Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning’s hush I am the swift uplifting…
He felt as if all of this had happened before. He covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made. But nobody heard it. – Eudora Welty, Death of a Travelling Salesman, 1941 Lately I have been thanking people for their vulnerability. It has occurred to me…
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what I was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone…
In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1967 was a year for learning perseverance. I had understood that financial aid would be coming like clockwork in the first weeks of the year. Eager to show my ability to be responsible, I…
The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead. ― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned Recently in a conversation with a trusted friend, I remembered an incident that happened nearly 30 years ago. I was in a workshop in which problem solving was the prime topic. There were somewhere…
I work because I like to work. Work produces something and leaves me with a sense of accomplishment. When I was a boy, my mother had my brother, sisters, and me clean the house every Saturday. We washed baseboards, scrubbed the tub and sinks, polished furniture, dusted and vacuumed. Usually one room a month would…
Last summer on Facebook I read a post from someone who called AIDS his Vietnam. I was startled. For me, Vietnam was Vietnam. AIDS is AIDS. Almost nothing about them was the same. But I must confess both changed everything for me. In 1966 I graduated from high school. At that point in my life…
When I formed my most recent Board for Myself, I was struck by the occasional ways that everyone in the room thought about a thing the same as I did. But I was more interested in the times when our thoughts were highly divergent, especially when I was the odd man out. There were only…
I started Diverse and Resilient as a program in 1995 and as a separate non-profit organization seven years later. The time I spent in health care administration and medical education was rewarding in that it provided me daily opportunities to achieve good and useful things. I honed several skills in an excellent organization that had…
“I can’t wait to get home.” “Home is where the heart is.” “Home is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in.” For me, none of these often heard statements resonate. There have been many places where people felt compelled to take me in, but were not home to…
Creating Community for Everyone 