Last week, I looked out my office window and noticed that the float is now back in place at the Littlejohn Island dock. The past few nights, we paused to take in the full Flower Moon shining over the Chebeague Island crossing. Yesterday, my husband and I ran by bursts of forsythia brightening the rain-greyed landscape.

Even though we often still wear gloves and multiple layers when we go outside, the seasonal markers say spring is here: forsythia along the roadway, the float at the Littlejohn dock, and the full Flower Moon over the Chebeague Island crossing.

I wrote recently about a blocked trail on Cousins Island, a house that had burned quietly, and the kind of changes that do not always announce themselves, including those that are ambiguous or complicated. This week, the path continues.

After the fire

There is a waypoint past the naming. Once we acknowledge a change, the question becomes what to do with it.

We may not feel a sense of greater ease or get back what we’ve lost, but when we pause to notice what has ended and what remains, we can begin again on more solid ground.

Thirty years ago, just as I was beginning my first year of family medicine residency training, my grandfather died. My father, also a family doctor, had been close to my Pepere, and this death hit him hard.

Soon after that, a major fire badly damaged my parents’ house. They moved with my brothers and sisters to a temporary home in a nearby town.

These changes challenged my parents and siblings, and they challenged me, too. At the time, medical residency meant working extremely long weeks routinely, often with little sleep. In 2003, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education began limiting clinical and educational work hours to 80 hours per week. I finished my education before that occurred. When I started family medicine residency, I had an infant and a toddler. I was more tired than I had ever been.

Fast forward to December that year, and my parents were still in the temporary home.

We celebrated Christmas from a place of transition. I can still feel the strangeness of celebrating that holiday, with everything around us rearranged. We no longer had the grandfather who had been with us for many celebrations. We were not in the house where my siblings and I had grown up. The children still needed meals and mittens. I still needed to report to the hospital. My parents still had to make decisions about contractors, insurance, belongings, and where everyone would sleep. Life did not pause simply because we had lost a family member and the house had burned.

At the time, this all felt hard in the way death and emergencies feel hard. Now, after many more years of raising children, keeping homes, and watching lives change in ways none of us can fully control, I can feel the disruption even more deeply.

The house was still structurally intact. Smoke, water, heat, and upheaval had damaged what the fire had not. Things in rooms untouched by flame still needed sorting, cleaning, discarding, or replacing. Some were gone for good.

My parents rebuilt their home within a year and began work on the new version of their family.

I understand all of this differently in hindsight. I now understand what it means to lose a father. I understand that a fire does not end when the flames are out.

Similarly, a transition does not end when someone announces it, whether the announcement names a fire, a death, or a professional restructuring.

Sometimes the hardest work begins after the visible crisis has passed.

This is often how transition works.

Something ends. Something visible happens. The fire is over. The decision has been made. The role is gone. The person has died. The move has occurred.

Then comes the work after the ending.

The neutral zone

I recently discussed Dr. William Bridges' research with my co-host, Dr. Jeff Barkin, for an upcoming A Healthy Conversation show on transitions. Bridges described transition not simply as change, but as a psychological process. There is an ending. Then there is a neutral zone. This is an in-between time where the old identity no longer fully fits, and the new one has not yet formed.

Only after that can a true new beginning emerge.

This neutral zone has a place in organizational change. We previously talked about Dr. John Kotter’s work on change. Kotter's eight well-known steps of change are: create urgency; build a guiding coalition; co-create a clear, shared vision; mobilize a volunteer network of champions; remove barriers so people can act; deliver and celebrate short-term wins; sustain momentum; and embed the change in the culture. These steps focus on structure and sequence.

Many people are also familiar with Dr. Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning. These stages describe the life cycle of a group.

Bridges gave attention to something those frameworks often skip: the private work of letting go of a role before the next one forms. This is the quiet, internal work each team member does when a company reorganizes, a leader departs, or a mission changes.

The burned houses offer a visible image of an invisible process. Before people can rebuild a house, someone has to walk through what is still standing. Someone has to decide what is sound, what is unsafe, what can be carried forward, and what must be released.

Leaders are also in transition.

Bridges wrote about the neutral zone for both individuals and leaders.

The leaders who handle change well, in the organizations I have worked with and written about, are the ones who give themselves and their teams room for the neutral zone. They do not confuse their own urgency to act with the team’s readiness to begin. They let the ending be an ending. They name what was, and what is gone. Only then do they invite their people into what comes next.

One of the best leaders I have worked with once learned, after the fact, that the organization had restructured a position he had held for many years, without his knowledge. The biggest change was that he would no longer be eligible to hold that position. He could not leave for a similar role elsewhere; his work rooted him in a community to which he and his family belonged. Rather than dwell on what had ended, he stepped into a parallel leadership role within the educational arm of the same organization. The people he joined benefited from his willingness to move through what could have been a devastating change.

On A Healthy Conversation, my co-host, Dr. Jeff Barkin, and I talked about what it takes to lead people through ambiguous loss, not just logistical change. A reduction in force, a merger, a rebrand, or a retirement can each produce something close to what Pauline Boss and Kenneth Doka describe: the ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief we named last week. Leaders who recognize that and make room for the interior work tend to build the kinds of organizations people stay in voluntarily.

This does not mean leaders need to make every transition soft or endlessly process every decision. It means they understand that people do not move from one identity to another by memo alone. They need context. They need honest language. They need a chance to orient themselves before anyone asks them to perform certainty they do not yet feel.

Rebuilding on purpose

This neutral zone can be deeply uncomfortable, especially for those of us who prefer motion to standing still.

I know this tendency in myself. After an ending, I have often wanted to leap straight into the next beginning. I have wanted to use the tools that worked before to rebuild quickly and prove I was still moving.

Rebuilding too fast can mean building on an unsafe foundation.

A burned structure needs clearing. The bones need inspection. We have to separate what is salvageable from what is not. This takes time, discernment, and the courage not to confuse motion with healing.

Or, perhaps more precisely, not to confuse motion with rebuilding. Healing may happen beneath the surface, but rebuilding requires attention. Rebuilding asks us to look closely at the foundation before we raise walls.

What most of us underestimate is how much strength this interior work builds. The people I know who have come through the hardest transitions are not the ones who moved fastest. They are the ones who moved attentively.

They are the ones who allowed the neutral zone to teach them.

What still stands

Spring is an appropriate season for this kind of reflection. Grass grows around the winter’s damage. Dandelions emerge in the most unexpected places. On the Cousins Island property I ran past last week, the shed still stands. The trees are budding. Something remains.

Something else has irrevocably changed.

Many of us are living inside transitions of this kind right now. Some are personal, some professional, some cultural and collective. In recent years, many people across healthcare, technology, government, and other industries have experienced job transitions, reductions in force, or the loss of daily ties to colleagues who continue without them.

There is no single fire, no clear marker, no obvious endpoint. The organization remains, but your place in it has changed. The people remain, but the daily rhythm is gone. You may feel grateful, relieved, displaced, hopeful, and sad all at once.

For me, this has sat atop broader changes from the COVID years, the death of my father, and the ongoing work of building The Bountiful Path. Last week’s essay was about naming the changes that do not announce themselves. This week’s says: the path reroutes, and it can still be bountiful.

Not bountiful because nothing hurt. Not bountiful because everything returns as it was. Bountiful because life keeps offering material for repair: a shed still standing, grass returning, a float waiting to hold a summer’s worth of dinghies, or a path that asks us to choose another way.

Why this may matter for you

I wrote last week’s post and this one with particular people in mind — colleagues, friends, readers, and patients who have been quietly walking through their own transitions.

On last week’s post, Jenn commented:

Thank you for so many things to ponder in this piece. Transitions and change can bring grief and fear, even if they are welcome changes. I thought about the burned-out house that you describe, and how unnerving that can be, even if no one was living there at the time. In Bath, there have been three very old, classic buildings that recently have been razed on Washington St. I can’t help but wonder about the history of those spaces and the people who inhabited them.

We’re living in times of tremendous change, and it often feels like it takes a lot of effort to stay balanced amid all the upheaval. Jenn’s comment reminds me that people have lived through change before. It’s helpful to have company on the journey. I’m so grateful to Jenn, Karen, Kevin, Natalie, and others who take the time to “like” these reflections and regularly share their own insights.

A newer reader, Richard, wrote in recently after becoming a paid subscriber. He noted that we are all works in progress, and I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for joining us, Richard. We’re glad you are here.

Ultimately, change is good. Growth is good. A life that keeps moving through new seasons is the life most of us want. At the same time, being inside the movement is not always comfortable.

Three practices for the neutral zone: pause long enough for the next step to become clear. Name what has ended, even to yourself. Ask one person to sit with you in it. These are not complicated. They are what we most often forget.

Perhaps one more: notice what remains.

If you are a leader, the invitation is the same. The work you do in your own neutral zone is also the work that teaches you how to lead your people through theirs.

Pause + Reflect:

What part of your current transition might be asking for the neutral zone rather than the next step?

Leave a comment

Back on Cousins Island, the float now waits for summer visitors. The forsythia brightens the roadway. The shed on the burned property still stands. The temporary stoplight on Cousins Island still asks us to pause before moving forward.

Sometimes that pause is the practice.

Sometimes the pause is what makes return possible.

May we trust that changing direction is not always leaving the path. Sometimes it is how the path continues.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Early April

We’ve returned from our Cayman Brac/amateur radio adventure to find a misty Maine. Early April on Littlejohn Island is not pretty the way it shows up farther south. The grass is still flattened. The water is dark and cold. Mud gathers at the edge of the driveway, and the trees are just beginning to bud.

Although there is not much to look at from a distance, the softening of the island trails suggests that the ground is opening again.

It feels like the right time to read about work that takes years; work done mostly out of sight. Work that asks for patience.

What the Textile Mills Held

My father’s family knew that type of work. His French-speaking great-grandparents came from Canada looking for the opportunity to create better lives for themselves and their “someday” children. They found their opportunity in the Biddeford textile mills.

Like many New England mills, those in Biddeford offered a living. They also demanded a great deal from the people inside. Long hours. Machinery noise. Air thick with fiber. The constant bargain between earning your keep and what the work might take from you.

That family history is one reason I have long been drawn to the story of Maine-connected Frances Perkins, and to what set her on the professional path that would eventually lead her to become Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Frances was the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States.

Her journey began after witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911. A total of 146 garment workers died that day in New York City as a result of unsafe working conditions. Many of them were recent immigrants, and most were young women.

Frances understood what happens when people are treated as expendable. When I think of the garment workers who died, it is hard to separate them from my own mill-working family. Labor safety was not a side issue in places like the Biddeford mills. It was a necessity of daily life, whether those who owned the mills chose to see it or not.

Frances Perkins chose to see it. Then she refused to look away.

