Last week at Radio Maine Live, Emergence and Light at the Portland Art Gallery, we spent an evening celebrating what rises in spring. We talked about light returning, creative energy gathering, and the ways new growth often begins before we can fully see it. A few days later, out running on Cousins Island, I found myself on the other side of that conversation.

For all the beauty I often write about on Littlejohn Island—the water, the causeway, the trails, the light—we live inside ordinary infrastructure too. Littlejohn is attached by causeway to Cousins Island, and Cousins, in turn, connects us to mainland Yarmouth. Cousins is larger, with different neighborhoods, familiar roads, sidewalks, and the trails many of us use to walk and run.

Cousins has stop signs, not stoplights, so even the temporary red light on the main road felt like a small dislocation: the familiar landscape asking us to pause in an unfamiliar way. I thought the construction might block the northern part of the West Side Trail, so I ran south, only to find that route interrupted, too. Eventually, I wove my way around the closures and headed to Madeleine Point on the western shore.

On the way, I ran past a house I had noticed for the first time just weeks before, one that a fire had badly damaged.

Emergence has an underside. Whatever rises has done so after something else has ended. Spring not only points us toward what has been lost. It also asks us to notice what remains, what returns, and what might yet be rebuilt.

Every path has waypoints. Some are marked. Some are not.

This essay is about one of the unmarked ones. A waypoint many of us walk through, though it rarely has a name. I write it with particular people in mind: colleagues, patients, and friends who have been quietly moving through their own kinds of change. I write it for the readers I imagine on the other side of this page who may be walking there too.

The house I had run past before

I had not set out that morning to think about endings. The run pointed me there.

Back on Littlejohn Island, I thought about the charred structure I had passed. It is a strange thing to run past a place close to home and realize how completely a fire has changed it, and stranger still to realize the event happened some time ago. Because this is not a part of the island I pass regularly unless I am running that way, the house had continued its quiet aftermath without me.

Later, I did what storytellers often do: I tried to learn what had happened. I discovered that the final occupant had died before the fire, which brought a certain relief. This had not been, it seemed, a night when someone stood outside watching their own home disappear. No one lost their home to flame that night.

Still, the charred structure unsettled me.

It is haunting to see what once held a life now standing as blackened beams and open sky.

It reminded me of another burned structure I had come across while traveling to Cayman Brac: a fire I could find no clear history for when I went to investigate. The structure may once have been a gathering place or business. I do not know. There was no sign explaining it, no story to read, only the remains themselves. The mind tries to complete what the landscape leaves unfinished.

A change does not always announce itself. A house burns, but no family stands outside wrapped in blankets. A life ends, but the structure remains. A place changes, but there is no gathering to mark it. The shift is visible and invisible at once, and the one carrying it is often alone in noticing.

On Madeleine Point, even around the burned house, the grass keeps growing. The shed still stands. The road continues past it. The island, with all its ordinary complications, keeps asking us to move carefully through what has changed.

The language for it

For a long time, we did not have words for this kind of ache. The language has been slow to catch up.

Pauline Boss, who spent decades on the family social science faculty at the University of Minnesota, devoted her career to finding language for it. She called it an ambiguous loss: the ending that does not arrive with a death certificate or a clean goodbye. Her work describes two shapes. The first is physical absence with psychological presence, a family member missing in war, or a colleague who moved away without a goodbye. The second is physical presence with psychological absence, a parent whose mind is slipping, a friend who has changed beyond recognition.

Kenneth Doka, professor emeritus at the College of New Rochelle, coined a related term in 1989. His term, disenfranchised grief, describes the kinds of losses a culture does not fully recognize, and therefore does not always help us mourn. The end of a job that mattered. The collapse of a long-held identity. The quiet exit from a role no one marked with a ceremony.

Both are common. Both are real. Both tend to travel alongside a person without a place to set them down.

I offer these terms not to make the essay heavier, but to make the experience more understandable. Naming something does not require us to stay inside it forever. Sometimes the name is the first doorway back toward movement.

When it comes to job transitions, many people are going through them right now. Some are by choice. Retirement, for example, can offer a perceived upside. Others arrive when an employer abruptly cuts a position, for financial or other reasons. They often seem to carry very little positive potential.

Many transitions are more mixed than our categories allow. A person can feel relief and sadness, freedom and displacement, hope and disorientation, all at once. The old structure may no longer be livable, but that does not mean we know yet what comes next.

What the naming offers

In my clinical experience, something quietly changes when a difficult transition gets a name.

Patients who have been carrying an ache no one around them acknowledged often settle a little when it is named. The weight does not vanish. It becomes legible. A legible weight is easier to share with a friend. Easier to put on your own list of things worth tending. Easier to stop pretending it is nothing.

The first help, in almost every case, is the naming.

The next help is noticing what remains.

After a fire, the question is not only what burned. It is also what still stands.

What can we clean? What can’t we save? What deserves to be carried forward? What must we release before we can build a safer foundation?

Why this may matter for you

All of the literature I have read on transitions, and much of what we have written about on The Bountiful Path before, agrees on one thing. Growth itself is good. A life that keeps moving through new seasons is the life most of us want. But being inside the movement is not always comfortable. Growth has friction. Friction is not a failure of growth; it is part of it.

If you are walking through a waypoint like this one right now — a role that ended quietly, a relationship that shifted without a conversation, or a version of yourself that no longer quite fits — the thing you are carrying has a name. It is a real kind of transition, and it may include grief, without being only grief. It is more common than the quiet it travels in would suggest.

One small practice, if you want it: write down what you are carrying. One line. Not a solution, just an acknowledgment. You might also write a second line: what remains? Tell one person whose presence you trust. A named ache is lighter than a private one, not because the ache shrinks, but because the company widens.

Pause + Reflect:

What change in your life has been hard to name because something, or someone, still remains?

Leave a comment

Back at Madeleine Point, more dinghies ride at the float in anticipation of their summer boat companions. The shed on the burned property still stands. Spring in Maine is rerouting itself along its own schedule.

The temporary stoplight still asks drivers and runners to pause. The closed trail still asks us to choose another way. The burned house still asks us to look without turning away. The green grass, coming up around it, asks us to remember that return is rarely simple, but it is real.

Next week on The Bountiful Path, the second half of this reflection: the neutral zone, William Bridges, and what it means to walk a transition on purpose.

Until then…

May we name what has ended, even quietly. May we let the ache become legible. May we keep each other company on the unmarked parts of the path.

May we notice, with care, what is still standing.

✨ 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.

Within the past two weeks, daffodils have begun appearing in the woods near our house on Littlejohn Island.

We did not plant them. No one in our family tucked those bulbs into the ground in some long-ago autumn moment, hoping for this exact burst of yellow months later. Yet there they were, bright against the brown leaves and bare branches, visible before much in the woods had yet opened to meet them.

Other spring flowers feel more intentional. For the past few years, we’ve had lupines on the slope in front of our stone wall. We know where we placed them. We have watched for their return. In Maine, especially, where spring arrives in its own order, there is satisfaction in recognizing the blooms we planned for and patiently awaited.

Relationships can be like that, too.

Some are planted carefully over time, tended with consistency and intention. Others arrive more like daffodils in the woods: unexpected, vivid, already rooted before we fully understand how they got there. Both matter. Both can become part of the landscape of a life.

I found both on display, in different settings, during these weeks of blooming daffodils.

First, we held Radio Maine Live Emergence and Light at the Portland Art Gallery last week. We were surrounded by the gallery artists' work, including those featured at the recent opening: Ryan Kohler, Bibby Gignilliat, Sarah Verardo, and Willa Vennema.

Dr. Emily Isaacson, Christopher O’Connor, Heather Shields, and Dr. Deirdre Heersink joined us for the panel presentation in front of a room filled with friends, family, and colleagues. Some of these people have been part of my life for decades. Others I have come to know more recently. The room held both kinds of relationship at once: the carefully tended and the newly unfolding.

Before the formal conversation even began, people were already gathering in little clusters in front of the art. They came early. They found one another easily. When the evening ended, many stayed. That is one of the surest signs that a gathering has worked. People keep talking at the edges of the room long after the program has formally concluded, because the real exchange is still happening.

What the room asked of people

I was struck, as I often am, by the courage of our speakers.

Some people are very comfortable speaking in public when the topic is business, mission, or expertise. Radio Maine Live was something else. The questions occasionally took people to tender places in their lives.

During the conversation, I asked one of the panelists about her father, who had passed away not long before my own father. My mother was in the audience. I felt myself growing emotional as I asked the question, and I suspect my mother did too. We were speaking about two deeply loved fathers, two very large presences in our lives, and what it means to continue building a life after that kind of loss.

Another panelist’s parents were seated in the front row, both very much alive, watching with eager attention. The room held grief and gratitude at once, and absence and presence with them.

A good room can hold that kind of complexity.

The Maine connections we do not plan

Much of the evening felt distinctly Maine, though with just enough Ireland sprinkled in to be interesting.

One woman came to the gallery because she was familiar with Dr. Emily Isaacson’s organization, Classical Uprising. As the evening unfolded, it turned out that this woman had grown up in the same town as my mother, and her sister had been in the same high school class as Mom. I never tire of these discoveries. A connection you did not see coming is suddenly uncovered, and the room feels both larger and smaller at once.

