope and solace. It has lessons if we pay attention.
Read MoreIt was the first Saturday of spring, March 23, and the conditions couldn't have been better — 70-degree temps and an offshore wind.
Read MoreIt's not quite dawn and I am standing at the top of a dune at White Sand National Park. Cold, anxious and mesmerized by the breaking light, I can't believe I am here.
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Coq au Vin is the signature dish in my culinary repertoire. I use Craig Claiborne's recipe from the tattered New Times Cookbook that was given to me by my sister for my first Christmas as a newlywed in 1975.
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He said his name was Leslie as he smiled and gestured to his collection of cowboy hats. "Visiting from out of town?" "New York City," we replied, which was no doubt our first mistake.
Read MoreThe three of us, my sister Dianne, nephew Eamon and I, were standing on Jackson Street in front of what had once been my Grandmother Egan's house.
Read MoreSlipping into the pool for the first time in nearly two years, it came back to me—the sense of well-being that I find in the water.
Read MoreIn the last year of my father's life he obsessed about his father's grave. His life had been upended in nearly every way, yet regularly he would call the office at St. Patrick's Cemetery in Butte, Montana to assure that his father's grave was being cared for.
Read MoreWhen I was growing up, my grandmother used to reminisce about how she ran away to the icehouse to meet my grandfather for their planned elopement. It wasn't until I discovered a hundred-year-old newspaper clipping in a box of family photos that I began to imagine a more complicated story.
Read MoreIn late April, for our final assignment in my online photography workshop we were asked to shoot self-portraits. I don't know many photographers who enjoy self-portraiture and I am no exception. But I had a concept.
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Although I may be a fallen away Catholic, I am a practicing Guadalupana. She is my go-to intercessor whenever there is a request for prayers or when I need a little personal grace.
Read MoreIn the time of Corona, celebrating special events requires exceptional ingenuity. Without question one of the most creative to date was the elaborate virtual birthday party orchestrated by one high school girlfriend for another.
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For a dozen years, my remarkable partners, Marjanne Pearson and Paul Nakazawa, and I taught a course on professional practice classes in the Executive Education Program at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Exhilarating, educational (for the educators) and exhausting. Our first gig ran for nine years — 1996 to 2004; the second from 2011to 2013. Much changed for the professions over all those years. What has not changed is my own curious relationship with Harvard. Not so much the real place, rather the over-determined Harvard of my mind.
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Watching the crowd parade into the ballroom for the SMPS Build Business Gala last Thursday evening, reminded me of the line from Van Morrison's Wild Nights, "all the girls walk by dressed up for each other." Quite the catwalk. That hasn't changed much since the earliest grand galas (staged by the remarkable Jeanne Murphy, our first executive director.) Nor has the intention of using the event to honor the best of SMPS — our people and their work.
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