Frances carried her memories of the Triangle Factory fire into the rest of her own working life. Into labor protections. Into Social Security. Into unemployment insurance. Into the forty-hour workweek. Into the question underneath all of it: what do we owe the people whose work keeps the country going?

Jennifer J. Merz’s Steadfast: Frances Perkins, Champion of Workers’ Rights is a clear-eyed picture book that brings a large life onto the page.

Finding Jenn, Finding the Book

I first “met” Jenn here on Substack. She has been a supportive and engaged friend on The Bountiful Path. After reading her comment on my post about Elizabeth McCracken and the long game, I was intrigued, looked her up, and bought her book.

Jenn knew that long game herself. She began the Frances Perkins book in 2011 and published it in 2020. Over nine years, the narrative changed, the art changed, the length changed, and the publication path changed. Hurdles and detours, she called them. “But I persevered,” she wrote. “Like Frances herself, I was Steadfast.”

Jenn used an image in her comment that fits this time of year. With seeds, we do not dig them up every few days to check whether they are doing their job. We tend the soil. We wait. Eventually something breaks through.

I have thought about that kind of waiting more than once since reading Jenn’s note. Especially now, with April just beginning. Especially in a season when so much still looks bare.

The Maine Thread

There is a Maine thread running through the Frances Perkins story.

A year ago, I spoke with Giovanna Gray Lockhart, Executive Director of the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle, on Radio Maine. The Frances Perkins Center is the nonprofit partner at the Frances Perkins National Monument, one of only two national monuments in our state.

Frances Perkins is buried in Newcastle’s Glidden Cemetery.

Jenn’s book is listed on the Frances Perkins Center website as a learning resource.

When Jenn told me she had already found her way to my conversation with Giovanna, things folded in on themselves in that distinctly Maine way. Mainers are typically interconnected by far fewer than six degrees of separation.

Newcastle. Radio Maine. The Bountiful Path.

Now, Frances Perkins, shared through Jenn’s eyes.

Frances Perkins grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, but Maine had a lasting impact on her life. The homestead in Newcastle, where she first spent summers with her grandparents, and eventually lived intermittently as an adult, is important to this story. Not just as biography, but as context, setting, and scale.

A farmhouse by the river. The feel of weather. The pace of a place where not everything happens at once.

That part made sense to me immediately.

It also made sense to Jenn, who has both a Maine connection and a family connection to the textile industry.

As Jenn shared in Steadfast, Jenn’s grandfather and father worked in the New York City textile industry, as did Jenn, early in her career.

Her grandfather was living and working in Lower Manhattan at the time of the Triangle Factory fire.

Jenn brings Frances Perkins to life with her words, and with the collage illustrations created from cut papers, photographs, and the “laces, fabrics, and trims of the textile industry that is woven into the fabric of my family history.”

Jenn has said that her participation in an exhibit for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Factory Fire helped ignite her passion for the subject of the book I hold in my hands today.

Jenn, Frances Perkins and I have different connections to textile work, and to the Pine Tree State.

Biddeford and Newcastle are not the same Maine. Mill town and saltwater farm. Brick and fields. Shift bells and river light.

Still, they meet in this story. In work. In memory. In the question Frances Perkins kept pressing into public life.

Who is responsible for the people doing the work?

Boat Book

This is an early-season boat book for me. One you can read in a single sitting, then carry around for a while afterward. It is also a lovely book to read with an older child or grandchild.

Small enough for a tote bag. Substantial enough to return to.

Your turn:

What are you reading these early spring days? Does it connect to your past, or to seeds sown that may be a source of future joy?

Leave a comment

To Jenn, and others who regularly take the time to be in touch, I offer my deep appreciation.

Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

What came into view on the island

We are spending the final weekend in March on a limestone island cut with high bluffs and caves, many miles from our native Maine on Cayman Brac. Over the past days, we have followed narrow footpaths above steep drop-offs and stepped into stone chambers that tighten around the body before widening again. None of this feels natural to me. I have never felt fully at ease with heights. Enclosed spaces make me more conscious of every breath. Still, curiosity keeps drawing us forward.

Unlike the ambling granite shores of Littlejohn Island, the bluff here rises like a towering blade. The cave openings cut dark seams into the porous but unyielding rock known locally as ironshore. We placed one careful foot after another, uneasy but intent on seeing what lay ahead.

That physical experience has drawn me back to an ancient story that has traveled with me for years: Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Plato’s cave, in plain language

For readers who would like a re-introduction, Plato places the cave image in Book VII of The Republic. He asks us to imagine prisoners chained inside a cave from childhood, forced to face a wall. Behind them, a fire burns. Between the fire and the prisoners, others carry objects whose shadows fall across that wall. Because the prisoners have never seen anything else, they take those shadows for reality itself. One prisoner is eventually freed, leaves the cave, and slowly learns that what he accepted as reality was only projection. The image is Plato’s way of showing how readily human beings confuse appearance with truth, and how difficult real education can be because it requires a painful turn toward what is more fully real.

That old image still fits modern life with unnerving precision.

We live among projections. Headlines. Algorithms. Group assumptions. Inherited scripts. Somebody else’s certainty can fall across the wall in front of us so quickly, and so often, that it begins to look like fact. Plato’s cave remains useful because it reminds us that comfort and truth are not the same thing. Familiarity can harden into its own form of confinement.

That lesson felt less abstract after a week of moving through actual caves.

A cave marked by history

One of the caves we visited carried not just geological force, but human grief. A weathered sign at its entrance remembers Rebecca Bodden, one family’s infant daughter whose relatives fled there during the catastrophic hurricane of November 9, 1932. She reached the cave with her family, but died of exposure and injuries received during the storm. She is buried inside the cave, her grave marked by a simple white memorial.

Beyond Rebecca’s Cave, a cross-island path continues across the bluff toward another memorial. Even in good weather, we found the footing treacherous. The ironshore is sharp, uneven, and broken by crevices that require careful footing almost the entire way, so we did not walk the full route between the two sites. We later visited the seaside location honoring the other 19 lives that were lost during the storm.

Reading the memorial markers changed the scale of the experience immediately. The cave was no longer simply a destination on a trail. It became a chamber of survival, loss, and memory.

As we walked, we thought about how quickly a cave can change meaning. In Plato, it represents illusion. In a storm, it becomes refuge. In memory, it becomes both shelter and wound. Stone can conceal. Stone can protect. Context determines which truth we are facing.

That matters in leadership too.

Leadership beyond the projected wall

Leadership often falters when we mistake the visible wall for the whole room.

A team can become captive to its own shadows just as easily as any prisoner in Plato’s thought experiment. The loudest opinion can masquerade as the clearest one. The most repeated interpretation can calcify into doctrine. Old habits can pass for wisdom simply because they have occupied the wall for a long time.

This week’s Radio Maine conversation with Tobias Parkhurst brought me back to that point. His path from professional skateboarding to entrepreneurship and community-building in central Maine carries an important lesson about what happens when people bring fresh sightlines back home. His story is about persistence, community connection, and the creation of places where people gather over beverages, pizza, and conversation.

Strong leaders do not merely manage what is already projected. They test assumptions. They widen the aperture. They ask who has not yet spoken, who has been standing in the dark, and what truths have been flattened into silhouette.

Some of the most consequential leadership mistakes I have seen, in medicine and beyond, began with false clarity. Someone assumed they already understood the room. Someone accepted the shadow and stopped looking for the source.

Patients, margins, and the sentence that comes last

Medicine has taught me a parallel lesson.

Patients do not always begin with the deepest truth. Most of us do not. We start with the version we can tolerate. We describe the symptom, the schedule problem, the fatigue, the pain. Then, if enough space opens, something more central emerges.

That is why this week’s Radio Maine Bountiful Path solo reflection on Working in the Margins felt so resonant. The margins are not empty. They are often where the real thing enters. Those unscripted spaces often carry the truth that the main event could not hold.

I saw that over and over as a physician. Having finished a patient interaction, I would reach for the doorknob. Then I would hear the sentence that mattered most: “There’s one more thing.”

That final sentence was often the real cave opening.

Not because it pulled us deeper into darkness, but because it carried us beneath the polished surface and into the place where something truer could be named. Pain concealed grief. Insomnia concealed fear. “Stress” concealed loneliness. The chart gave one outline. The human story supplied the missing depth.

In that sense, medicine is an ongoing discipline of leaving the wall and turning toward the source.

A Healthy Conversation: common ground beneath difference

That same theme surfaces in this week’s episode of A Healthy Conversation, in which my co-host and I interviewed Dr. Jim Jarvis about medicine and medical education. We each bring different versions of professional experience to the discussion. Jim and I are family physicians. Jeff is a psychiatrist. We have all held positions in medical leadership and education.

This context feels deeply relevant to Plato’s cave.

People stand in different places. They inherit different shadows. They bring different histories to the wall. Good leadership does not demand sameness before trust can begin. Good leadership asks us to look carefully enough, and listen long enough, to discover what convictions can hold across difference.

In medicine, that matters enormously. In leadership, it matters just as much. We need people willing to ask harder questions without stripping others of dignity. We need people willing to recognize that perspective shapes interpretation, but does not erase the possibility of shared purpose.

Light, wax, and the gallery opening

This week I have also been thinking about Portland Art Gallery artist Willa Vennema’s encaustic work and the way it builds through layering, scraping, embedding, and return. Our recent Off the Wall feature, Carried by Light, describes a practice shaped by molten beeswax, pigment, improvisation, and repeated revision.

Willa is one of the artists being showcased in this week’s Portland Art Gallery opening. The April exhibition also includes Bibby Gignilliat, Ryan Kohler, and Sarah Verardo. The opening reception is on Thursday, April 2, from 5 to 7 p.m.

A gallery opening is, in its own way, an argument against shadow-life.

It asks us to show up in person. To look longer. To let shape, color, surface, and conversation interrupt the speed of the feed. It asks the eye to work honestly again. In an era that rewards quick judgments and borrowed opinions, that kind of attention feels almost muscular. It is not passive. It is a practice.

Why this may matter to you right now

You may not be standing at the edge of a bluff or stepping into a limestone cave this week.

Still, you may know the feeling of living near a threshold you would rather avoid.

A difficult conversation.
A decision delayed by fear.
A role that no longer fits its old outline.
A truth you have sensed at the edge of awareness, but have not yet turned to face.

Plato’s cave endures because it names a human tendency that never quite disappears. We accept shadows. We inherit them. We repeat them. Then life, if we are fortunate, places us in circumstances that make a larger reality harder to ignore.

For me, this island has done that through physical discomfort. The body has made the lesson plain. I do not need to adore heights or confined spaces in order to learn from them. I do not need to erase fear in order to move. I need only refuse to let fear become a fence around what I am willing to know.