That, too, felt like the daffodils in the woods.

Unexpected and entirely perfect.

An evening like Radio Maine Live is also built on forethought. We think carefully about whom to invite as speakers. We try to create a panel with enough range to be interesting and enough overlap to be coherent. We nearly always include an artist because the creative life changes what becomes possible in a room.

This time, Christopher O’Connor spoke about his work with the plain fluency of an artist who has lived in more than one landscape, drawing on Ireland and on the way the place continues to shape how he sees.

The family of one of the panelists ended up taking home a piece of Christopher’s work. We had planted the bulbs, in a sense. Something was indeed gathered in.

What books and art make possible

As a physician, I have long been interested in how connection shapes health, though we do not always treat it with the same seriousness as sleep, movement, or food. The more I read in this area, the more convinced I am that relationships, beauty, and shared experience are not extras. They are part of what holds us up.

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine includes positive social connections among the pillars of health. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s work on loneliness and social isolation helped bring greater attention to the importance of our relationships. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has spent decades arriving at a similarly grounded conclusion: relationships shape health and life satisfaction in lasting ways.

Books and art seem to do adjacent work.

In 2019, Daisy Fancourt and Andrew Steptoe published a study in The BMJ that tracked more than 6,000 adults in England over 14 years. Adults who attended museums, galleries, concerts, or theater at least once or twice a year had a meaningfully lower risk of dying during the study period than those who did not, even after accounting for income, education, and underlying health. Literary reading points in a similar direction. Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar have shown that readers of literary fiction tend to score higher on tests of empathy and social cognition than non-readers. A novel gives us time inside the thinking of someone who is not us. We often come back out changed, even slightly.

None of this turns a painting into a prescription or a novel into an elixir.

What it does suggest is that attention, beauty, story, and shared experience are not ornamental. They shape the lives we are able to live.

We felt some version of that in the gallery.

We felt it in the willingness of panelists to speak honestly. We felt it in the front row attentiveness of family members. We felt it in the conversations that continued after the formal program was over. We felt it in the simple fact that people came early and stayed late.

A second room

A few days later, we met again online for The Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle. I’ll return to this in the upcoming Books on the Boat post. It belongs here, though, because it carried a similar spirit to Radio Maine Live. Some of the participants were people I have known for decades. Others I was meeting in the moments after their faces came up on the screen.

One person joined us from across the ocean in a different time zone and brought a TEDx talk rather than a book, which was perfectly welcome. English was not his first language; he listened to all of us and spoke back in his own register. We all welcomed one another.

Books do this. Rooms do too.

A good book read in company becomes more than a book. It becomes a place where people can meet one another a little differently.

Civility and attention can change the feel of a room. Books and art often help create that same condition.

Why this may matter for you

If you have felt recently that your circle has narrowed, or that the sound of a full room asks more of you than it once did, you are not alone. The past few years have left many of us feeling more uncertain, and at times more tentative in rooms full of people. Part of the antidote is to keep moving, gently, toward community. Connection is not what we do after the serious work of the day is done. It is part of the serious work itself.

It is as serious as the daffodils, daring to show their frilly faces on a cool Maine morning in spring, and as hopeful.

Pause + Reflect:

What in your life feels more like daffodils in the woods than a bulb you knowingly planted?

Leave a comment

✨ 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.

I spotted the treehouse while running along the West Side Trail on Cousins Island this week. It belongs to a neighbor’s child. I’ve no doubt passed it dozens of times and barely registered it, hidden as it typically is by a full canopy of oak and maple. In mid-April the leaves are still forming here in Maine, and the structure sat plainly visible against the grey sky: plywood platform, a railing, a wooden ladder. Nothing about it appeared to have changed recently. The branches had simply not yet filled in enough to hide it.

Or maybe I was just ready to see it that day.

When I was young, my father built us a similar treehouse. He was a family physician for nearly fifty years, and on weekends he worked with his hands: lumber, tools, the physical work of building something a child could climb. There is a photograph of all ten of us lined up in the treehouse, arranged along the railing, taken from below. We may have used it for the Christmas card that year.

I remember the plywood floor, the way it smelled like sawdust and rain. I would climb up with a book and sit with the birds in the branches around me, calling out to one another in coded refrains.

Stories passed between us, with and without words, high above the ordinary world.

The element that bends

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, spring belongs to the Wood element. Wood governs growth, vision, and the capacity to push upward and outward after months of stillness. It is the energy of a plan forming, a shoot pressing through cold soil, and a branch extending toward light it has not yet reached.

The trouble with Wood is not growth itself. The trouble is an inability to bend.

I tell my patients a version of this: picture a tree in a hurricane. A tree of moderate size, rooted well, with enough flexibility in its trunk to move with the wind, will hold its ground. The storm passes. The tree is still standing. A tree that has grown too large or become too fixed in its own architecture may snap in half. The break happens not because the storm is stronger than the tree, but because the tree has lost the capacity to flex.

We carry this in our bodies. In the muscles along the sides of the ribs, in the tendons of the hips, in the jaw we clench without noticing. The Wood element, when it flows, gives us direction and the steady force that moves a season forward. When it stagnates, we feel stuck, irritable, brittle in places we used to bend.

We built the Bountiful Path Spring Seasonal Reflection Toolkit around this idea. The Wood phase invites us to notice where we are growing freely and where we have stopped flexing. Where we are reaching toward something new and where we are gripping what no longer serves. The toolkit walks through this in detail, one question at a time, because the body often knows before the mind does.

The view from higher up

A tree, of course, does more than grow. It is rooted in soil and reaches toward open sky. It interacts with every element in the natural world: the water that feeds it, the fire of sunlight that drives its chemistry, the earth that holds it, the metal of minerals drawn up through its roots. It is home to birds, insects, squirrels, the occasional child with a book. It is also the place where humans climb to see things differently.

During our Artful Escapes event last fall, my co-host shared photographs from a resort built entirely in the trees. He and his partner had stayed in one of the sky-bourne dwellings. His images showed structures nestled amidst large branches, connected by walkways and ladders.

Adults who have built entire professional lives, who keep calendars and manage obligations, will travel across the world to sleep in trees.

The plywood floor. The shift in perspective when the ground drops away by ten or twelve feet and the familiar landscape rearranges. The sound of wind in branches without a wall between you and it. We will go a long way to get back to this.

What the bare branches reveal

On Littlejohn Island this week, the buds are swelling on the oaks. They are not yet open. The treehouse I passed on my run will disappear again in a few weeks, folded into green, invisible from the trail. For now, in this particular window of April, the bare branches have made it plain.

The spring that arrived in Virginia as dogwood and cherry blossoms is still working its way north. The ground is soft. The light is longer. The Wood element is doing what it does: pressing upward, reaching outward, testing flexibility as it goes.

Shel Silverstein’s tree gave everything it had and remained rooted. Wood gives itself away and remains standing.

My father, who built the treehouse that held ten children and a Christmas card, understood this. He spent his weekdays listening to patients and his weekends building things with his hands. He knew that the strongest structures are the ones that give a little. That roots matter more than height. That sometimes the best use of a Saturday is to build a platform twelve feet off the ground and let your children see the world from there.

The treehouse on the West Side Trail is still visible this week. The leaves will come. The canopy will close. In the meantime, the structure sits in plain sight, waiting for the child who knows the way up.

Pause + Reflect:

What did you see differently from up high as a child, and where do you go now when you need that shift in perspective?

Leave a comment

May we grow and remain flexible. May we keep climbing to see the familiar from a new height. May we build platforms for the people who come after us, and trust that the branches will hold.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

If you are nearby this evening (April 16), we hope you will join us for Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light at the Portland Art Gallery. 5:00–7:00 pm. Free and open to the public

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

Spring reading, a little differently

This week we are again far away from Littlejohn Island. I’ve accompanied my husband to a borrowed shoreline where he is engaged in an amateur radio contest. We are both working remotely, and I’ve been assembling this week’s posts from a place that looks nothing like our beloved Pine Tree State. This island is lush in a way that March in Maine simply refuses to be: a verdant green canopy, roadsides resplendent with the yellow-flowered Turnera triglandulosa, and air so warm it feels like something we could fold and carry home.

On our morning runs, the iridescent parrots are not alone in their treetop navigation. Migrating birds stop here too, some just briefly, some for months, drawn south by something older than any map. A trail sign we passed identified indigo buntings, summer tanagers, hooded warblers, and rose-breasted grosbeaks, all moving through. Some people who know us well suggest that my husband and I belong in that same category. We do have a tendency to follow warmth.

Here, spring has already arrived in full force. Back home on Littlejohn, it is still gathering itself. Watching one season rush forward while imagining another still thawing sharpens the mind in useful ways.

That makes this an especially fitting moment to present a quick lineup of nonfiction books about medicine, my chosen profession, and the many ways it keeps changing.

Before we left Littlejohn Island, one of our sons visited with his young family. He is now an attending physician in his first year of practice, and we share the habit of browsing each other's shelves, and hearing each other’s professional ponderings, with the same reflexive curiosity. He picked up a book about medicine that I had read many years before and asked what I thought of it. I appreciated his wanting my opinion. I have always kept shelves dense with medically-oriented reading. Not textbooks, but the kind of books that ask harder questions about what medicine is for, where it succeeds, where it fails, and what it owes the people it serves. My son and I don't always reach the same conclusions. We weren't trained in the same era, and we practice differently. But we keep asking the same kinds of questions. That, it seems to me, is what matters.

