Cousins Island after the equinox: what entered the frame

This past week, the trails to the north on Cousins Island were closed to protect the tender ground from overuse. That small interruption changed the shape of my runs. Instead of turning north as I often do, I headed south.

On one intersecting road, I passed a red box holding books from the Little Free Library. I loved the generosity of it: a trailside shelf for story, exchange, and chance encounter. The island neighborhood trusted that someone passing by might retrieve a volume and carry it forward.

On the next intersecting road, I found this weathered sign, as if to emphasize the intentions of the island inhabitants.

Farther down, at the turnaround point near the end of the Westside Trail, I reached a memorial plaque that read “David Adams: Friend of the West Side Trail from Beginning to End.” I had seen his name there before, mounted on a bench, but it had slipped from memory. Encountering it again at the end of those southward runs brought it back with unusual force. My father and I (both family physicians practicing in the greater Portland area) knew David well. He had been a cardiologist with deep roots in Maine, and Cousins Island specifically; a man honored for his volunteerism and for his work with Physicians for Social Responsibility. He was also a kind man for whom our shared patients had much respect. He died just over a decade ago, yet seeing his name again drew him so sharply into the present that the intervening years thinned almost to nothing.

That turnaround surprised me the first time I reached it this week. I usually run north. This southern endpoint, though not unknown to me, felt newly visible because I was now arriving there every day rather than only occasionally.

Once I had reached that turnaround and started northward again, this time along the streets of Cousins Island toward Madeleine Point, I noticed a sign on a tree that read, “Blind Curve.”

I have been to Madeline Point countless times. I knew there was a blind curve there. Yet the sign itself seemed new to me, or at least newly noticed. That was part of what made it arresting. The words carried more weight than a simple roadside warning. I remember thinking, as I had on an earlier run, that I knew perfectly well the road continued beyond what I could see. The curve was not the end of the road; it was only the end of the visible portion. Even so, there is something about the moment when a road slips from sight that can stir uncertainty in the body, even when the mind knows better.

Seen in the context of this week’s rerouted runs, the sign gathered the whole sequence into a single image. Books shared without ceremony. A remembered life at the trail’s end. A route altered by necessity. A road bending out of sight. A red heart passed again and again until it began to feel less like decoration than emphasis. What lay beyond the expected line had not been emptiness. It had been presence.

Jane Dahmen

Vanishing point: where sight narrows, but the road goes on

In art and design, the vanishing point marks the place where lines appear to meet at the horizon. It arranges depth. It steadies composition. It tells the eye where distance tightens.

It also tempts us toward a false conclusion.

When lines gather in the far field, the mind can read that narrowing as an ending. Yet the vanishing point does not record the end of the road. It records the limit of sight from one particular place.

That distinction feels essential.

A curve that blocks visibility tells the truth about vision: from where you stand, you cannot see what comes next. It tells only part of the truth about the road itself. The road continues. Sometimes it carries difficulty. Sometimes it yields something unexpectedly welcome, something worth seeing for the first time or seeing once more with changed eyes.

The vanishing point is not an ending. It is merely the place where visibility gives out.

Getting Reoriented: when the visible edge is not the whole story

That reflection kept circling me back to our recent Radio Maine solo episode, Getting Reoriented.

There are periods when nothing is obviously wrong, yet something no longer fits. The days still move. Obligations are still met. Work still gets done. Beneath that surface, however, a quieter truth begins to press forward: the inner line has shifted.

The vanishing point offers a useful image for that experience. We assume we are reading the whole road when we may be seeing only the nearest stretch. Blur can masquerade as finality. Limited sight can harden into certainty if we are not careful.

I see this often in medicine. People will say, “I don’t feel like myself,” even when familiar measurements suggest stability. Their lab results and body metrics might look fine. To the person in front of me, something central has drifted out of alignment nonetheless. It was our responsibility, together, to ask the right questions and better understand how to reorient toward wellness.

Leadership and perspective: each person carries a different horizon

This matters in leadership because no one enters a shared moment from the same place.

Each person carries a past, a present condition, and some sketch of a hoped-for future. One person attends to the immediate foreground. Another remains braced inside an earlier loss. Another has already fixed their gaze on a distant possibility others cannot yet make out.

Leadership falters when we mistake our own vanishing point for everyone else’s.

What looks like hesitation may be context. What resembles resistance may arise from grief, exhaustion, or a different relationship to risk. What seems self-evident from one angle may remain obscured from another.

Good leadership asks for patience, curiosity, and the discipline to ask what another person can see from where they stand. Some of the most consequential turns in my own leadership life have come not through grand pronouncements, but through recalibration: slowing the pace, widening the conversation, and returning to purpose before pressing ahead.