That feels like a useful threshold for late March, with spring gathering force just beyond the calendar’s edge.

Closing reflection

This week has braided several truths together: Plato’s old warning about shadows, the cave history carried by storm memory, the leadership lesson of looking past consensus, the patient lesson of listening for the sentence that comes late, the conversation on A Healthy Conversation about common ground beneath difference, and the artistic discipline of layering toward light.

Together, they make the larger pattern easier to see.

Truth rarely arrives as a spotlight. More often it comes as an adjustment of sight. A longer look. A harder question. A step past the point where comfort tries to halt us.

Pause + Reflect

Where in your life are you accepting a shadow in place of a fuller truth?

Leave a comment

The limestone caves, ironshore, and high bluffs have pressed that lesson into my body as much as into my thoughts. I have felt it in my ribs, in my breath, and in the careful placement of each foot.

What lies beyond familiar fear is not always comfort.

Sometimes it is simply clearer vision.

That is enough.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

P.S. This week also marks the release of the first Bountiful Path Seasonal Reflection, a guided companion for reflection, emergence, and creative flow.

For the inaugural release of our seasonal toolkits, we’re sharing our spring version widely—at no charge— with this community. We hope you will let us know what you think.

This and future toolkits will also be included in our upcoming course, The Life that’s Asking to Be Lived. Future seasonal toolkits will become part of the broader Bountiful Path subscriber experience.

Get the Spring Seasonal Reflection Toolkit Here.

Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light

Join us for Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light on April 16, from 5–7 pm at the Portland Art Gallery. Our spring panelists bring music, art, home, community, and medicine into the same frame, creating a rich conversation about emergence, light, and the forms of connection that come into focus over time.

• Dr. Emily Isaacson is the artistic director of Classical Uprising, where she reimagines classical performance as a more collaborative, democratic, and deeply social artistic experience.

• Christopher O’Connor is a Portland Art Gallery artist whose paintings of rock, water, and abstraction invite us to slow down, look more closely, and let place open into a different state of mind.

• Heather Shields is an island-born real estate leader and longtime community-builder who understands Maine not only as a market, but as a place where belonging, beauty, and human connection shape how people want to live.

• Dr. Deirdre Heersink is a family physician and medical leader specializing in post-acute and long-term care. Her work restoring life stories to elders reminds us that health care is not only about needs and diagnoses, but about identity, dignity, and being truly known.

The panel conversation will run about 45 minutes, followed by a social hour focused on conversation and connection among attendees.

Attendance is free, but space is limited.

We hope to see you there!

Spring Virtual Book Circle

Awaken to the energy of spring and spend an evening with fellow readers who want companionship without homework.

Spring can feel like a threshold, with longer light, softer air, and the slow, steady work of thawing. My co-host and friend, Karen Longfellow, and I invite you to gather with us in that in-between space for the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21. Attendance is free, and there is no required reading: simply be willing to share whatever pages you’ve been turning with our friendly little group!

Meeting you along the Bountiful Path

We appreciate the opportunity to be part of your world.

If you’re wondering where to find us, here’s where we land during the week: Solo episodes on Monday, Radio Maine on Tuesday, Off the Wall on Wednesday, Books on the Boat on Friday, and The Bountiful Path Foundational Posts on Sunday.

See you on the path!

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Maine March: mud, thaw, and the deeper ground

The snow has receded from the Littlejohn Island roadways, and mud gathers thickly along many parts of the trails on Cousins Island. One might believe, from these first visible signs, that the ground is softening everywhere. But if you look beneath the trees, where the sunlight reaches less easily, the truth is more complicated. Snow still lingers there. The ground may appear ready around the edges while remaining frozen in the deeper, darker crevices of the woods.

I felt this vividly while running across the causeway between Littlejohn and Cousins Islands recently. Out on the mudflats at low tide, clammers were already at work in the exposed earth, moving through that familiar in-between season when winter loosens but spring has not fully arrived. Then, the very next day, with the tide higher, I saw a duck surfing effortlessly on a small ice floe as a disjointed raft of his companions paddled furiously nearby.

Just a few short weeks ago, those same mudflats were covered by ice and snow, and on one of my morning runs I saw our neighbors out cross-country skiing between the islands.

The landscape had changed quickly, but not completely.

Mud season often works this way. So do we.

Many years ago, when I was working as a fill-in physician in northern Maine, I became familiar with the annual anticipation surrounding a large lake that froze solid each winter. People celebrated not only the thaw itself, but the person most able to predict when “ice-out” would take place. That celebration raised its own deeper question: what actually counted as thaw? Was it open water around the edges? A visible break in the ice near shore? Or did it only count when the lake was entirely free?

It strikes me now that spring asks the same question of us. What does thaw really mean? Is it enough to feel movement where the sun hits? Or are we being invited into something deeper—something that reaches the places still held tight beneath the surface?

A recent conversation with someone observing Lent led me further into this reflection. I just finished reading one of Martin Shaw’s works on mythology, and one story stayed with me: a peddler dreams that he must leave home to find treasure. Though warned against the journey by his wife and the parish priest, he trusts the dream and travels farther than he ever imagined. At the furthest point, he meets a man who says that he too once had a dream, that treasure was buried beneath a hawthorn tree in a peddler’s yard, but he would never be foolish enough to follow such a thing.

So the peddler returns home and digs beneath the hawthorn tree in his own yard. There, he finds treasure. In some tellings, he digs deeper still and discovers even more. Eventually he realizes that what he has uncovered can be used not only for his own household, but also to restore the parish church.

I had heard versions of this fairy tale before, but not with the hawthorn tree, and not with the image of digging deeper and then deeper still. Those details caught my attention. In Celtic lore, hawthorn is often linked with thresholds and the unseen, which made the image feel even more resonant to me during Lent, in a season shaped by return, inwardness, and change.

Because this is often what spiritual seasons ask of us: not urgency, but depth.

During Lent, and I imagine during Ramadan and other traditions shaped by fasting, prayer, and inward turning, there is often a going inward, and then a going inward further still. Not to disappear from the world, but to reconnect with what is most true. To uncover what has been buried. To illuminate what might otherwise remain hidden.

This pattern is older than any one faith tradition. In myth, in medicine, in leadership, and in creative life, there is often a severance, a journey, and a return.

We leave what was familiar.
We enter a place of uncertainty or depth.
We return carrying something we did not have before.

Radio Maine: Beryl Cui and the courage of beginning

On Radio Maine this week, my conversation with Beryl Cui returned me to the courage of beginning again.

Beryl, a cross-cultural communication educator and trainer who recently moved to Maine from Beijing, spoke beautifully about trust, confidence, listening, and the small brave acts that help people reconnect face-to-face in a world that too often rewards distance over presence.

One part of our conversation stayed with me in particular: her belief in “tiny change,” the idea that people do not need to make a dramatic leap in order to reconnect. Sometimes a five percent change is enough. Show up at an event. Ask a simple question. Look someone in the eye. Risk a conversation without knowing exactly where it will lead.

Her story held that springlike quality of stepping into something new without needing full certainty first. Not instant belonging. Not full thaw. Just the willingness to begin.

A Healthy Conversation: making room for respectful complexity

This week, I’ve also been thinking about what it means to create spaces where people can show up honestly without being reduced to caricature.

My new role as co-host of A Healthy Conversation with Dr. Jeff Barkin has brought that question closer into focus. There is something powerful about building a place where people can speak in full sentences, where they can feel heard, and where the point is not performance but understanding. This Sunday’s showmarks our first time sharing the studio with a guest: Hannah Pingree, a candidate for governor of Maine.

That line feels especially important right now.

As a family physician, I have long believed that thoughtful listening is not optional. It is part of the work. People need room to share what matters to them, what worries them, what they hope for, and what they fear. That is true in the exam room. It is true in leadership. And it is true in public life.

A studio can be a place for slogans, but it can also be a place for discernment. My hope is always the latter.

Off the Wall: Joan Fischer and color as renewal

This week’s Off the Wall feature highlights Portland Art Gallery artist Joan Fischer, whose work feels like its own argument for joy arriving in bright, honest form.

Joan did not always see herself publicly as an artist. For many years, her visible identities were attorney, councilman, police commissioner, and fundraiser. Art remained the quieter part of her life until retirement gave it more room to emerge. That history stayed with me because it offers another version of seasonal truth: sometimes what appears newly visible has actually been alive for a very long time.

Color is the driving force behind Joan’s work. Acrylic, watercolor, oil pastel, ink, and pencil become tools for images that feel playful, intuitive, and alive. Her fish and large-scale sculptures carry delight without apology. They remind me that renewal does not always arrive solemnly. Sometimes it arrives in brightness.

Her story also echoes the deeper movement of spring. What rises now may have been waiting below the surface for years, gathering its own readiness.

Bountiful Path Solo: What We Tend

On this week’s Radio Maine solo episode, What We Tend, I reflected on the quiet work of care over time.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that much of a meaningful life is shaped not by what we build all at once, but by what we tend, slowly and repeatedly, over years.

I learned this first in medicine. Healing rarely happened in a single visit. It unfolded through relationships, habits, trust, and attention. Often, my role was not to intervene dramatically, but to notice what needed care and to return to it again and again.

I have seen this same pattern in writing, leadership, parenting, and grief. What lasts is rarely what is rushed. It is what is tended with patience.

That, too, feels connected to thaw.

What softens in us may not need to be forced open. It may simply need steady attention, enough warmth, enough honesty, enough time.

Why this may matter to you

Lately I’ve been thinking about how often we mistake surface movement for full readiness. A team may look as though it has turned a corner while trust still needs rebuilding beneath the surface. A person may sound composed before they have found true steadiness. A relationship may be improving around the edges while something deeper still asks for care.

In medicine, I saw this often. Healing rarely came through one dramatic moment. It unfolded through relationship, consistency, and return. Leadership can work the same way. So can creative practice. So can the inner life.

The challenge is that our culture prefers the visible sign. We like the first clear patch of road, the first open water, the first evidence that something has changed. But some of the richest learning happens lower down, in darker soil, in deeper water, in places that are not yet ready to announce themselves.

This is one reason seasonal attention matters to me. The natural world keeps offering a kinder timeline. Mudflats can open while ice still drifts nearby. A trail can soften while snow remains in the woods. Both things can be true.

Closing reflection

The roads are clearer. The mudflats are open at low tide. Clammers are out working. A duck rides an ice floe where a skier crossed not long ago. Around us, the season is shifting visibly. And yet under the trees, snow remains.

My takeaway this week is that this is not contradiction. It is instruction.

Spring does not ask us to deny what is still frozen. It asks us to notice what is changing without rushing the rest. It reminds us that unseen thaw is still thaw, that inward journeys have their own timing, and that what returns from depth often comes back carrying something we did not have before.