As some readers may remember, the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle is coming up next month, and my co-host Karen Longfellow (also a long-time medical professional) and I know that some readers are more drawn to nonfiction than novels. This week’s four books have been sitting together for a few months, waiting for the right moment for me to share them here. I have been reading them, thinking about them, and letting their contents settle.

Each one approaches medicine from a different angle. Each one also, in its own way, presses medicine to stay open to revision, which strikes me as the central question of spring. Together, they offer a portrait of a field still learning, still correcting itself, and still trying to care for human beings with wisdom and humility.

Why this feels timely this spring

Spring asks us to notice what is emerging.

In medicine, emergence rarely arrives neatly. New knowledge comes with questions. New tools come with tradeoffs. New confidence sometimes turns out to be misplaced. One season’s certainty becomes the next season’s revision.

These books sit in that living space between hope and uncertainty, which may be one reason they feel right to me now.

Each one opens a different window: the cell, the screen, the daily work of health, and the institutional blind spot. Taken together, they feel less like separate titles and more like an ongoing conversation about care, about attention, and about what it means to remain human inside a profession that so often asks us to move quickly.

Listening at the level of the cell

We begin at the cellular level, with The Song of the Cell by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee.

It is the longest and most meditative of the four, rich with history, biology, and the unfolding story of how we have come to understand the cell. For me, this book lands close to home.

I have cared for patients with cancer throughout my career. More recently, I was present as my father died from cancer. That changes how one reads a book like this. It brings the science nearer. It makes the history feel personal.

When I started medical school, cancer treatment was entering a more hopeful era, though we were still far from where we are now. Surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy could sometimes prolong life, sometimes palliate, sometimes leave us in murkier territory. Today, targeted therapies shaped by very specific cellular characteristics have changed that landscape.

My father lived years longer because of advances that would have seemed nearly unimaginable when I was training.

Mukherjee writes with historical depth and a sense of wonder, never losing sight of what is at stake. He offers hope without sentimentality, which I value. He reminds us that cancer is not one thing. It is many cellular stories, many ecosystems, many lives. That feels like emergence too: not tidy, not linear, but alive.

Care across distance, care across doubt

From the inner life of the cell, the next book broadens our perspective to the systems through which people actually receive care. Written by Chris Rovin, Jared Sheehan, Dr. Talib Omer, and Michael Ashley, Skip the Waiting Room is a quicker read, focused on virtual health and its power to transform access to care.

Before I say more about the book itself, let me tell you about a patient. She had diabetes and was profoundly hearing impaired, living with the long health consequences of congenital rubella, and a distrust of medical providers who may not always have had her best interests at heart. Her health was fragile. During Covid, she was reluctant to come into the office. She was willing, though, to meet by video with an interpreter. Over a series of visits, we rebuilt trust and got her blood sugar back on track. That is what telehealth can do when it is working. It can open a door that would otherwise stay closed.

I came to Skip the Waiting Room with additional experience in virtual medicine on a larger scale. I spent a year on the leadership team of a virtual care startup, and before that sat in senior leadership conversations during Covid, when patient access had to be reimagined in real time within our health system.

Those experiences came back to me vividly while recording a recent episode of A Healthy Conversation from here, thousands of miles from home. My co-host and I interviewed Dr. Jim Jarvis about medicine and medical education, the three of us connecting not only across different time zones but also different practice contexts. Jim is a family physician, as I have been for decades. Jim, Jeff and I have all held medical leadership positions. The conversation kept revealing how differently each of us had arrived at similar commitments, and how much common ground still ran beneath all that difference.

That tension, between individual perspective and shared purpose, is one reason I pay attention to where authors are writing from. Three of the four authors of Skip the Waiting Room founded QuickMD, so the book naturally carries a telehealth-forward point of view.

I do not see that as a flaw. I see it as a useful reminder that authorship always carries context. Knowing an author’s vantage point matters when we choose our sources, especially in medicine, where perspective shapes what gets emphasized and what gets left aside.

What interested me here was not only the argument for telemedicine, but also the historical perspective the book offers. Virtual care did not suddenly appear during Covid. The modality has a longer arc, and the book traces some of that history with care.

It also traces how skepticism, institutional caution, and the friction of reimbursement structures held the technology in a kind of suspended animation for years, even as the tools ripened. That sits in interesting tension with other moments in medicine when new practices spread too fast, confidence racing well ahead of evidence.

Some changes arrive too slowly because of doubt, bureaucracy, or habit. Others arrive too fast. Wisdom lives somewhere in the discernment between the two.

What that patient’s story keeps reminding me, and what this book reinforces, is that when we widen the ways people can access care, we reach people who might otherwise go unseen. Virtual care is not the answer to everything. The emergence this book tracks is still incomplete. But the door it describes is real. In the right setting, virtual care can open a door that would otherwise stay closed.

The daily work of tending health

Once access is on the table, the next question feels inevitable: what kind of health are we trying to help people build in the first place?

That question leads naturally to Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means.

I received this book as a gift and read it before Means’s name began appearing more widely in the news.

Means advocates for a broader, more proactive view of health, one that includes metabolism, lifestyle, prevention, mindfulness, and time in nature. As a family and preventive medicine physician who has long valued lifestyle medicine and integrative approaches, I found much to appreciate.

Some of her ideas align with my own experience. Others I hold more loosely. That feels fine to me. A useful book does not have to produce total agreement.

Here is my honest read: if you want to claim a more active role in your own health, covering metabolism, movement, food, sleep, and time outdoors, this book hands you both the vocabulary and a scaffold for that conversation with your doctor. Clinicians will likely find themselves nodding at parts, pushing back at others, and dog-earing pages for specific patients. That is the right way to hold it: not as a final verdict, but as a point of entry. Health, this book insists, is not simply the absence of disease. It is something built, layer by layer, choice by choice.

Where certainty frays

That broader view of health also requires us to ask harder questions about what medicine gets wrong. Blind Spots by Dr. Marty Makary turns directly toward that discomfort.

He examines the places where medicine has moved with confidence in the wrong direction. That subject has haunted many of us who have practiced for decades.

Makary points to examples that are now familiar, though they were once treated as settled truth: delaying peanut exposure in young children, overprescribing antibiotics, vilifying foods like eggs, and perhaps most painfully, the overuse of opioids and the suffering that followed.

I felt this book in a particularly personal way. Throughout my career, I have often questioned recommendations that were broadly accepted by the medical establishment.

Sometimes I raised those concerns as an individual clinician. Sometimes as a leader within healthcare organizations. Sometimes those questions mattered. Sometimes they changed very little.

Looking back and saying I told you so offers no comfort when real people paid the price.

I did not agree with all of Blind Spots either. That feels important to name. Even so, I appreciated its larger insistence that medicine should never become too certain of itself.

For me, the book’s value lies less in agreeing with every claim than in its call to remain alert, independent, and humane in our thinking. That call feels especially sharp in spring, a season that tears through winter's certainties without pausing for consensus.

Why this feels close right now

You do not need to be a clinician for these books to matter.

You may be trying to make sense of your own health. You may be helping a parent navigate cancer, chronic illness, or a complicated medical system. You may be wondering which voices to trust in a moment when medical information comes at us in fragments, headlines, podcasts, and social media clips.

You may simply be trying to live more attentively inside your own body and your own season of life.

That is one reason I wanted to gather these four books together now. They invite a reader to stay curious without becoming cynical. They ask us to notice context, to ask better questions, to resist false certainty, and to remember that caring for human beings requires both knowledge and humility.

That feels especially timely this spring, when so much in the natural world is beginning again, and so much in our human world still asks for patience, discernment, and care.

What I’d like medicine to remember

What ties these books together is not that they all agree. They do not. It is that each one asks medicine to remain awake.

That, to me, is one of the deepest forms of narrative medicine: staying alert to the human story beneath the data, the guideline, the protocol, the trend.

In a recent solo episode of The Bountiful Path on Radio Maine, we talked about margins. Not the margins of a page, but the margins of a day. The pause before answering a difficult question. The few minutes after an appointment when a patient finally says what they came to say. The quiet that opens when the formal agenda closes.

I have come to believe that medicine’s most important work often happens there, in those unscheduled, unoptimized spaces. So does much of our most honest thinking. After my father died, I could no longer move through days at the same pace. I needed margins to absorb what had changed.

These four books, in different ways, ask us to protect those spaces rather than fill them.

I think about my son reaching for a book off my shelf. I think about the conversation with Jeff and Jim: three physicians comparing notes across miles of open air. I think about the warblers on that trail sign, pressing north again after their long crossing.

Cells matter. Access matters. Lifestyle matters. Skepticism matters. So does humility.

Medicine is not only science. It is also art, judgment, presence, and relationship. Trial and error are part of both art and science.

Covid reminded us of that in a very public way. People were told to follow the science, then felt betrayed when conclusions shifted. Science, of course, is not a monument. It is a process. A hypothesis tested today may be revised tomorrow.

