In eleventh grade, I experienced at first hand my first adult incidence of undeserved compassion and it changed my life…
Tag: empathy
Grateful Progeny
My father always kept me engaged and entertained. Whether it entailed planting flowers in the garden, spending Saturday afternoons sitting cross-legged on the floor of the public library…
Stolpersteine
I thought everyone knew about them but apparently not! Stolpersteine (literally ‘stumbling blocks’, singular Stolperstein) commemorate individuals (mostly, but not exclusively, Jews) who perished in the Holocaust…
Service Provider
Piggyback rides constitute the kind of service I enjoy providing – one that brings joy to all parties. In recent decades, the concept of a service provider being primarily and genuinely concerned with the quality of service provided and customer satisfaction seems to have mutated…
Gardening
I am happily surprised by the joy I derive from gardening. My father would have observed dryly, ‘I told you so’…
Caspar David Friedrich
I currently find myself residing at a house in a rural German village tucked into the corner where Germany meets the Czech Republic and Poland. It’s a region where one of my first art historical loves, Caspar David Friedrich, often wandered. He captured the rolling hills, distinguished by pale nuances even at sunset, in many of his paintings, although Cross in the Mountains (painted in 1808 and now in Dresden) depicts the nearby, pointier, red sandstone peaks a few kilometers southeast….
Balancing Act
During the past year, the unexpected deaths or devastating traumas experienced by close friends and family have instigated intensified reflections on mortality, materialism, legacies, and the choices we make. I’d prefer to have such thoughts poke me a lot less often…
Vision: Motif from Visby
As a staunch Social Democrat from the bourgeoisie, Bergh hoped to dissolve social demographic barriers, establish common ground, and generate empathy among social layers…
Hope & Happiness
I thought about my sudden change of humor and how someone else’s success transformed my somber mood of detached concentration into a vibration of joy that lingered as a gentle quivering undercurrent…
The Ninth Inning?
Is humanity on the fast track to self-destruction, or on the eve of a new era of enlightenment and sustainability?