Sometimes the treasure is what we find when we return. Sometimes it is the person we become because we were willing to go deeper first.

Pause + Reflect

Where in your life are you seeing change around the edges, and what might become possible if you allowed yourself to go one layer deeper?

Leave a comment

As the light changes and the trails continue to soften, I’m reminded that this work, too, is seasonal. It asks for attention, return, and a willingness to notice what is quietly changing. Whether you share a note, forward a post, or simply pause here for a few minutes, thank you for making room for these reflections.

I’m grateful to be part of your week.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

P.S. Also on my radar this mud season: MudFest, an upcoming series from Classical Uprising that turns Maine’s messiest season into an invitation for music, play, and community. I previously had the pleasure of interviewing conductor Emily Isaacson on Radio Maine, and this feels very much in keeping with the creativity and community-centered spirit she brings to her work. With participatory singing, live music, and playful reimaginings of how we gather, MudFest invites us to meet the in-between not only with patience, but with imagination.

The events begin next week—click here for more information!

Join us for the Spring Virtual Book Circle

Awaken to the energy of spring and spend an evening with fellow readers who want companionship without homework.

Spring can feel like a threshold, with longer light, softer air, and the slow, steady work of thawing. We invite you to gather with us in that in-between space for the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21

Meeting you along the Bountiful Path

We appreciate the opportunity to be part of your world.

If you’re wondering where to find us, here’s where we land during the week: Solo episodes on Monday, Radio Maine on Tuesday, Off the Wall on Wednesday, Books on the Boat on Friday, and The Bountiful Path Foundational Posts on Sunday.

See you on the path!

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

A very cold stretch, in more than one place

Recently the Northeast has been locked in the kind of cold that sharpens everything.

While we in Maine have experienced winter temperatures that feel familiar, this year we are not alone. Our adult daughters in Georgia and North Carolina have shared weather updates that sounded like ours, but coming from states lacking the infrastructure and habits for managing cold. Our children weren’t complaining, they were simply noticing how the same air can feel different depending on what a place is built to handle.

Some of this southward reach of cold has been attributed to the Arctic Oscillation, a large-scale pattern that can influence where cold air settles.

In Maine, we expect winter to arrive with teeth. We build for it. We stock the sand bucket. We know where the warm layers live. We also know the quiet reward: sunrise through bare trees, silver water, and a sky that can look freshly washed even when the air stings.

Different places make different bargains with the season.

The give and the get

One of life’s harder lessons is this: we rarely have everything we want all at once. Nearly every “yes” includes a “not right now” tucked inside it.

We see this in families. In careers. In bodies.

In medicine, I hear versions of this regularly. A diagnosis arrives and someone says, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” They’re not wrong.

Most of us do not get full information before life asks us to choose. We agree to a path, and then reality reveals terms we did not read.

In leadership, I hear a similar ache when people feel they did what was asked and did not receive what they believed the agreement promised. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the agreement was real, but incomplete. Sometimes the world changed mid-contract.

Either way, frustration makes sense. We are allowed to feel it.

The question is what we do next.

You can’t always control the storm, the diagnosis, the budget, the market, or the family dynamics. But you can often choose your next step, and similarly choose what you shape inside your own reach.

Why we try to control our space

When life feels constrained, many of us start by trying to control something smaller. That is not superficial. It is human.

Our brains and bodies are constantly scanning for cues: Am I safe? Do I have enough? What’s coming next? When uncertainty rises, the stress response rises with it. And when stress is elevated, it’s harder to think clearly, connect generously, or make grounded decisions.

That’s why small sensory anchors matter more than we sometimes admit: visual order, comforting sound, familiar objects, living green. They can help the nervous system downshift from hyper-vigilance to homeostasis.

This is also where awe quietly enters the room. In Dr. Dacher Keltner’s work on the eight wonders of life, visual design is on the list because form, color, pattern, and beauty can stop us mid-thought, and remind us we’re part of something larger. Sometimes awe isn’t a mountaintop. Sometimes it’s a well-made space.

Like many people, I have taken jobs that were not a perfect fit for my interests, but were an important way to meet my family’s needs, financial and otherwise. In these, I could not always control the time that was required or how the time was spent. But I could often shape the space.

So I did.

I brought in plants. I hung artwork. I played classical music quietly in the background. Small choices, but real. A way of saying: even here, even now, I can participate in the environment I inhabit.

Tradeoffs without resentment

The trap is believing that the presence of tradeoffs means we have failed.

It doesn’t.

It means we are alive in a world where time, energy, money, and weather are all finite. Tradeoffs do not invalidate our goals. They clarify them.

A helpful question I return to is:

What am I willing to give up in order to get what I say I want?
And equally important:
What am I not willing to give up, even if it costs me something else?

That second question is where values live.

A small practice for this week

If life feels cold in any sense right now—literal or figurative—try this:

1. Choose one small area you can shape: a corner of a desk, the inside of your car, your bedside table.

2. Add one signal of care: a sprig of green, a photo you love, a candle, a piece of music that steadies you.

3. Say out loud: “This is what I can influence today.”

This is not giving up. It is choosing how you engage with your circumstances.

Off the Wall and Into the Warmth

Portland Art Gallery artist James Bonner’s work is a study in tradeoffs: layering instead of rushing, restraint instead of overload, what he leaves out as part of what gives the painting its power.

After injury kept him from painting for years, his return was built one careful layer at a time. His story provides an embodied reminder that the “get” often requires a long, faithful “give.”

Read more about James Bonner later this week on our Off the Wall feature. If you feel inspired, we invite you to subscribe to this art-focused digital magazine.

For those who appreciate the tradeoffs built into narrative works, it is not too late to join TODAY’S Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle at 5:30 pm EST (February 3). We’d love to have you bring whatever you’ve been reading to share with our group. We’ve even created a Bountiful Path Virtual Circle Participant Sharing Guide to light your path.

Also a reminder that this week is our Portland Art Gallery opening event for featured artists Emily Blaschke, James Mattison, Matthew Russ, and Mike Larosa. If you are seeking exposure to the awe of visual design and warmth of the human kind, we invite you to come say hello on February 5 from 5-7 pm.

Radio Maine: Liz Kovarsky and the Electric Cottage Collective

This week on Radio Maine, we speak with Electric Cottage Collective founder Liz Kovarsky. Liz is a firm believer in the warmth of companionship and the idea that community spaces can be designed to support wholeness.

Her work threads together creativity, coworking, and wellness, pushing gently against the cultural habit of living “from the neck up.”

Closing

The cold always teaches something, even when we wish it wouldn’t. It reminds us that every place, every choice, every season comes with a give and a get.

And when life asks more than we wanted to give, we can still do something quietly powerful.

We can shape the space around us.
We can name the tradeoffs honestly.
We can keep going without pretending it’s easy.

Pause + Reflect: What is one “give” you can accept with less resentment, because it supports something that truly matters to you?

Leave a comment

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path solo series is an offshoot of Radio Maine, created in response to those who want to go a bit deeper using an audiovisual medium. In this week’s episode, The Bountiful Blur, we explore how blur and uncertainty can be lived as something soft rather than something wrong, especially when we’re asking ourselves to give and grow at the same time.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Winter trails and “slippery slopes”

Here in Maine, we are digging out from the snowstorm that made its presence known across the country. Last week’s southern island temperatures seem a distant memory, and our daily runs have returned to their usual seasonal rhythm.

Over the weekend, I did a long run across island roads and mainland trails. There are sections with particularly steep downward paths. This time of year, those descents are often icy. Standing at the summit in trail sneakers can feel intimidating.

When you reach that point deep in the woods, though, the only other option is to turn around and retrace your steps.

I was reminded of my high school ski team days, pausing at the top of a hill. The slope might be icy, the ruts deep, but lingering indefinitely would not change the conditions. At some point you commit, knowing there is risk involved, and trust your training to help you respond.

On this weekend’s trail run, I had the same choice. I could turn around, adding several miles and a lot of frustration, or I could pick my line, shorten my stride, and begin.

Yesterday in the midst of a winter storm, I faced a different decision. Fresh snow had fallen overnight. I could stay on the unplowed road with its narrowed shoulder, or head into the woods where the snow was deep but the traffic was gone. I had just put new Yaktrax on my shoes, so I decided to test them. The pace was slow. Each step took more effort. Yet the quiet beauty of the woods and the satisfaction of using the tools I had made it worth the extra time.

Both moments reminded me of how easily we dismiss things as a “slippery slope.” We say, “If I start down that path, it will only get worse,” and choose not to move at all. Sometimes that caution is wise. More often, it reflects how little confidence we feel in our ability to adjust as we go.

Winter trails rarely offer perfect footing. Life does not either. Confidence is what lets us say, “I will go carefully, I will use what I know, and I will trust myself to respond if things get tricky.”

What confidence is (and is not)

The word confidence comes from the Latin con fidere, “to trust with.” At its core, confidence is about being with faith. Faith in your preparation. Faith in your capacity to learn in motion. Sometimes faith in something larger than yourself.

That is very different from the kind of loud certainty we sometimes see rewarded in competitive spaces: chest-beating, overpromising, the “I’ve got this” performance that leaves little room for doubt or nuance.

There is a place for dramatic confidence on a stage or in a high-energy pitch. Yet in the kinds of leadership and living we talk about here, the form of confidence that matters most is quieter. It sounds more like:

• I do not know everything, but I know enough to begin.

• I can ask for help and still respect myself.

• If this does not go as planned, I will find a way to recover and learn.

Quiet confidence is not about having no fear. It is about deciding that your values and intentions matter more than your fear of slipping.

Slippery slopes in real life

The “slippery slope” phrase shows up often in medicine, leadership, and family life.

• “If we change this policy for one patient, we will have to do it for everyone.”

• “If I say yes to one more project, I will never be able to say no again.”

• “If we start talking about feelings at work, everything will get messy.”

There are genuine boundary issues worth watching. Yet many of these statements hide something simpler: a lack of confidence in our ability to make decisions case by case.

If you are always afraid that one exception will destroy your structure, the real issue may not be the slope. It may be how much you trust yourself to pause, reassess, and adjust.

In practice, this kind of confidence can sound like:

• “We can try this once and then reevaluate.”

• “I can help this time, and next time we will need to share the load differently.”

• “I am willing to experiment with this new habit and refine it rather than abandon it completely.”

It is the same mindset that lets you test your footing on an icy trail. You do not throw yourself downhill. You take one step, feel how the ground responds, and only then decide the next.

Confidence in what you build: Radio Maine with Jeff Mao

This week on Radio Maine, we speak with Jeff Mao, founder of Knead and Nosh. Jeff is known now as “the bagel guy” at farmers’ markets and pop-ups. Earlier in his career, he was “the laptop guy,” helping lead Maine’s pioneering effort to bring one-to-one computers into public schools.