Most clinicians I know are doing the best they can with the information available to them at the time. That reality does not excuse complacency. It calls for deeper responsibility.

These books, in different ways, ask us to look again, think again, and care again.

📚 Your Turn

Are you reaching for books that offer answers this spring, or books that help you ask better questions? I’d love to know what’s on your stack, and whether any of these four might find a place there.

Leave a comment

If you are joining our Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle and prefer nonfiction, perhaps one of these titles might speak to you.

A deeper-water boat stack for spring

This week’s books are deeper-water reads, even the shorter ones.

They invite reflection, conversation, and a willingness to stay curious.

Medicine, growth, spring: none of them arrive on schedule, and none of them apologize for it.

I carry Littlejohn with me from this distant island. Reading here, in borrowed warmth, among birds that cross hemispheres and return, has reminded me why I keep the shelves so full.

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

Lisa

P.S. Wondering about the amateur radio contest connection? Learn more through my conversation with here.

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

No assigned book. Bring whatever you are reading right now, or choose a title that resonates from past Books on the Boat posts. If you would like to loosely connect your reading to the season, consider a book that helps you notice renewal, creativity, resilience, or change.

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

The leeward side of the house

My morning nook faces north, and despite this being the windward position, I feel sheltered within the walls of my tiny room.

Most days I light a candle as a natural counterpoint to the dragonfly lamp that illuminates my pages.

Today this especially important. The scene outside my window is layered gray. There is no obvious sun. No bright edge on the horizon.

My attention shifts to what I hear.

Outside, the soundscape is both sharp and blurred. Gulls and crows call over the rising wind that tells us the storm is near. Earlier, for just a moment, we heard the more lyrical notes of a songbird from the leeward side of the house, protected from the gusts.

Inside, the hands of the copper wall clock reach for the next second; the next minute; the next hour. One metallic tick after another.

Objectively, time is measured in the same way, morning, noon and night. Still, time feels different depending on circumstance. Similarly, where we find shelter changes our experience of weather.

Maybe the songbird is providing us with our practice for this week: find the leeward side, then return there on purpose.

Analog bodies, digital weather

The passing of time and experience of weather reminds us that we are analog bodies living in a digital world. Nothing can change that fact.

Our nervous systems still respond to light, sound, touch, temperature, and breath. Our attention still lives in the body. When we forget that, the body speaks up in the only language it has: tension, fatigue, restlessness, and disconnection.

I love many things about the digital world, including what I can learn, how I can connect, and how I can communicate. For me, it is always balanced by what my body tells me it loves. Those loves are most often analog.

I have been intrigued by the recently popular idea of an “analog bag,” which contains things we can do instead of going online. This has resonated with people of all ages because sometimes we grab a phone (or other digital companion) simply because we do not have a nearby “next thing:” we have nothing within reach that helps us shift state.

I’ve always had a variety of analog hobbies, some of which fit neatly in a bag, and others that do not.

Here are a few recent analog activities that are bringing me joy:

• Paper books. I never gave them up.

• Chopping winter root vegetables and seeing the brilliant colors of beets emerge from the peel.

• Pulling silk thread through needlepoint canvas, imagining the day I might share it with my daughter.

• Spreading cerulean and cerise hues across watercolor paper.

• Plucking notes from my guitar, finding a chord on the keyboard, hearing what my voice can make.

These are not productivity hacks. They are returns. They bring me back to sensation, and sensation brings me back to aliveness.

Writing work and the relief of the real

As I continue to evolve my larger writing projects, these analog returns feel even more important. I recently completed a draft of a longer non-fiction piece that began many years ago, grounded in writing I have done over time, both for publication and not.

It has been fascinating to compare my earlier self with my current self through old blog posts from a very different stage of life. The scenes are familiar, and the meaning shifts. I interpret the stories differently now. I may eventually share them differently.

What stays constant are the sensations and emotions. The body truth of who I was in those moments. I was always an analog body living an analog life. I was simply trying to describe it in a way that might help others find commonality, often using digital means.

Last month I came across a news article featuring choral groups that have formed specifically for people who love to sing but do not feel they can carry a tune. No auditions. No performance pressure. Just voices, together.

The article made me think of my father.

My mother has a beautiful voice. So do my children. The same could not be said of my otherwise gifted father.

Despite this, I loved hearing Dad sing at church. He did not let the fact that his voice was not “beautiful” keep him from lifting it in faith, praise and celebration.

My father would have categorized his own voice more as gull or crow than songbird.

And yet, he sang.

Dad sang while holding his children and grand-children, like his father before him, shifting back and forth on our creaky rocking chair.

He lulled us each to sleep with “Alouette,” “Frere Jacques,” and other ditties reminiscent of our French-Canadian heritage.

I would give anything to hear his voice again.

Radio Maine: Finding your voice with Aubrey Calaway of Foghorn

This week on Radio Maine, we spoke with Aubrey Calaway, the director of Foghorn, an audio collective and coworking space in Portland, Maine.

Our conversation kept returning to the body.

Aubrey traced audio storytelling back to early human gathering, and even earlier, to voice as vibration and connection. We talked about how easily humans mimic the voices we admire, especially in audio, and how “finding your voice” often requires stepping away from the script long enough to tell the story to a friend.

Not reading. Not performing. Simply telling.

It is also where the nervous system softens, because you are no longer trying to sound like someone else.

Off the Wall: Margot Hartford and the joy of the tactile

Off the Wall this week features Portland Art Gallery artist Margot Hartford, whose work feels like a bright answer to digital perfectionism.

Margot blends photography with mixed media, collage, and image transfer. She prints photographs onto acetate, lays them over prepared surfaces like wood, glass, or metal, then lifts the image with transfer solution. The results carry texture and surprise. They are alive in the way handmade things are alive.

One line from her process stayed with me. “When I discovered this transfer method, bells went off,” she says. “It was thrilling.”

Margot’s work is a reminder that experimentation is not a detour. It is a way back to wonder. It is also a quiet permission slip for those of us who keep trying to get everything “right” before we begin.

Solo episode: Seeds and stitches that outlast us

This week’s Radio Maine solo episode, “The Thread That Holds” is dedicated to the two patients who gave me small mementoes that still grace the walls of our home.

One is a framed passage often attributed to Oscar Romero. It begins, “This is what we are about,” and includes the line, “We plant seeds that one day will grow.” I remember the day a patient gave it to me, and how the words landed with simple clarity. In medicine, leadership, and parenting, much of the work is quiet. Much of it is long term.

The second piece is a crocheted textile made by the elderly mother of a former patient. Her daughter handed it to me at our final appointment and said, “My mother wanted you to have it.” The pattern is intricate. It carries patience and presence in every stitch.

Together these pieces remind me that influence is rarely immediate. It is the slow accumulation of moments. It is care offered without certainty of recognition.

Sometimes our job is not to complete the story. It is to contribute a thread.

Why this may matter for you

If you have been feeling scattered, numb, or strangely lonely in the middle of constant connection, it may not be a motivation problem. It may be an environment problem.

Your body is not asking you to be perfect. It is asking you to be here. Often, “here” is built from small, faithful actions. Seeds planted. Stitches made. Songs sung even when the voice is not polished.

We cannot do everything. There is liberation in that. We can still offer a thread.

Pause + Reflect:

What is one analog thread in your life you can name—an object, a person, or a practice—that brings you steadiness and joy?
What is one tiny physical way you could honor it this week?

Leave a comment

The wind will rise. The world will stay loud. The landscape will go gray again.

You can still choose your leeward side. A candle. A basket. A stitch. A voice lifted, even when it is not perfect.

We cannot do everything. We can, however, do something. We can gather what endures. We can return.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

Doorway Ritual: Word → Ritual → Share

🕊️ Word: Gather

Ritual (for you): Build a Thread Basket where your hand already reaches.
Choose one spot you often scroll by default (kettle, couch, bedside, work bag). Place a small basket or tote there with three analog returns:

1. One page (a book, poem, crossword)

2. One thread (needlepoint, mending, crochet, simple sketch kit)

3. One sound (a song you sing with, a tiny instrument, a single written lyric)

When the urge to check hits, touch the basket first and choose one item for two minutes. Not to be productive. To come back.

Share: “The thread I am strengthening today is ______.”

Team / Partner variant: Before a meeting or meal, try 60 seconds with phones down. One breath. One sentence: “Here is what would help me be present.”

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

Leaving one season, landing in another

The visit with our younger daughter and her husband for her Valentine’s Day birthday carried us quickly from one season into another, and back again, this past weekend.

Savannah has already started to loosen into early spring. Camellias blooming. Air soft enough to leave our coats behind as we enjoyed the Riverwalk, a visit to a local company for a beekeeping tour, and other adventures.

Returning from Georgia, we flew through snow in New York, and landed once more in what has proven to be a bracing Maine winter.

The contrast was a reminder that seasons are never universal. They’re interpreted differently depending on where we stand, what calendar we follow, and what cultural lenses shape our understanding of time.

Two new years and one Tuesday

Today is Mardi Gras. A precursor to Lent (the time leading up to Easter in the Christian church), “Fat Tuesday” also represents a cultural choreography: abundance before restraint, celebration before quiet, and music before stillness.

