More Than Four Sides

Category: Books & Reading

  • Mental illness … and the Nature of Evil

    The past fifty years have seen a huge change in society’s understanding and attitude toward mental illness, but stigma still remains. Just this past week, the news that caught my ear (since most of my news comes to me via NPR) was that lawmakers are attempting to make it easier to force people with mental illness…

  • Familiar suggestions…to Thrive

    I first engaged seriously in meditation when I was about 15years old.  I had the tremendous good fortune to be part of the A-school (the “Alternative” school) as Palo Alto High School, and met an amazing teacher who invited us to participate in an optional “class” – meditation and chanting led on Wednesday mornings in…

  • Too old…for an engagement ring

    My first trip around the marriage carousel, we bought the full set – engagement ring and two bands. They were very cheap (we were on a tight budget), and they bent easily. By the time we split up, they were broken. My second trip around the marriage carousel started without a clear engagement. We moved…

  • The Idea of Him

    When I met him in the first few weeks of my freshman year of college in the depths of the rural midwest, he was wearing a dashiki shirt and sandals made from old tire rubber, I thought I’d met my soulmate. He was six and a half feet tall, with strawberry blond hair, and grew…

  • Divorce, in hindsight

    Divorce has been a defining fact in my life, although, thankfully, not the only defining one. My parents separated when I was eight years old, and their divorce was finalized when I was about 10. The first time I married, I was still a teenager, and, yes, the marriage was precipitated by the impending birth…

  • Discharge plan: to jail

    My first real job in the health care field was an internship I participated in as an undergraduate.  I worked for a summer at the Family Practice Residency Program of Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, CA.  A few years prior to my internship, one of the residents had noticed that there were an unusual number of…

  • “The love of a dead person counted, too.”

    What would your answer be if someone said to you, in all earnestness: “I really wanted only to know how you are faring?  Whether you are happy? Whether you are loved.  The rest is immaterial.” What would your answer be? At various times, I can claim to feel loved.  More often, though, I feel unloved.…

  • Individual attention

    The anniversary of our “gotcha day” for our boys is just around the corner, and it’s a great time for reflection on parenting. My first time around, as a mom, with one easy-going daughter, I never had to worry about dividing my time between siblings – all my parenting time was hers. Now, with two…

  • Growing up Anglophile

    I was born in England, and carry a British passport (in addition to my American one), but I have a decidedly American accent, American habits, and American sensibilities. And, yet, I’ve always loved England, and more specifically, London. I love English food (really!), and drafty old English houses, and the amazing museums and galleries of…

  • Dining with the enemy

    There are those times when we have to go out to a meal, usually at a restaurant, or sometimes in the context of a party, when we know that we will have to spend substantial time with people that we would never choose to have as our personal friends.  Examples: evenings out with the spouse’s…