The thread between these very different roles is a willingness to learn in public and keep moving forward, even without a traditional script. Jeff studied history at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, taught math, became an educational technology leader, then wrote The Essential Chinese Hot Pot Cookbook and built an award-winning bagel business that weaves in flavors from his Chinese heritage.

He talks candidly about working seven-day weeks, teaching himself networking concepts by drawing them on a chalkboard, and later learning how to write recipes for publication. None of it began with a guarantee. It began with curiosity and the confidence to say, “I can figure this out, step by step.”

Off the Wall: Brian Reardon and everyday courage

Later this week, our Off the Wall feature will spotlight Portland Art Gallery artist Brian Jude Reardon.

Brian paints tractors, Airstreams, VW bugs, and other industrial forms that many of us might drive past without noticing. For him, these objects are carriers of memory and joy. He balances a long career in educational publishing with a steady studio practice, letting the work pull him into that place where time disappears.

Stepping into public view as an artist required its own quiet confidence. Brian describes how encouragement from friends helped him move from private painting to gallery shows and collectors. He reminds us that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is simply to share what makes us happy and let others respond.

Solo episode: The Long Walk

In response to those who have wanted to go a bit deeper into Bountiful Path themes, we’ve created the Bountiful Path solo series as an offshoot of Radio Maine. This week’s mini episode, The Long Walk, reflects on walking as a way to move through transition with presence rather than pressure; if you have a moment to watch, I’d love to hear how it lands for you as we continue to shape our approach.

Leave a comment

Radio Maine Live: confidence in community

If you would like the opportunity to explore Bountiful Path themes in person, our next Radio Maine Live gathering at the Portland Art Gallery will take place on February 18. I will be joined by former Radio Maine guests Dr. Susan Woods, Chip Brewer, and Elizabeth Ross for a conversation about stillness, renewal, and the kind of grounded confidence it takes to lead and live well in uncertain times. More information awaits at the end of today’s piece…

Why this may matter for you

You may not be standing at the top of an icy trail, but there is likely some slope in front of you right now.

A conversation you have been avoiding.
A creative project you have been circling.
A health change you keep postponing until conditions feel ideal.

Confidence will not remove every risk, and it will not guarantee a smooth run. What it can offer is this: a felt sense that you can choose, act, and respond, rather than freeze.

It asks you to trust:

• The skills and experience you already carry.

• The tools and supports available to you.

• Your capacity to learn in motion.

Pause + Reflect

As you move through this late-January week, consider:

Where in your life are you standing at the top of a “slope,” and what is one small, deliberate move you feel confident enough to make next?

If you would like to share your answer, we invite you to comment here—or reply to this post email. I read and deeply appreciate everything you share. Your comments and reflections often shape future essays. They contribute to my own “being with faith.”

Leave a comment

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

Radio Maine Live Series: Stillness and Renewal

An evening of conversation, creativity, and community, brought to you by the Portland Art Gallery

As winter settles in, our focus on Stillness and Renewal invites reflection on what this season teaches us—the quiet between waves of activity, the balance between rest and imagination, and the ways creativity endures even in stillness.

Host Dr. Lisa Belisle welcomes a new panel of former Radio Maine guests whose work spans art, design, healing, and place. Together we’’ll explore how moments of pause and renewal open the way for fresh perspectives and creative growth.

The evening begins with a reception and refreshments, followed by a 45-minute panel conversation and time to connect with others afterward.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026
5:00–7:00 pm
Portland Art Gallery, Portland, Maine

Open to the public with limited seating. Tickets are available now. We look forward to seeing you.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

This past week we saw a few brief flurries on Casco Bay. Snow lifted the light, hovered, and dissolved. Nothing stayed, yet each burst changed the feel of the day. That is the signal of quiescence: less visible motion, more quiet preparation.

Several brief showers of snow traced the space between branches and were gone within minutes. I found myself slowing, not to stop, but to observe and set a steadier tempo. The flurries did not add depth on the ground. They changed the quality of attention. This is the seasonal tempo shift that invites a different kind of work.

Why this matters right now: Mid-November piles on tasks while light and energy decline. Quiescence gives you a quieter cadence so you can notice what is needed, choose one proportionate response, and protect attention for what matters.

What you will get in this five minute read: a clear definition of quiescence, a witnessing menu you can use today, and one doorway ritual to anchor the practice.

Quiescence comes from the Latin quies (rest). It is quiet readiness, not idling.

• In nature, buds hold energy, roots repair, and sugars store for later growth.

• In studios, it looks like priming panels, mixing test swatches, or walking with a sketchbook before laying paint.

• In teams, it looks like clarifying purpose, cadence, and roles before adding tasks.

Here a few words related to quiescence that may help round out the picture:

• Dormancy: a pause with protective mechanisms.

• Fallow: a period of non-production to restore fertility.

• Latency: potential that has not yet been expressed.

• Incubation: time set aside for ideas to organize.

• Consolidation: the brain’s work of turning experience into memory.

Quiescence matters now because mid-November asks for consolidation. Days shorten. Nature’s external pace slows. Internal work continues. In this quieter cadence, attention can do its best work.

Pause + Reflect

Which word names your season today: quiescent, fallow, incubation, latency, or consolidation? What will you do less of this week so that work beneath the surface can continue?

Why bearing witness belongs to quiescence

Bearing witness pairs attentive reception with proportionate response. Quiescence provides the conditions for that. When the tempo lowers, we can separate signal from noise, ask what help is wanted, and match our action to the moment.

In quiet seasons, witnessing often looks like calibrated listening, accurate naming, consent-led help, and thoughtful follow-through. The aim is not to do nothing. The aim is to do the right thing next. Quiescence gives us the time and texture to choose well.

Artist reflection: Mike LaRosa on structure and spontaneity

On Radio Maine this week, Mike LaRosa shared how a pharmacist’s precision and a painter’s play can live on the same canvas. His hard-edged abstractions and Maine landscapes balance crisp boundaries with saturated rhythm.

Mike’s approach is quiescent in spirit: keep the edges that matter, allow color to find its path, and wait one beat before the next layer. That same mix of clarity and patience sustains effective witnessing.

Quiescence in leadership means setting tempo and edges: shorter meetings with stronger openings, one measurable outcome per conversation, guarded blocks of deep work, clear roles. Quiescence at home means turning toward: a check-in question at dinner, a phone left in another room, an early bedtime when the week runs heavy. In both, the witness stance is the same: attend first, name accurately, act in proportion. Think of this as designing conditions where the right work can take root.

Pause + Reflect

Where do you need a clean edge, and where can color find its way?
Name one boundary you will hold and one freedom you will allow in your next piece or project.

A seasonal toolkit for witnessing

As a leader and teacher in the medical setting, I often have to determine quickly what exactly people need from me. Patients who come in bleeding or unable to breathe provide obvious clues and a clear course of action. Medical directors who are trying to change the behavior of their clinical teams present more nuanced scenarios.

In conversation, people ask for different kinds of responses. This may be true in medical settings, in families, in friendships and in communities. Quiescence helps us pause long enough to ask which kind of help is wanted.

Sometimes, the most helpful thing we can do is to bear witness, rather than jump to act on someone’s behalf. Bearing witness is defined and executed differently in different contexts. Think of it as a spectrum that runs from inner, private change to outward, systemic action. The stance is the same (attentive, accountable); the visibility and activation vary.

For me, The Bountiful Path, Radio Maine and Off the Wall all represent ways that I can bear witness, primarily by amplifying the voices of others.

The spectrum

1. Receptive Witness (private, low activation)
   You watch/read/listen and let it change you. No reposting, no performative takes. You notice impact, regulate yourself, and avoid voyeurism.

2. Reflective Witness (private → preparatory)
   You verify facts, seek context, examine your own bias, and translate insight into a concrete intention (“Next time X happens, I’ll do Y.”).

3. Relational Witness (interpersonal, consent-led)
   You name what you saw to the person affected, validate, and ask what support is wanted.

4. Accountable Witness (document & route)
   You record facts and use the right channel (incident report, chart note, HR), keeping the harmed person’s preferences in view.

5. Protective Witness (in-the-moment boundary)
   You intervene to stop harm or set a norm: brief, behavior-focused, safety-first. (Exception to consent if there’s imminent risk.)

6. Amplifying Witness (public, consent-aware)
   You speak or share publicly to widen care/resources—credit sources, include content notes, avoid sharing graphic material, center those affected.

7. Transformational Witness (system change)
   You convert what you witnessed into policy, training, metrics, resource shifts—then follow up to ensure it sticks.

If clarity, care, or accountability increase because you were there, you bore witness. In a quiescent season, even the quieter modes can move things meaningfully.

Pause + Reflect

Which witnessing mode fits your next conversation: receptive, reflective, relational, accountable, protective, amplifying, or transformational?
Write the exact question you will ask to confirm what help is wanted.

Why this may matter for you

Quiescence does not slow your life into stillness. It right-sizes it. When you witness well, tension drops, trust rises, and the next step becomes obvious. The benefits compound in studios, clinics, classrooms, and kitchens. The season gives you permission to practice this on purpose.

Doorway Ritual

Word: Choose
Do: Select one witness move that fits today and do it once. Treat it like a snow flurry that clears the air.
Share: “I used [move] with [person or topic] so that [outcome].”

Pause + Reflect

Which part of your work or life needs a quiescent edge this week: a clearer boundary, a slower tempo, or a better handoff? If you feel inclined, please share in the comments.

What to carry forward

The week’s brief flurries did not stay, yet they changed the light, and that can be our cue. Quiescence asks for quiet readiness that steadies attention until the right move becomes visible. In this slower brightness, bearing witness grows precise as we listen, name what is true, and offer help that fits. Mike LaRosa’s practice reminds us to keep the edges that matter and let color find its path. Carry one thing forward. Choose the tempo that serves the work, then place a single, honest act within it. Like snow that lifts the morning and disappears, a small shift can change what we are able to see.

✨ Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Warmly,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

When the light recedes, what definition of yourself softens, and what new shape begins to form?

Gray morning, gentle turn

This week arrived in soft gray. After a bright, generous weekend, replete with the reds of autumn, the Maine sky hinted at an impending storm. By mid-morning, the wind was up; by afternoon the rain had settled in. It was the kind of day that invites reflection even as it hurries you along.

We packed the last of the gear off the boat this weekend, ahead of the weather, and will store our trusty vessel at week’s end. Another boating season—this one extended and abundant—comes gently to a close. We benefited from many beautiful October days on the water this year, which does not always happen.

Likewise, this summer brought gains I couldn’t have anticipated.

The Earth’s gathering gray reminds us that we are as much a part of nature as the building winds, and that things can shift at any moment. There’s humility in that truth, and gratitude too.

As seasons change, so do our definitions of who we are and how we serve.