This year, Mardi Gras overlaps with another threshold. The Lunar New Year begins today, opening the Year of the Fire Horse for China and other Asian countries.

The Islamic month of Ramadan will coincide with Lent this year as well.

One tradition says: feast, dance, gather, make noise. Another says: begin again, clean the slate, honor lineage, step forward with intention.

Different languages for the same human longing: we want a doorway.

Members of my own extended family celebrate Lent, the Lunar New Year, and Ramadan, which makes each of these a lived reality rather than an abstract idea.

Because I’ve long practiced both family medicine and acupuncture, the Lunar New Year holds significance for me, particularly as related to healing traditions. It isn’t just a cultural curiosity. It provides a way to understand cycles of health, energy, and transformation.

Calendars, whether solar, lunar, liturgical or civil, offer frameworks that connect with neuroscience. The brain’s capacity to reorganize itself through neuroplasticity continues throughout the lifespan. When we decide to shed an old pattern or learn a new way of being, our brains physically rewire to support that change.

We are, quite literally, built to begin again.

The Wisdom of Peeling Back

This week on Radio Maine, we spoke with Brian Petrovek. Brian, a former sports executive who brought professional hockey to Maine, is in a different season now—serving on boards, considering teaching, and finding ways to give back in quieter ways. He maintains a leadership perspective.

Brian was talking about business decisions, but he could have been talking about New Year’s intentions, and elaborate plans that collapse under their own complexity.

Leadership, change, and the courage to simplify

This wisdom about simplification extends beyond individual renewal into organizational life. Research on leadership during change reveals that effectiveness depends on adaptive response—not rigid adherence to a single approach, but the ability to address situations as they arise.

This “peel it back” instinct matters because change often fails from a lack of focus, from too many initiatives stacked on top of each other, and from a vision that can’t be repeated in one breath.

Our brains conserve energy by relying on habit loops. In times of uncertainty, teams default to the familiar, even when the familiar is no longer effective. New patterns require repetition, reinforcement, and an environment that makes the new behavior easier to choose than the old one.

Dr. John Kotter’s work on transformation emphasizes that successful change requires creating urgency and establishing a clear vision, but also pressing harder after early successes to make new behaviors strong enough to replace old habits. The biology supports this: the “fire together, wire together” principle means that what we repeat becomes embedded.

Held by the tide

This week Off the Wall features Portland Art Gallery artist Sarah Verardo. A Providence-based oil painter, Sarah’s work reflects her dedication to coastal New England through its focus on stones, shells, and surfers.

After fourteen years in New York, the ocean called her back, and grief sharpened her focus into a daily practice of noticing.

Sarah builds her surfaces in thin layers, often ten or more, following the structure of the subject rather than imposing one upon it.

This is its own form of beginning again: taking what is ordinary, returning to it with care, and letting attention become devotion.

The still point

This week’s Radio Maine solo episode, “The Still Point,” recognizes the importance of returning to things with care.

The still point is the moment we pause long enough for truth to surface.

In my clinical work, I learned this through the practice of mindful silence. Years ago, I worked with a younger patient recovering from a stroke. He struggled to speak in the way he once could. He repeatedly started and stopped our conversation, with rising frustration.

It was clear that what he needed most was not someone to rescue the moment, but someone willing to hold it with him.

When he finally found his words, the true problem revealed itself. The issue was not only neurological recovery. It was identity. Purpose. Fear of losing a calling.

This is why I keep making space for stillness, even when life is loud. Stillness is not passive. It’s active listening. It’s the ground beneath the next step.

Join us in Portland: Stillness and Renewal

Because this post is arriving so close to our next Radio Maine Live gathering, I want to make this invitation more personal and more direct.

Radio Maine Live: Stillness and Renewal is happening this Wednesday, February 18, 2026, from 5:00–7:00 pm at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland’s Old Port.

This winter’s theme, Stillness and Renewal, explores how rest, reflection, and seasonal quiet can become real sources of inspiration, not just concepts we admire from afar. Our panelists include:

• Chip Brewer, storyteller and community-builder exploring trust, meaning, and what grows in quiet seasons

• Page Eastburn O’Rourke, Portland Art Gallery artist whose vibrant work explores color, belonging, and the “peaceable kingdom” of shared community

• Elizabeth Ross, founder of The Art of Being, reflecting on rest, presence, and the courage of pause, and

• Dr. Susan Woods, participatory medicine leader integrating digital health, co-design, and food as medicine.

Space is limited, but the event is free and open to the public. We’ll have refreshments, time to gather, a 45-minute conversation, and space afterward to connect.

If you’ve been reading along and waiting for the right moment to meet other bountiful path travellers in person, this week may be your chance!.

What If This Is Your Real New Year?

So here we are, on the threshold once again. What if the Fire Horse Year’s arrival is the permission you’ve been waiting for to move forward differently?

What actually matters to you, stripped of everything you think you’re supposed to want?

Maybe it’s not a fresh start you need.

Maybe it’s a still point. A moment where you stop long enough to hear yourself think.

Maybe it’s the recognition that seasons are culturally interpreted, regionally specific, personally experienced. That camellias bloom in Savannah while Portland stays frozen, and both are exactly as they should be.

Pause + Reflect:

This week, I invite you to find one still point: one moment where you pause and ask: What actually matters here?

In that moment, ask, “If I were to begin again right now, what would I keep? What would I move forward with?”

If you feel so moved, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

The Year of the Fire Horse is here, along with other important threshold observances.

May we cross these thresholds with courage and grace, while staying attuned to the ground beneath us.

✨ 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.

Where Ice Meets Moving Water

My daily running route across the Littlejohn Island causeway enables me to see winter up close. From a distance, the protected space between Cousins and Littlejohn Islands can look completely sealed; a single sheet of white and gray. I’ve even seen people out walking on the sturdy-appearing surface.

But when you slow down, the story changes.

Looking toward the ferry landing, water sluices over the ice in thin, glassy runs. At the edges, it pushes in and out with the tide, finding small openings, widening them, then letting them freeze again. It is not a straightforward quiescence. It is a conversation between stillness and motion, happening right where you can see it.

According to the five phase theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine, winter carries yin energy: inward, conserving, deepening. Yet within each season, there is always a hint of what comes next. Spring’s yang is already present at the margins, not as a leap forward, but as a gentle insistence that renewal is part of the design.

The biology of stillness and renewal

We tend to think of stillness as “nothing happening.” Biologically, it is often the opposite.

In humans, recovery depends on rhythmic shifts between activation and restoration. When stress is high, the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis help mobilize energy. But repair, digestion, immune recalibration, memory consolidation, and emotional processing all rely on the body’s ability to downshift again.

Sleep is one of the clearest examples. During sleep, the brain increases clearance of metabolic waste in living creatures, which is one reason sleep can feel like a reset rather than just a pause.

Even waking stillness matters. Practices that reliably evoke a relaxation response have measurable physiologic effects, including shifts in gene expression pathways related to energy metabolism and inflammation.

Many animals rely on winter strategies that look like “doing less” but function as highly adapted survival physiology. Torpor and hibernation reduce energy demands during harsh conditions, and they come with coordinated changes across metabolism and immune function.

Winter quiet is not ecological emptiness. Under snow, microbial communities and nutrient cycling continue in distinct “snowmelt niches,” setting the stage for what can grow later.

Renewal is rarely dramatic. It is often layered, incremental, and built into the way living systems persist.

Renewal Needs Leaders Too

In leadership, we sometimes treat change as a constant push: more urgency, more effort, more speed. That approach can work for a sprint, but it rarely works as a season.

Kotter’s classic change framework begins with urgency, but successful change also depends on sequencing, coalition, and reinforcing wins so people can sustain the work.

From a behavioral change lens, the Transtheoretical Model reminds us that change unfolds in stages. People move forward, pause, circle back, and move again. That is not failure; it is how change often looks in real life.

Biology and organizational research point in the same direction: without recovery, systems degrade. Burnout literature emphasizes that chronic overload and mismatch between person and job drive exhaustion and cynicism, while recovery research highlights the importance of unwinding and psychological detachment from work to restore capacity.

So the causeway becomes a leadership metaphor too: if you want renewal, you need a structure that can hold stillness without pretending nothing is happening.

Radio Maine

This week on Radio Maine, we explore creativity as a form of resilience, including the courage it takes to build something new when life has been reshaped.

Sara Schiller, co-founder of the nationally acclaimed Sloomoo Institute, speaks about learning confidence over time and stepping into uncertainty without being reckless.

Her story is not about constant motion for its own sake. It is about choosing what restores you, then building from there, even if the process includes trial, error, and revisions.

Radio Maine Live

Our next Radio Maine Live gathering on February 18 at the Portland Art Gallery carries this same seasonal theme: Stillness and Renewal, and how winter quiet can become a source of insight and creative energy.

Panelists include:

• Chip Brewer, storyteller and community-builder exploring trust, meaning, and what grows in quiet seasons

• Page Eastburn O’Rourke, Portland Art Gallery artist whose vibrant work explores color, belonging, and the “peaceable kingdom” of shared community

• Elizabeth Ross, founder of The Art of Being, reflecting on rest, presence, and the courage of pause

• Dr. Susan Woods, participatory medicine leader integrating digital health, co-design, and food as medicine

Together we'll explore how moments of pause open the way for fresh perspectives and creative growth. Space is limited, but the event is free and open to the public. We hope you’ll join us!