Why this may matter for you: Gray days aren’t empty; they clarify. They ask what truly matters when the color fades and what continues to hold its shape.

Pause + Reflect: What are you ready to store for the season, and what deserves to stay on deck?

When definitions shift: moving from drama to growth

In recent months, as I’ve stepped more fully into building The Bountiful Path, people have asked, Are you still a doctor? The answer is yes—though what that means has changed. After more than three decades in medicine, my work now draws more deeply on leadership, creativity, and connection. I champion wellness through story and reflection, using design as scaffolding for growth.

To do that well, I lean on clear frameworks that help individuals and groups see their patterns and choose different moves when old habits pull them off course.

As I’ve explored new ways of caring for others—through community, and conversation—I’ve looked for models that make invisible dynamics visible. One of those is Stephen Karpman’s Drama Triangle of victim/persecutor/rescuer, a 1960s model that maps how we get entangled in reactive cycles.

Each of Karpman’s defined roles sustains conflict. When we are ensnared in this triangle, we sometimes become the rescuer and, inadvertently perhaps, the persecutor, even when we may feel like the victim.

Some people orbit nearby as bystanders, not fueling the dynamic directly but sustaining it through silence or avoidance.

I’ve worked with many patients and colleagues who have been impacted by trauma. Their experiences are real. Our life events change us, whether we realize it or not.

Many physicians, myself included, may feel called to rescue those who have been victimized. We are trained to solve problems, and fix things, in cases where patients would likely benefit from collaborating more in their own health futures.

David Emerald’s reframe of the Drama Triangle invites us out of reactivity and into conscious participation—as creators, challengers, or coaches. When we shift from rescuing to coaching, or from criticism to challenge, the triangle expands into something alive: a trellis that supports intentional growth.

Even bystanders may become empowered as they mindfully bear witness and hold space for others.

Moving Beyond: The Empowerment Dynamic (David Emerald)

Pause + Reflect: When you notice tension looping in your work or community, briefly step back and ask: what role are you playing? Try reframing and moving into a place of empowerment, as you imagine how you could shift the dynamic.

Radio Maine voices shaping this work

One of the gifts of this season has been learning how to reframe and share the growth approach. Preparing for Radio Maine Live , happening Tuesday, October 22, I’ve been in conversation with artists, physicians, entrepreneurs and numerous others who embody creativity and the human spirit.

As part of our Radio Maine conversations, each guest has offered a lesson that reshaped how I think. Dr. Jacey Goddard reminded me that alignment begins with gentleness, Jim Brady spoke of the courage to imagine renewal, and Michael Keighley distilled agency into presence.

From Grace DeGennaro, I learned that structure can be sacred. Her paintings, built on Fibonacci sequences and golden ratios, turn mathematics into meditation.

Her insight reminded me that geometry can be a spiritual language—one that helps us see how strength and balance coexist.

Putting the framework to work

The geometry of human growth mirrors the geometry of art and architecture. A triangle holds tension; a pyramid builds stability; a trellis invites motion and light.

Gray days encourage that same discernment. When the horizon blurs, we rely on the shapes that hold us steady—the next buoy, the steady rhythm, the frame we can trust.

Why this may matter for you: In uncertain times, clarity comes from form. When life feels scattered, return to a single structure that keeps you oriented.

Pause + Reflect: Where are you being asked to move from reaction to creation? Imagine lifting the situation into the next dimension and ask, What would growth look like here?

Staying a doctor, differently

As The Bountiful Path continues to unfold, I see that my medical practice hasn’t ended; it has expanded. The location is new, but the mission remains the same: tending connection, nurturing wellness, and creating conditions for meaning to grow.

That is the work of this season: trading reactive triangles for living trellises we can create and climb together.

Next week, we’ll explore White Space—the pause within the pattern, the silence that gives shape its strength.

Reflection prompt

Where in your own life might you redefine what you do, not by title but by intention?

✨ Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Warmly,

Lisa

P.S. Join us for the free, live Radio Maine Live event on Tuesday, October 22. We’ll continue exploring how creative geometry, gentle alignment, bold vision, and everyday presence shape our community. Event info here.

Harvest on the water, harvest at home

The Harvest Moon arrives this week; porches are lined with bright gourds and speckled pumpkins. We’ve also been riding an unseasonably warm stretch of weather. Over the weekend our family boated from Littlejohn Island to the Goslings and anchored for the afternoon. Few boats were out, and many owners had already pulled their moorings for winter. We’ll do the same soon, which made this outing feel like an unexpected October bonus.

Personal harvest

This is also the season of inward harvest. Our children are arriving home for our daughter’s wedding at nearby Fort Williams. One of our sons celebrated a birthday last week, and several close colleagues marked birthdays and a wedding of their own.

Family gathers, circles widen, old songs find their chorus.

Our creative harvest continues as well. At last week’s Portland Art Gallery opening we celebrated the work of Jill Hoy, Brenda Cirioni, Dale Roberts, and James Bonner, artists who carry decades of practice and still keep pushing into new terrain.

We also recorded five new conversations for Radio Maine: business owner Jason Agren, author Dr. Chuck Radis, and artists Emily Blaschke, Mike LaRosa, and Emily Sabino.

Each visit felt like color, craft, and courage gathered into a single basket.

Harvesting courage in public

One quiet honor of this work is watching people risk being seen. At our gallery openings and on Radio Maine, some guests are seasoned speakers. Others tell me, just off-camera, that this is a big deal. They admit to racing hearts and slightly shaky hands. Years of experience have helped me feel at more at ease in these settings. For many, the courage is freshly grown.

Courage usually increases with repetition. This is true for microphones and for meetings, for gallery talks and for family toasts. The first few times out still require us to dig deep. Some people need to dig deep nearly every time, particularly when social settings or public speaking trigger strong emotions.

Leadership in practice: from assertion to invitation

This courage connects to the leadership work many of us are tending this fall. Some people, including those who are intelligent and well-read, fall into a common habit known as arguing by assertion. Communication researchers use this term for a pattern in which a person presents a claim so decisively that there is no space for any other true fact to stand beside it.

The effect is silencing. Conversations stop before they start.

This can happen either one-on-one or in group settings.

A gentle self-check. If you often find yourself saying, “The information is clear, and there is only one sensible path,” or if you notice heads nodding without questions, you may be arguing by assertion.

Try this the next time: state your view, name at least one reasonable alternative, and invite a single clarifying question before discussion moves on. For example, “Here is my read on the information. A different interpretation is X. What is one question we should answer before we choose?”

Why it helps. This shift preserves your expertise, increases psychological safety, and usually surfaces a practical risk or constraint that improves the final decision. In short, you trade short-term certainty for better long-term outcomes.

This opening also mirrors the space clinicians hold in motivational interviewing (MI). We meet people where they are, listen for what matters to them, and co-design a right-sized next move. Whether in a group or one-to-one, this collaborative process is critical to real change.

Last week we talked about trellises and ladders. Returning to that image, invitation is the trellis that lets many climbs interlace, assertion is often a single ladder leaned hard against one wall. In practice, we need both. The leader’s craft is to keep ladders strong while building the trellis that helps everyone rise without tangling the growth, latticework that turns many paths into one shared direction.

Try this small practice the next time a conversation tightens:

• Name the question you are trying to answer.

• Invite two additional interpretations that could also be true.

• Ask, “What experiment could honor all three?”

Radio Maine this week: William (Liam) Sullivan on building bridges in creative tech

This week’s Radio Maine guest, William (Liam) Sullivan, co-organizer of Maine Tech Week and General Manager at From Away Games, works exactly at that trellis point where artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs meet. A Maine native and former Microsoft engineer, he shifted from enterprise cloud to immersive media, helping launch projects in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), including collaborations like the Island Institute’s Island Land VR. Liam also founded Standard Magic to explore training and education through interactive tech, and later helped create Silicon Lobster, a visual directory that connects Maine’s creative-tech community.

What I love about Liam’s story is the through-line: connect people across disciplines so ideas move from screen to real life. That is trellis work. It echoes our leadership practice and the spirit of MI: start where people are, align on meaning, then build the next rail together. His community-building around Maine Tech Week offers a living example of how shared scaffolding can help many ladders rise.

Last week on Radio Maine: Billy Jack Goodwin, service as art and courage as practice

Several people stopped me this week to say how much they loved last week’s Radio Maine conversation with Billy Jack Goodwin, program leader at Port Resources’ Achieving Independence in Maine (AIM). Billy Jack has spent three decades building programs that help vulnerable Mainers—most recentl young adults on the autism spectrum—gain skills and live more independently. Billy Jack is also an artist, a longtime yoga practitioner and teacher, and a comic who uses humor to lift hard stories.

Billy Jack’s grounded optimism and daily discipline of service stayed with me. Billy Jack often says, “The universe loves me,” not as a claim of ease, but as a commitment to show up with purpose, joy, and stamina—especially when the work is hard. That posture is its own kind of trellis. It meets people where they are, holds space with dignity, and invites the next right step.

Wayfinding together

Harvest is a communal verb. The gallery opening reminded me how artists learn, honing what they do well while evolving into new territory. The same pattern serves teams: keep what works, try one new approach, and show your work so others can learn with you. If we hold space the way a good trellis does, steady, spacious, and safe, people will step in.

Join us: Radio Maine Live

Harvest, Beginnings, and Shared Legacy

We invite you to be part of the first Radio Maine Live, an evening of conversation and community at the Portland Art Gallery. On Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 5:00–7:00 pm, we will gather for a live panel on Harvest, Beginnings, and Shared Legacy, bringing together four distinct voices for a conversation that promises both depth and discovery.

Panelists

• Jim Brady, Olympic silver medalist and community builder in Portland

• Grace DeGennaro, artist known for sacred geometry and cultural symbolism

• Dr. Jacey Goddard, osteopathic physician with an integrative, mind–body approach

• Michael Keighley, military veteran and trauma-informed yoga teacher

Where
Portland Art Gallery, Portland, Maine

Evening flow
Reception with refreshments, a 45-minute panel, and time for conversation afterward.

Please RSVP by Friday, October 17th here or email jocelyn@portlandartgallery.com.

We would love to welcome you into this inaugural live gathering as Radio Maine steps onto the stage.

Sneak peek: Artful Escapes in November

Coming soon—the launch of Artful Escapes, a new conversation series at the Portland Art Gallery. My special guest and I will take a global view of travel, shaped by intention and an eye for meaning, with memorable experiences from the Arctic Circle to the South Pacific.

Our first symposium, Finding Your Ideal Hotel, invites an autumn mindset. As the season turns, we slow down, choose with care, and notice what restores us. The places we stay can change how we experience a city or coastline, and influence the stories we bring home. We will share perspectives, then welcome yours in the social hour that follows.

Thursday, November 13, 2025, 5:00–8:00 pm, Portland Art Gallery
Enjoy refreshments and an open conversation with others who value thoughtful travel. For more information, please email jocelyn@portlandartgallery.com.

Next in the series: Islands That Might Surprise You.

Closing reflection

We are fully in the time of harvest. On the water, moorings are coming up. On land, porches glow with pumpkins. At home and at work, we mark birthdays, a wedding, and the courage it takes to share your voice. In our community, artists and other creative individuals keep bringing their best work forward, and many are brave enough to speak about it out loud.

If this season is asking something of you, consider what courage you are harvesting and where a conversation, one that makes room for more than one true thing, might help the work move.

✨ Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

Murmurations and the Egret

The September sky over Casco Bay is a study in emergence and seasonal change. Under the fading light of yesterday morning’s full September “corn moon,” a skein of geese flew in formation, each body holding its own slice of air. Last week, while navigating the Royal River by boat, we watched murmurations of starlings gather, ripple, and fold back on themselves like an airborne tide.

Returning from a recent long run, I met another solitary traveler: an egret wading the tidal edge near the Littlejohn causeway. Each of us moved along a quiet path, tracing our own way across shifting water and light.

Together. In formation. Alone. Three ways of being, each true to the season.

Sharon Varney, in Leadership in Complexity and Change, reminds us that large-scale patterns are shaped by countless small movements. Watching the murmuration reminded me that the same is true for us. Stability in life often rests on tiny, everyday adjustments we rarely notice.

Leadership in daily life

I first encountered Varney’s book during my doctoral coursework in leadership. It gave language to what I had sensed all along: meaning and direction arise not only from titles or roles but also from the way we show up for one another in daily life.

Leading in this broader sense is not about issuing instructions. It is about self-leadership, presence in families and communities, and the quiet example of our choices. I experienced this early as the oldest of ten children. Even before words, we learned by watching one another. Neuroscience now confirms this through mirror neurons. What we embody—patience, effort, resilience—teaches as much as anything we say.

At the executive level of a regional health system, I once carried responsibility for many. On each of my morning runs, I carry responsibility for one: my own body in motion, as I described in the Run-shine episode of Radio Maine. Each scale matters. How we care for ourselves and others ripples outward into the larger whole.

Last Friday brought its own murmuration in the Radio Maine studio. We welcomed a diverse set of guests to explore and celebrate the human spirit: an attorney-turned-artist, a tech entrepreneur, a nonprofit leader, and the owner of the Portland Art Gallery. An independent art historian joined us virtually. We rounded out the day with solo episodes. Each conversation mattered on its own; together, they created an evolving ecosystem—Portland Art Gallery, Radio Maine, and this newsletter—dynamic, interconnected, emergent. These conversations, involving different people on different paths, woven together became more than the sum of their parts.

Art as Emergence

Artists at Portland Art Gallery work from fragments—sketches, test panels, margin notes. The coherence of a finished piece is emergent, not imposed. Radio Maine functions the same way. Off the Wall features, long-form interviews, and solo episodes are sketch pages. Each week adds a stroke, adjusts the palette, or reveals the grain of a new conversation.

Varney suggests that small differences often combine to create novelty, like the grit in an oyster that helps form a pearl. A guest’s unexpected phrase, a listener’s comment, your reply to this newsletter: integrated with one another, they generate something unique.

Looking ahead, Radio Maine Live will be a living murmuration. We won’t script the flock. We’ll create a container for listening and allow the pattern to emerge.

Where You Are in the Flock

September is motion: geese migrating under the corn moon, starlings shaping and reshaping, an egret wading patiently at the edge. Life mirrors the bay. Sometimes we fly the disciplined V, taking turns to carry the weight for others. Sometimes we join the murmuration, letting the flock’s intelligence move us through a turn we could not execute alone. Sometimes we are the egret, steady in solitude, attending closely to what the tide brings.

Wherever you find yourself this week, whether in front, middle swirl, or quiet edge, remember that you are both shaping and being shaped. The invitation is simple: notice what is around you, respond deliberately, and trust that even the smallest actions matter.

Always start where you are. Hold your map lightly. Live with presence, intention, and care.

If you are nearby, consider joining us for Radio Maine Live. Add your voice to the living pattern, and let’s see what takes shape in real time.

Reflection Prompt

Where are you in the flock this September—and what small, specific interaction will you attend to next so that a larger pattern can emerge with more grace?

✨ Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.
Warmly,
Lisa

The Turning of the Harvest

The fields are shifting. While the bright reds, golds and oranges of heirloom tomatoes continue to take center stage, the farmshare basket now carries evidence of heavier treasures: bold mauve beets and multi-colored carrots. The rhythm of the harvest is moving toward heartier foods, preparing our bodies and kitchens for the cooler autumnal months ahead. This serves as a reminder that resilience is never about holding one season forever. It is about yielding, conserving change, and finding nourishment in each turning.

Resilience as Regeneration

Lately I have been thinking deeply about resilience—not as a slogan, but as a practice. In medicine and leadership, we are so often told to be resilient, as though it were a fixed trait, the “grit” we either have or do not. But resilience, I have learned, is far more dynamic. It asks us to bend with change, to grow in response to pressures, and sometimes to let go entirely so that something new may emerge.

Just before the pandemic, I returned to family medicine as an employed physician in a larger leadership role, with imposter syndrome trailing me like an old ghost. After years of running my own practice, I wondered: was I equipped to direct others who had more longevity with that organization, and to carry the weight of systems under strain? I learned, through trial and humility, that resilience did not mean holding everything together alone. It meant cultivating the conditions in which others could step forward, where shared leadership and mutual care became the scaffolding that held us. It meant, finding the “sweet spot of confidence,” as organizational psychologist Dr. wrote in his aptly titled book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.

Resilience in leadership is being certain enough to act when necessary, but humble enough to learn when not.

Resilience is not a solitary act—it is regenerative. Human ecologist Dr. Philip Loring reminds us that regeneration in food systems, for example, is less about specific practices and more about the conservation of change: working with the natural cycles of release and renewal. He writes: “Wherever human activities actively resist natural variability and change to achieve highly structured and uniform outcomes, environmental degradation will result.” In contrast, when we honor diversity (like the diversity of the heirlooms above) and remain flexible, we create the conditions where resilience is possible.

Re-Purposing with Intention

I think of this as I place my father’s art on the walls of my home. After his passing in July 2024, my mother gifted me with several pieces, including one “paint by numbers” treasure from when he was a boy. I also received back many photographs and framed pieces of my own writing. Their weight is not only aesthetic—it is emotional, connective, a living link.

Like me, my father was a family physician. Over the course of his career, he saw his profession change dramatically, yet he remained resilient. He met each shift not with bitterness, but with intentional positivity, adapting his purpose as medicine evolved. The art he left behind now carries that same legacy of adaptation and renewal.

Here I faced a choice: to simply re-use these works as decoration, or to re-purpose them with intention. I chose the latter. Each piece has been given a place where it can speak into daily life, reminding me of my father’s creativity and our shared exchange of art and words. In this way, they become not only relics of what was, but invitations to carry his spirit forward. They remind me that resilience in grief is not about endurance alone, but about transformation.

This same lens of intentional re-purposing can extend to our own talents, skills, and knowledge. What if resilience is not about continuing in the same ways, but about using what we have differently—redeploying our gifts in new contexts, for new purposes? This is how both individuals and systems regenerate.

Lessons from Art at the Edge

This, too, is what I heard in my recent Radio Maine conversation with Portland Art Gallery artist Ann Trainor Domingue. Her work often dwells at the edges—where land meets sea, or where two figures clasp hands. She spoke of sketchbooks filled with fragments, accidents, and experiments that sometimes take years to ripen into paintings. She described the play of subtraction and addition, of sanding away or wiping over until something essential emerges.

Ann’s willingness to re-purpose fragments of older work into new pieces reflects the same principle. She leaves space for accidents, for new relationships between color and line, for the conservation of change within her own practice. In this openness lies a quiet resilience—not clinging to a single outcome, but trusting the cycles of creation, loss, revision, and renewal.

As Ann explained: “I don’t want to be so meticulous that every single stroke or line needs to be perfect… I am trying to keep a lot more open time, and that’s what this abstraction practice is allowing me to do.”

The Thread Through All Things

So I find myself returning to this truth: resilience is not about bouncing back, as if nothing happened. It is about absorbing change and emerging with new purpose. It is about re-purposing art, talents, and experiences with intention. It is about reorienting, sometimes painfully, toward the next season. It is about conserving change, whether in the soil, in leadership, in art, or in the tender act of placing a father’s painting in its new home.

Reflection Prompt: Where in your life right now are you being asked not simply to endure, but to re-purpose with intention? What would it look like to conserve change, rather than resist it?

✨ Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.
Warmly,
Lisa

Summer invites us to feel more deeply, connect more fully, and protect the sparks that give our lives meaning.

Systems, Stories, and Sparklers

Each year we celebrate summer with the Yarmouth Clam Festival, which is in full swing this weekend. Chairs line the Main Street sidewalks along the Friday night parade route. Fried dough perfumes the breeze on the Little League field. Neighbors plan reunions timed to Saturday’s road race and fireworks.

Several years ago I wrote about one of our state’s favorite hometown festivals for Maine Magazine:

My family’s history is intertwined with this celebration: we’ve flipped pancakes, sold soda, marched with Girl Scouts, ridden on parade floats, and played music under the performance tent.

Behind the joyful chaos of our beloved town gathering is something deeper: structure, stewardship, and shared responsibility. The Clam Festival endures not by magic, but by systems—built over time and stewarded by generations.

As the oldest of ten children, I’ve long witnessed the power of well-maintained systems. Good leadership models possibility—but it also creates frameworks that support it. That’s why, in addition to my medical degree, I gathered additional systems knowledge with both a master’s and a doctorate in leadership. I also earned a medical board certification in leadership.

Perhaps most importantly, I gained practical experience in leadership both professionally and personally in formal and informal roles. I firmly believe in the role of leadership to shape—and sustain—what matters. This holds true in medicine and beyond.

When the Flowers Multiply

Last week, as the first anniversary of my father’s death passed and a work chapter quietly closed, I found myself surrounded by unexpected beauty.

We’d already picked up our weekly flower share from a local farm.

Then my daughter handed me three little bouquets from an event we attended together…

and still more blossoms began appearing around the house, a domestic homage to summer’s bright bounty.

We shared one bouquet with my mother. We presented another to our son and his fiancée in celebration of their engagement.

Despite all we gave away, we still had plenty left.

Flowers from the Roadside

More than once on solo running jaunts, I’ve happened across roadside flower stands courtesy local gardeners. No matter how tired I may be, I always stop, pull the requisite crumpled bills from my pocket, and chose a few representative stems. For the rest of the route home, I run with flowers in my hand, gathering curious looks and smiles from the occupants of passing cars.