Closing and a small practice for the week

Our Maine islands in winter are reminding us that the most important changes often happen at the edges.

Pause + Reflect:

If you’re feeling pulled between stillness and momentum—between winter quiet and the push to “get going”—try this:

Name what is frozen. What feels stuck, heavy, or delayed right now?

Name what is moving. What’s quietly shifting beneath the surface?

Choose one small act of renewal. Not a reinvention—just a next step.

Leave a comment

Winter may look like stillness, but it’s never the whole story. Beneath the ice, the tide keeps moving: steady, patient, inevitable.

May you let winter hold what needs holding.
May you notice what’s already renewing.
And may you trust the quiet motion that brings you toward spring.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

This week’s episode from our solo series (an offshoot of Radio Maine), continues our thread on returning to center, especially when life asks for ongoing adjustment rather than a single solution.

We’d love to have you listen, share, comment and subscribe!

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

Groundhog Day and the courage to notice

Groundhog Day arrived this past week with its old-fashioned forecast. Relying on his unique brand of shadow divination, Punxsutawney Phil suggested that we are in for six more weeks of winter. We in the Northeast are not surprised: winter maintains a long hold here. Phil’s track record is uneven, yet the ritual still persists. People reach for meaning in patterns and signs— anything that helps us live inside uncertainty. We are no different from our ancestors in that way.

Lessons from the 1993 movie Groundhog Day have stayed with me for years, for a different reason. Bill Murray’s cynical weatherman wakes up to the same day over and over again, until he learns to experience the day differently. The facts do not change. His attention changes. His choices change.

The movie offers a warning and an invitation. All of us can get caught in repetition, asking the same narrow questions and missing what a story is trying to reveal. Listening to a wider range of wisdom can break the loop. Stories return us to the real, complex, human world.

As the shortest month of the year, February keeps us honest. This is the month when brevity and revelation may conspire. This is the month when we reach for words that tell the truth. Perhaps that is why Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen’s classic Kitchen Table Wisdom has found its way back to me this February.

Kitchen Table Wisdom sits alongside Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as one of my foundational professional texts. Unlike the books that taught me physiology, pharmacology and other basic and applied sciences, books like Kitchen Table Wisdom shaped how I listen. They offer the type of medicine I learned from my father, a longtime family physician. They shaped what I believe is possible in a room when someone finally feels safe enough to speak.

The table where medicine begins

I first heard about Kitchen Table Wisdom when I was a resident in family medicine, and I loved its premise right away. What we learn from patients often resembles what we learn in the most human places, sitting with people we trust, trading stories, and noticing what matters beneath the surface. The kitchen table becomes a symbol for that kind of learning: shared, ordinary and luminous.

In Remen’s telling, “kitchen table wisdom” is the lived knowledge that comes from stories shared in places where honesty counts more than polish and where being listened to becomes part of healing. First published in 1996, Kitchen Table Wisdom was shaped by Remen’s life as a physician, teacher, and pioneer of integrative medicine.

Remen keeps pointing to what modern medicine can forget when pace and protocols take over. A patient is not a problem to solve. A patient is a person making meaning while trying to survive. A clinician cannot practice well without story.

Now, more than ever, we need to understand the power of people’s stories. Stories shape trust. Stories reveal suffering. Stories carry context that no lab value can hold. Stories tell us what the illness has taken, and what the person is still protecting.

Deep listening in a digital era

Healthcare has benefited enormously from the access created by digitized records and technology. Those gains are real. A quieter cost has traveled with them, too. A screen in the room changes the geometry of attention. One body speaks while another body types. A story tries to unfold inside a template built for documentation.

I have watched how this can thin the moment.

I have also watched something hopeful emerge. AI, especially when paired with an electronic scribing system, may help us reclaim presence. Not because machines understand suffering. Not because automation replaces relationship. Presence returns when the primary focus shifts away from the keyboard and back to the human being.

Used carefully, with clear-eyed attention to inaccuracies and hallucinations, these tools could give clinicians their eyes back, and return us to “wisdom work.” Patients still want up-to-date knowledge and excellent care. Patients also want to feel cared for, respected, appreciated. They want their own lived experience and wisdom to matter, not as an accessory, but as part of the clinical truth.

The patient with the stack of papers

I once had a patient who came in with a poorly understood autoimmune condition that had long lived under the umbrella descriptor “chronic fatigue syndrome.” She brought a stack of papers representing a mere fraction of the work she had done to understand her syndrome. It was overwhelming to digest the materials and hear her story as a brand-new patient, all at once.

I was equally intrigued and grateful.

She had done her research. She was willing to share her experience. She was willing to partner. She reminded me that wisdom does not live exclusively on the clinician’s side of the encounter.

That memory feels especially relevant now. We stand at the edge of using information differently, more collaboratively. Patients bring lived expertise. Clinicians bring training and pattern recognition. AI-enabled research tools can help us widen the frame and generate better questions together, with humility and oversight. The goal is not certainty at all costs. The goal is integrity, curiosity, companionship, and shared thinking.

A different table, the same kind of wisdom

The phrase kitchen table wisdom also makes me think of a table that is not in my kitchen at all.

In the recording studio for Radio Maine, we have a table where microphones sit beside coffee cups. That table holds questions. It holds pauses. It holds the moment when someone stops giving a polished answer and starts offering their personal truth.

Yesterday we interviewed people from four very distinct backgrounds, each with their own wisdom: author, educator and editor Jennifer Acker; John Kuehnle, CEO of Partners for World Health; Tobias Parkhurst, former professional skateboarder and co-founder of Cushnoc Brewing Co.; and cross-cultural communication facilitator and educator Beryl Cui.

Four lives, four lenses, and four ways of seeing what is at stake in being human right now.

The thread that connects them is the same thread Remen keeps handing back to us: stories carry the medicine.

Boat book verdict

Kitchen Table Wisdom is another metaphorical “boat book,” best enjoyed in February-sized doses like healing elixir.

The kind you keep close because it re-centers you on what matters when the world tries to hurry you past the winter shadows.

Groundhog Day warns us about sleepwalking through the familiar. Remen reminds us that stories wake us up. In the exam room, at the studio table, and in every place where someone risks telling the truth, deep listening becomes both craft and care. That is the medicine to keep practicing, especially now.

📚Your Turn

For this week’s Books on the Boat, I would love to hear from you:

What book has shaped the way you listen? What story has changed you lately because someone trusted you enough to tell it?

Leave a comment

Coming soon: a re-cap of this past week’s inaugural Virtual Book Circle, and an invitation to join our Spring session.

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

Lisa

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

Cold moon, warm heart

Last week, the December “Cold Moon” rose over Maine. It was another supermoon, and the final full moon of the year—larger and brighter than usual, lighting up the horizon like a lantern.

Around the same time, Mother Nature pirouetted across the landscape in a performance of brief, dramatic squalls that left little snow behind but pulled sharply colder air in its wake. It was a significant contrast with the stretch of milder weather we’d just enjoyed, though the clouds had previously obscured the sun.

For the past few days, we’ve felt that particular kind of stillness that comes when temperatures drop. Sea smoke hangs over Casco Bay in the morning. Sounds carry differently. Steps feel more deliberate on the island trails.

All the while, the sky has been startlingly blue. The sun has been so bright it almost feels like late September. Yesterday, in preparation for our morning run, we walked outside and had a moment of cognitive dissonance: our eyes said “warm,” but our cheeks and fingertips said “absolutely not.”

Cold can be bright.
Cloudy can be warm.

Our interpretation of the world, shaped by the pieces of information upon which we happen to focus, does not always match what is actually happening. Even “reality” depends on where we stand. The thermometer, the light on the water, our internal temperature, and our memories of other Decembers each tell a slightly different story about the same day.

In many spiritual and seasonal traditions, the Cold Moon is seen as a time of completion and quiet reckoning before the new year begins: a moment to notice what truly is, rather than what we wished this season would be.

The Cold Moon reminds us that the sky does not answer to our narratives. It simply shows up as it is. Our work is to notice as honestly as we can, to remember there are multiple kinds of truth at play, and to respond with curiosity rather than assumption.

Working with the season you are actually in

On this week’s Radio Maine, we speak with Ayurvedic counselor and breathwork practitioner Brett Aldrich, founder of Seed the Spirit. Ayurveda is a 5,000-year-old “study of life” that looks at how seasons, elements, and daily habits shape health.

Brett describes winter as a “Vata” time, defined by qualities like cold, rough, mobile, and unstable. When the world around you becomes more Vata, Ayurveda does not ask you to pretend it is summer. Instead, you choose opposite qualities to restore balance:

• warm, cooked, grounding foods

• steady routines

• practices that bring you back into your body and breath

As a Family and Preventive Medicine physician who has practiced acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for many years, I hear strong echoes in the TCM view of the seasons. Chinese medicine also pays close attention to how each season shapes our bodies and minds.

In winter, TCM often encourages more rest, warmth, and inward focus, so that we are aligned with the deep, storing energy of the season rather than pushing ourselves as if it were still high summer. It is the time of the Water element and the kidneys, a season for tending the roots of our lives rather than the branches, colored in deep blue-black tones that invite us inward.

Ayurveda and TCM are different maps, drawn from different cultures, yet both are trying to name patterns they see in the world and in the body. They are not the only sources of truth, but they offer one trustworthy way to make sense of what we feel.

Different systems, similar invitation: notice the season you are in, from your own vantage point, then choose your habits accordingly.

Brett and I also talked about breath. Many of us hold our breath when we feel overwhelmed, as if pausing the flow of air could somehow pause the world. In Brett’s spiral dance breathwork practice, the invitation is the opposite. You keep the breath moving in a continuous, circular pattern and learn how to stay present with what is happening, even when you may be feeling discomfort or dissatisfaction with your present circumstances .

Our conversation with Brett suggests a simple pattern for living and leadership as well. We cannot control the external “weather.” We can choose a response that is grounded rather than reactive.

The group show, Artful Escapes, and the color wheel of winter

This month at the Portland Art Gallery, the Evergreen group show exemplifies another practice in working with what is true rather than what we assume.

On their own, each artist’s pieces carry a particular energy and palette. Hung together, they become something new. The wall itself becomes a kind of conversation.

When the gallery coordinates a group show, those who are curating the placement of the pieces think about relationships between works the way a painter thinks about relationships between colors:

• Complementary schemes: Sometimes the curators place contrasting or complementary works near each other, like colors across the wheel. A cool blue seascape next to a warm, intense abstraction. That pairing wakes up the eye and sparks energy.

• Analogous schemes: Sometimes the curators choose pieces that live in a similar part of the visual spectrum. Soft grays, muted greens, gentle pinks. Those analogous pairings create calm and continuity.

In the art and design worlds, other harmonies bring their own kind of movement:

• Triadic schemes use three colors evenly spaced around the wheel. They feel lively and diverse, but still balanced.

• Tetradic schemes use two pairs of complementary colors. They introduce rich variety, but require care so that one pair does not overwhelm the others.

Curators and creators begin with intention. We ask, “What feeling do we hope this wall will invite? What rhythm of seeing do we want to offer a viewer who walks in from the cold?” Then we adjust in real time as we see how the work actually behaves together. There are always surprises. A painting hums differently next to a sculpture than it did in storage. A small work unexpectedly becomes the anchor of a room.

These same color harmonies show up in our daily group dynamics.

• A complementary pairing in leadership might be seating a big-picture visionary next to a detail-focused colleague at a planning meeting. One brings expansive ideas, the other brings structure.

• An analogous pairing might be bringing together two calm, thoughtful team members to design a new process, because their similar style creates a steady, focused atmosphere.

A triadic “team palette” could be a visionary, a realist, and an integrator who translates between the two. Evenly spaced perspectives, different but balanced.

A simple tetradic mix in your week might be making room for four “colors” of time: time with others, time alone, contribution, and play. Two complementary pairs that together feel more whole than any single one.

Our question becomes less “What is the one right arrangement?” and more:

Our Artful Escapes series uses this same spirit with winter itself. As the air turns sharper, we gather inside for evenings that center travel, design, and place. In THIS WEEK’S Islands That Might Surprise You (for more information, see the end of this piece), we turn toward islands in the darker months, exploring destinations that linger in memory long after the trip is over.

Warm stories and thoughtful itineraries sit right next to our cold Maine trails, much like pairing a deep winter blue with a vivid, sunlit orange. We are not pretending it is not winter. We are choosing a “counter-color” experience that makes both the season outside and the conversation inside feel more alive.

This is the art and craft of co-creation. The artists bring their truth. The curators make choices in response. The travelers share their stories. The viewers and guests arrive with their own histories and hopes. The show or gathering becomes itself only when all of those realities stand next to one another.

Dabble in discovery: small detours, new angles

In our most recent solo episode of The Bountiful Path | A Radio Maine Series, “Dabble in Discovery,” I share a short story about taking a different route on an ordinary lunchtime walk and noticing something vivid that had been there all along.

On a week when the sky feels like September and the air feels like January, that tiny detour becomes its own kind of Cold Moon practice. Step a little to the side, and a different truth comes into view. It is the same street, the same day, the same life, seen from a fresher angle.

If you would like a companion for your own wanderings this week, I’d love to have you join me on Dabble in Discovery.

Shifting horizons: a brief preview

Later this week, Off the Wall (releasing tomorrow) will feature Portland Art Gallery artist Christopher O’Connor, whose work offers another way to think about truth and perception.

Christopher’s abstract paintings live between sea and sky. Layers of color shift like tides. Forms appear and dissolve. The landscapes are not literal, yet they feel familiar. Many viewers see horizons, shorelines, and weather. Others see something entirely different.

Each viewer brings a different horizon line from their own life. No single interpretation is “right,” yet each can be sincerely true.

Why this week’s piece may matter for you

You may not be painting abstract horizons, planning winter travel or leading breathwork sessions. But you are moving through a world that does not always match your expectations—and where many different sources of truth tug at you at once.

The headlines say one thing. Your body says another. Your family history, your training, your faith or science or both each add their own layer. No wonder it feels complicated.

Intentional living is not about forcing your experience to match a single picture in your head, or choosing one “truth” and rejecting all the others. It is about learning to see clearly enough to say:

• Here is what seems true for me right now.

• Here is what seems true for you.

• Here are the constraints and realities we share.

Then you work with that composite picture as kindly and honestly as you can.

This clarity can soften self-blame. It can ease conflict. It can help you make better choices with the energy you have. And, like that surprising mural around the corner, it can restore a sense of color and possibility to your ordinary days.

Pause + Reflect

As you move through this week of Cold Moon light and shifting weather, consider:

Where in your life are you acting on an old assumption about ‘how things are,’ and what changes when you ask whose truth you are living from now?

Closing: standing under the cold moon

When I think back to last week’s full moon, I recall nights filled with stars and the shifting light on newly fallen snow.

The sky is clear, but the temperature is unforgiving. The moon is beautiful, but the year it closes has been complex. None of it fits neatly into “good” or “bad,” “warm” or “cold.”

That is all right.

The invitation this week is simple:

• Let the weather be what it is.

• Let the people around you be who they are.

• Let your own inner landscape be a mix of light and shadow and many kinds of truth.

Then choose one small, intentional way to respond. One dish of warm, nourishing food. One honest conversation. One new route on your walk home.

May the Cold Moon remind you that clarity and kindness can coexist with uncertainty. May you find yourself surprised by warmth on cloudy days and by beauty that has been there all along, just outside your usual path.

✨ Thank you for reading, and for walking this Bountiful Path with me.

Best wishes,

Lisa

If you are new here, a quick note: On the Bountiful Path we often offer a simple Doorway Ritual—a tiny practice you can tuck into a transition you already have. No extra hour required; just a different way of stepping through something you are already doing. Let us know what you think of this one!

Doorway Ritual: Focus

Word: Focus

Ritual:
Choose one literal doorway you pass through often this week: your front door, the clinic entrance, your office, or even the car door. Each time you reach for the handle:

1. Pause for three slow breaths.

2. Silently name one “color” of your current truth (for example: “I feel navy blue–tired but deep,” or “I feel bright yellow–scattered but hopeful”).

3. Ask yourself: “What kind of harmony do I need as I step through—contrast or calm?”

Then make one tiny adjustment if you can. If you need contrast, you might turn on music, invite a different perspective, or step outside for two minutes. If you need calm, you might lower your voice, slow your pace, or do one thing instead of three.

Share (Self version):
Before bed, jot a single line that begins,
“Today I crossed the doorway feeling ___, and chose ___.”

Team / Partner variant (Leader track):
At the start of a meeting or meal, invite one word “color check” from each person—no explanation needed. Notice the palette in the room before you decide how to move forward together.

As winter nears and days grow quieter, we lean into the theme of intentional living at the next Artful Escapes.

Artful Escapes Part II: Islands That Might Surprise You
Thursday, December 11, 2025 • 5:00–7:00 pm
Portland Art Gallery, Portland, Maine

This will be an evening devoted to islands—some serene and some surprisingly lively— and to the way choices of place, pace, and thoughtful design shape what we notice and remember.

We will open the night in conversation with a featured guest, and include social time, designed for guests to connect with one another and trade insights, stories, and ideas.

The event is open to the public, with limited seating. It is very much in the spirit of intentional living, and offers a gently curated invitation to step into shared experience.

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

Last weekend, we traveled by boat from Littlejohn Island into Portland Harbor. The journey felt both familiar and fresh: a passage we hadn’t made in a while, toward a place layered with memories. As we passed Falmouth Foreside, a cluster of white sails dotted the water, catching the September breeze. Watching the boats react to the wind, I thought about how late-season light and still-balmy air invite us to move with what’s present, rather than resist. Even as summer wanes, the harbor still holds joy, momentum, and possibility—Casco Bay reminding us to align with the weather we have.

Reflecting on Change

In medicine and leadership, we keep relearning the same lesson: change depends less on force and more on timing and alignment. If someone is still considering change, pushing harder rarely helps.

For readers less familiar with behavior-change science, this idea appears in the Transtheoretical Model, created by Dr. James Prochaska and his colleagues. Their “Stages of Change” model describes how people typically move through precontemplation (not yet seeing a need to change), contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. In precontemplation, a person isn’t ready—sometimes because the downsides of the current behavior feel smaller than the imagined cost of change.