Years ago on the Bountiful Blog, I wrote about a neighbor who freely distributes her treasures without an expectation of return.

Sometimes tending the sparks means honoring the impulse in the moment: to run with wildflowers, to share what you’ve been given, to leave space on your table for whatever might bloom.

Legacy and Creative Presence

Last week’s post honored my father and his legacy. Dad was a family physician, veteran, father of ten, and the kind of leader who taught through presence and patience. I’m still learning what it means to carry forward what he left behind.

That’s the spirit in which The Bountiful Path was born. It’s also the essence of this creative body of work—designed to honor where we come from and imagine where we’re going.

This week in Substack’s Off the Wall, we featured Portland Art Gallery artist Jean Jack, whose work evokes presence, stillness, and spacious memory. Jean paints architectural forms—barns, houses, and rural churches—not with sentimentality, but with intuition:

Her compositions are often stripped back—one solitary structure, a minimal palette, quiet horizon lines. They invite us to pause. To wonder. To see what still stands.

What Neuroaesthetics Reveals

In the book Your Brain on Art, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross write:

This isn’t metaphor—it’s measurable. Neuroaesthetics is the scientific study of how engaging with art and beauty changes our brain, physiology, and behavior—revealing that creative experiences can support healing, connection, and human flourishing. As a physician and leader in both healthcare and the creative space, I’m deeply interested in how systems of care, beauty, and meaning intersect. That’s the foundation of my work: an ecosystem rooted in presence, connection, and regenerative creativity.

✨ Reflection Prompt

What are you tending right now that is quietly multiplying?

Where can you pause, notice beauty, and carry it forward?

Share your reflections in the comments—I love hearing what’s blooming in your world. Or post a picture of your favorite bloom!

What’s Ahead (and How You Can Help)

The Bountiful Path is growing into a full creative and leadership ecosystem:

• A virtual book circle will launch this fall for subscribers.

• A live version of Radio Maine is in the works—part storytelling, part community gathering.

• We are developing a signature talk and workshop on creative leadership, transitions, and sustainable systems.

• And yes, more flowers and field notes are on the way.

If this work resonates with you, please consider becoming a subscriber. Your support sustains this creative ecosystem—and helps bring more beauty, story, and structure into the world.

And if you’re new here: welcome. I’m so glad you’ve found your way to this path.

Together, let’s keep the path bountiful.

Warmly,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for joining us on this path.

Whether through a screen or in a room, in scrubs or in silence, in roles defined by title or the quiet weight of responsibility, we are the ones others turn to. We keep going. And most of the time, we do it well.

But showing up doesn’t mean we never get tired. And strength doesn’t mean we’re immune to strain. The question isn’t whether we can carry it—it’s whether we can keep carrying it without losing ourselves in the process.

This Series So Far

In the first Bountiful Path post, I wrote about how leadership often begins in the quiet—moments of stillness, reflection, and remembering what truly matters.

In the second, I explored how seemingly separate pieces of my life—medicine, art, writing, and conversation—form a kind of constellation. Individually meaningful, but more powerful when seen as part of a whole.

This third entry continues that thread by returning to the first theme I promised: healing the healer. Not in abstract terms, but in the lived reality of those who spend their days holding things together—for others, and often, for themselves.

A Story From the Bountiful Blog

Several years ago, I wrote a short post during a full season of clinical work, creative deadlines, and parenting. I had just wrapped a string of meetings, and before moving on to the next one, I sat in my parked car with the windows cracked and a clementine in my hand.

No music. No multitasking. Just light across the dashboard and the scent of citrus.

I wrote:

“This is not a grand break or a big fix. It’s a moment of being a person, not just a professional. And today, it’s enough.”

That line still rings true. Because healing isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s ten quiet minutes and a little breath of space.

What Virtual Life Doesn’t Always Show

Much of my work now—meetings, mentorship, clinical collaboration—happens virtually. The edges between intention and obligation, attention and depletion, can blur fast.

From the outside, we might look efficient. Focused. Productive.

But on the inside, our bodies often tell a different story.

This isn’t just a physician thing. It’s a human thing.

And the path back is often through the smallest door.

Art, Rhythm, and Returning to Ourselves

Portland Art Gallery artist Emma Ballou shared something similar in our recent Radio Maine conversation. She spoke of her return to Maine after years away, her barn-turned-studio filled with light, and how the act of painting was less about the finished product and more about resetting her rhythm.

“Sometimes I go to the studio just to notice,” she said. “Not to produce—just to be in it.”

Whether it’s a studio, a garden, a stretch between back-to-back calls, or a parked car with a peeled orange—we all need places where we don’t have to perform. Spaces where we can return to ourselves.

That’s what healing looks like in real time.

A Legacy of Care—and What It Asks of Us

In a recent piece I wrote for the UVM Larner College of Medicine, I reflected on my family’s multigenerational path through medicine. It’s a story I’m proud of—rooted in service, shaped by resilience.

In a family of caregivers, I’ve come to understand this:

We are born whole. We come into the world with everything we need to live and lead with integrity, presence, and care.

What we forget—what modern life often pulls us away from—is how to access it.

Tuning back in to what the body already knows takes practice. Choosing to pause, to listen, to reconnect isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a rhythm we relearn again and again.

A Question for the Week

What is one small act that helps you return to yourself—without needing to prove or produce anything?

Maybe it’s five minutes outside without your phone.

Maybe it’s painting. Or prayer. Or writing one honest sentence.

Maybe it’s eating lunch without checking anything.

Whatever it is: start there. That’s where healing begins.

Looking Ahead

Next week, I’ll turn to the second theme: From Frenzied to Focused—and share the tools, boundaries, and (ongoing) lessons I’ve gathered while trying to design a work life that restores more than it drains.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you:

What does healing look like for you right now?

Where are you making space to come back to yourself?

Let’s keep the path bountiful.

Warmly,

Lisa

In my introductory post, I shared the idea of the Bountiful Path—a way of leading with care, of tending to ourselves and those around us, and of finding meaning in both stillness and action. I also promised that we would explore four interconnected themes: healing the healer, building sustainable systems, leading with our whole selves, and the power of story.

Today, I want to begin fulfilling that promise by sharing how these themes come alive in my own life—and why they matter to all of us.

A Constellation of Care

Each of us has bright points in our lives that guide us forward—work we love, people who inspire us, creative pursuits that bring us alive. For me, these points include:

• Medicine: My work as a physician, where I see that healing is both a science and an act of human connection.

• Conversations: Interviews like the one I had this week on Radio Maine with Chip Brewer —a storyteller, improv teacher, and creative leader who reminded me that collaboration and kindness are at the heart of everything we do.

• Writing: My years of writing for the Bountiful Blog, for regional and national publications, and now for this newsletter. Writing has always been a way for me to understand the world and to listen more deeply to others.

• Art and Community: The creative spaces I’m part of, including the Portland Art Gallery, where art and conversation come together to remind us of our shared humanity.

A Personal Reflection

When my children were young, I didn’t wait for quiet moments to write. I learned to braid writing into the rhythm of my life—capturing insights between patient visits, advisory calls, and teaching sessions. Those years taught me that good work and good stories don’t have to wait for perfect conditions—they can live right in the middle of real life, if we’re willing to pay attention.

Through writing and medicine, I learned to listen. Through parenting, I learned that the smallest gestures matter. And through all of it, I learned that storytelling—whether in a medical chart, an essay, or a hallway conversation—has the power to connect and heal.

What Chip Brewer Taught Me

This week on Radio Maine, Chip Brewer talked about the importance of “sneaky bonding”—the subtle ways that teamwork and shared purpose build trust. He reminded me that storytelling isn’t about one person’s voice—it’s about listening, collaborating, and holding space for others to contribute.

In medicine, this matters. In leadership, it matters. And in our daily lives, it matters—because none of us does this alone.

Why Should You Care?

So why should you care about this constellation—about how these pieces come together?

Because in a world that often feels divided and transactional, there’s real value in remembering that:

• Healing and connection go hand in hand.

• Collaboration and kindness aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re essential.

• You don’t have to wait for the “right moment” to start weaving your own story of purpose and meaning.

These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re what make our work more effective, our relationships stronger, and our days more fulfilling.

A Promise to Keep

In the coming weeks, I’ll keep the promise I made in my first post. I’ll share practical stories from my work in medicine—how we’re building systems that nourish rather than deplete. I’ll bring you lessons from conversations like the one with Chip, where humor and presence unlock new ways of seeing. I’ll explore the practices that help me—and maybe you—stay grounded and whole in the middle of it all.

I’d love to hear from you:

• What are the bright points guiding your path?

• How do you bring them together in your own life?

Leave a comment or send me a note. Let’s build this constellation together.

A Final Invitation

Take a moment to look around your life—what pieces are already there, waiting to be connected? Your story matters, and sharing it just might light the way for someone else.

Let’s keep the path bountiful.

Warmly,

Lisa

Welcome to the very first edition of The Bountiful Path — a space for reflecting on what it means to lead with care, to build systems that nourish, and to share the stories that bind us together.

Most mornings, I begin my day in a small quiet room off our family room, borrowing a few peaceful moments to read and reflect. From this small space, I listen to the birds waking up outside, watch the way the morning light filters through the trees, and let myself remember what truly matters. These quiet moments remind me that leadership is as much about stillness as it is about action — that tending to our inner landscape is the first act of care for those we serve.

That idea — that leadership lives in the quiet spaces as much as the busy ones — is the heart of this journey.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore four interconnected themes that I believe are essential for leading in a way that sustains both ourselves and those around us:

1. Healing the Healer — tending to the self as the first act of care

2. From Frenzied to Focused — building workflows that restore rather than deplete

3. Whole-Person Leadership — showing up with your full self, not just the polished parts

4. The Power of Story — weaving narratives that heal and connect

Each of these threads has been woven through my own journey — from my earliest days shadowing my father on house calls, to my current role leading virtual-first care models that blend technology and human connection. My path has taught me again and again that leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about staying curious, listening deeply, and remembering that even the smallest gestures can create ripples of healing.

A Gentle Invitation

As you read these words, I invite you to pause. Notice what feels tender, what feels tight, and what might be calling for a breath of ease. Then ask yourself:

• How can I bring a little more spaciousness to this moment?

• How can I lead with my whole self — even the uncertain parts?

• What small measure of healing can I create today?

What’s Next

In our next edition, we’ll begin with “Healing the Healer,” sharing practical practices and real stories of leaders who have learned to care for themselves as fiercely as they care for others.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you — what stories or practices help you stay steady in your own work? Your reflections are part of this journey.

Until then, let’s keep the path bountiful.

With warmth and gratitude,

Lisa