My clinical conversations shift accordingly: when patients are in precontemplation, we focus on curiosity and gentle reflection rather than future-focused planning. It’s remarkable how often readiness grows when people feel seen rather than pushed.

There are many evidence-informed frameworks for guiding change in groups. One we return to in healthcare is Dr. John Kotter’s Eight Steps: 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. That sixth step matters more than we admit—early wins create lift, like a steady breeze in the sails—proving progress is possible and energizing people to keep going.

This posture of alignment echoes what my Qigong teacher introduced as wu wei, the Taoist practice often translated as “effortless” or “aligned” action. This isn’t passivity. It’s discerning where the current already flows—and placing your keel there.

Tim Sample: Flow, Humility, and the Calendar Lesson

Last week I briefly shared the stage again with internationally known Mainer Tim Sample, an author, illustrator, humorist, and (as he often jokes) “friend of stray dogs.” We were at a special showing of his pieces—most that have never before been seen publicly—presented by the Portland Art Gallery.

During our previous Radio Maine conversation, Tim noted how self-consciousness can stifle creative work. At one point he put it plainly: “Self-consciousness is the enemy of creativity.” During his presentation, Tim recounted a story about an early version of his popular Maine calendar that was well received by store owners, but didn’t sell because the date boxes were too small for potential buyers to write on.

The feedback wasn’t about the art; it was about how people needed to use the art. Tim adjusted. The result: work that still felt true to him and served the audience.

That lesson lives at the heart of change and wu wei: bring your authentic vision, listen to the real-world conditions, and let form follow function. It’s the same on the water—trim the sail to the wind you actually have.

Abacus and the Rhythm of the Year

I once interviewed Sal Scaglione and Dana Heacock, owners of Abacus Gallery, a Maine cornerstone since 1971. Their monthly calendar, designed by Dana, is an example of beautifully wedded form and function. We buy it every year because each image captures the feeling of the month—the quality of light in February, the burst of color in June, the hush of November. This September’s page is stunning and mirrors what we saw on Casco Bay over the weekend. Their calendar is a visual reminder to keep company with the season we’re in, not the one we wish it were. Like good change leadership, the calendar invites us to notice what’s already here and design with it.

Joan Fischer and the Tipping Balance

On this week’s Radio Maine, we spoke with Joan Fischer, an attorney-turned-artist whose brightly colored fish paintings brim with joy. Joan admitted that art was long her “release and joy,” the quirky part of herself many didn’t see—until life tipped the balance toward making art full-time. I loved her description of how color, shape, and rhythm guide her work, and how creating is both planned and playful. It’s a living metaphor for wu wei: disciplined steps, buoyed by the current of inspiration.

Closing Reflection

As we crest the wave of mid-September, I’m holding three images: sails adapting to the welcome wind; Tim Sample’s calendar story—vision meeting feedback, art meeting use; and Dana Heacock’s monthly pages that quietly align us with the season at hand. Add Joan Fischer’s joyful fish, and a full picture emerges: change, leadership, and creativity flourish when we stop muscling and start aligning.

We still do our part: raise the mast, set a course, take a first step, celebrate a short-term win. The deeper wisdom is simpler: feel the wind, trim the sail, and let the energy that already exists carry you forward.

Reflection Prompt

Where in your life could you move from pushing to positioning—from forcing outcomes to catching the wind that’s already blowing?

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

Lisa

The season of almost

These remaining days of August continue to present evidence of life’s threshold moments. Running the West Side Trails or walking our four-legged friends around the Littlejohn Island loop, we’ve begun to notice subtle shifts: a patch of leaves already changing, mornings edged with coolness, a deer-nibbled apple fallen to the ground.

Today, we found a different reminder of transition, when two children sitting behind a folding table caused us to pause our midday dog walk. Their hand-lettered sign promised either lemonade or a chocolate chip cookie, for the reasonable price of 50-cents. The kids weren’t just selling snacks—they were savoring the last free days of summer, testing out the art of exchange, discovering what it feels like to offer something of their own to the world. Their makeshift stand felt like the season itself: sweet, temporary, and full of possibility.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this is the Earth Season—the threshold between summer and fall. A time to digest what has come before, to ground, and to re-balance before the next turn.

The body as barometer

In recent years, my time was more often shaped by the camera and the keyboard: video visits with family medicine patients, leadership meetings, doctoral work. My mind was engaged, but my body was less forgiving. By evening my hands throbbed, my eyes blurred, and I realized these weren’t just inconveniences—they were messages.

This wasn’t just about ergonomics. My symptoms were clues. They were telling me that I was holding on too tightly, and that the way I was “seeing” things professionally wasn’t sustainable.

Our bodies often tell the truth before our minds are willing to. I’ve seen this countless times in practice, particularly when working with patients who come in for acupuncture:

A patient with neck pain describing the “pain in the neck” person in their life.

Digestive upset showing up when someone couldn’t “stomach” a situation.

Sleeplessness marking an unmade decision.

Imbalance is not weakness. It’s the body making us aware of where we should re-focus (and maybe unfocus) our energy and attention.

Creative clues

This week on our Radio Maine conversation, artist Sam Chappell spoke about her own process of recalibration:

Her words echo what I’ve witnessed in medicine and leadership alike. Imbalance isn’t failure—it’s information. A teacher pointing us toward the adjustments that allow the whole picture to come together.

A path back

Rebalancing doesn’t always mean abandoning the path we’re on. Often it’s a matter of loosening our grip, shifting one step, or restoring a rhythm we’ve neglected.

Consider re-integrating small practices of presence:

• Cook with the season. Slice late-summer vegetables, simmer a pot of tangy tomato soup, or bake with raspberries still warm from the sun. Let the process of preparing food slow you down.

• Sit by water. Whether river, tide, or lake, let the rise and fall steady your own breathing.

• Write one line. Capture the thought you’ve been carrying. Place it on paper so your body doesn’t have to hold it alone.

Each of these is an intentional act of rebalancing; an invitation to let the body lead. Given space, it often knows how to restore order.

Reflection:

This week, consider what your body may be telling you about your life balance, or where your creativity may be catching in your own “messy middle.”

If you loosen one grip this week, what might rebalance?

Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Warmly,
Lisa

This past weekend, the August moon rose full over Maine—round, luminous, and steady against the dark. It brought to mind the way Clement Clarke Moore’s ’Twas the Night Before Christmas describes moonlight on snow, except here it fell across late-summer gardens and open water. During the day, monarchs and bees moved among the butterfly bushes and Joe Pye weed. By evening, the gardens quieted and the soundscape shifted to the high, steady chorus of crickets—an unmistakable reminder that summer is beginning its slow turn toward autumn.

Across the country, school terms have already begun. In our extended family, nieces and nephews are heading back to campus—some returning for another college year, others starting their first. Although our own children are grown, we can feel the shift in the air. Summer warmth lingers, but the calendar tells a different story. We are moving into the threshold between seasons.

Thresholds in Life and Work

In my work as a physician, I have been navigating a different kind of transition. My role is evolving, shaped by years of experience and a shifting sense of purpose. At the same time, my son has just begun his own medical career, after recently completing residency and fellowship.

I understand the weight and privilege of that beginning: the stories that will stay with him, the decisions that will shape him, and the resilience he will need.

Years ago, I wrote about my son leaving to volunteer with Safe Passage in Guatemala for a year. He was a young high school graduate, having not yet turned 18. He was also our first child, and his leavetaking represented the beginning of many similar threshold occurrences that our family would share with our six children.

That experience—just like the seasonal shift we feel now—was both an ending and a beginning, a moment of standing in the in-between. With time and perspective I’ve come to understand the true beauty and universality of this space.

Creativity and Connection

On Sunday, we released another solo episode of Radio Maine—this one focused on the power of slowing down, honoring transitions, and reconnecting with the quiet wisdom within us. In response, I received an email from a respected colleague whose work has improved the lives of children and families across our state and beyond. She reminded me of earlier efforts we’d undertaken with Safe Passage through Our Daily Tread—and in doing so, affirmed that past leadership can continue to influence and inspire, even as our focus evolves.

That same theme of transition was present at the Portland Art Gallery’s recent artist opening. Among the featured work was a wall of intricate watercolors by Susan L. Johnson, a newer artist whose pieces have quickly resonated with collectors.

As Susan shared in our Radio Maine conversation: “When I paint, I’m finding my way back to a place that feels like home.”

Through offerings like Radio Maine and the online magazine Off the Wall, our family’s gallery works to amplify creative voices, spark curiosity, and create opportunities for connection far beyond its physical boundaries.

When artists, physicians, and others engage in creative pursuits, they not only elevate the human spirit—they also cast moonlight across the paths that lead us home to ourselves.

Living in the In-Between

Whether in medicine, art, or the changing seasons, the in-between holds meaning. These thresholds can be rich with possibility when we choose to notice them.

Reflection:

This week, I invite you to pay attention to your own “in-between” moments—those spaces where the past, present, and future meet—and see what might be waiting there for you.

Where in your life are you standing in an in-between space, and what might be waiting there for you?

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

Warmly,
Lisa