Off the Wall: David Moser and the shaping of form

The vanishing point has also been in my mind while reflecting on Portland Art Gallery sculptor David Moser’s work in this week’s Off the Wall feature, Form in Motion.

Artists know that finished form often conceals long labor. A line that appears inevitable may have emerged through revision, restraint, and repeated return. David’s movement from furniture into sculpture carries that rigor. He studies posture, surface, and weight. He works until form begins to hold more than structure alone.

That sentence reaches well beyond the studio. It speaks to how we shape a life, a practice, a relationship, a community. Much of what matters begins in rougher outlines than we would prefer. What appears unfinished may simply be waiting for the right angle of view.

Radio Maine: seeing value where others pass by

Another version of that truth surfaced in my recent Radio Maine conversation with John Kuehnle of Partners for World Health.

Partners for World Health collects surplus medical supplies and equipment and redistributes them locally and globally to people, communities, and health care facilities in need. They uncover worth that was present all along, though not fully recognized.

Vision is never purely visual. It also shapes judgment, care, inclusion, and responsibility.

A Healthy Conversation: trauma and the inner blind curve

This week on A Healthy Conversation we focused on post-traumatic stress and trauma, drawing on Dr. Jeff Barkin’s experience as a psychiatrist and my own work as a family and integrative physician.

Trauma changes the inner horizon. It influences what feels safe, what feels reachable, and how far ahead a person can look. An ordinary bend in the road can feel loaded with danger when the nervous system has learned to brace before the turn arrives.

My conversation with co-host about trauma and post-traumatic stress required context, clinical understanding, steadiness, and respect for the ways earlier experience continues to contour present life.

That is part of why I return to a line from another recent episode with a Maine gubernatorial candidate on A Healthy Conversation:

Healing does not happen alone. Neither do community resilience, wise governance, or meaningful public life. We need language strong enough to hold complexity and clear enough to support movement.

Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light

I’m looking forward to Radio Maine Live on April 16, centered on Emergence and Light, because the evening will gather people whose work helps us see how form, meaning, and connection emerge over time.

I’m also glad to share here, for the first time, three of the panelists and former Radio Maine guests who will help shape that evening’s conversation: Dr. Emily Isaacson, artistic director of Classical Uprising, whose work reimagines classical performance as a more collaborative, democratic, and deeply social artistic experience; Heather Shields, island-born real estate leader and longtime community-builder, who understands Maine not only as a market, but as a place where belonging, beauty, and human connection shape how people want to live; and Dr. Deirdre Heersink, board-certified family medicine physician and medical director specializing in post-acute and long-term care, whose work restoring life stories to elders reminds us that health care is not only about needs and diagnoses, but about identity, dignity, and being truly known.

Together, our panelists bring music, community, and medicine into the same frame, which seems appropriate for a conversation about emergence, light, and the forms of connection that become visible when we look more carefully.

Why this may matter to you right now

You may be standing at your own vanishing point without naming it that way.

A role may be changing shape. A relationship may have grown harder to read. A loss may still contour your days long after others assume its edges have softened. On the surface, life may appear steady while inwardly something asks for reorientation.

That is why the vanishing point feels so useful to me right now, especially in these days after the equinox. This season rarely hands over the whole picture at once. It offers a changed angle, a brighter edge, a newly visible turn. The next part of the landscape comes clear only if we keep moving long enough to meet it.

The southward runs made that plain. A closed trail altered the route. That altered route brought books left for strangers and a red heart seen again and again, a remembered life at the trail’s end, and later a sign that named the limit of sight while also recalling something simple and easy to forget: the road continues beyond the place where vision stops.

Sometimes the bend itself reveals what the straightaway could not.

Closing reflection

The vanishing point tells the truth about what can be seen from where we are. It does not tell the whole truth about what is there.

On Cousins Island this past week, the southern route became a lesson in repetition and sight. The little library appeared first, followed by the heart. Dr. David Adams waited at the turnaround, familiar once more after slipping from memory. The sign near Madeleine Point, encountered after turning north again onto the streets, named the narrowing later on, while also underscoring what I already knew even if I had not paused to say it: the road continues beyond the place where sight gives out.

That feels true to the larger pattern as well. The curve ahead may close your view, yet it may also carry you toward what is worth remembering, what is worth receiving, what draws you back into connection.

Pause + Reflect

Where in your life are you mistaking the edge of your vision for the end of the road?

Leave a comment

As the light continues to lengthen and the road ahead remains partly hidden, I’m reminded that this work too is seasonal. It asks for attention, patience, and a willingness to stay present at the curve. Whether you pause here for a few minutes, share a note, or pass this reflection along, I appreciate your making room for these conversations.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

P.S. Join us for Radio Maine Live: Emergence and Light on April 16, from 5–7 pm at the Portland Art Gallery. Attendance is free, but space is limited. The panel conversation will run about 45 minutes, followed by a social hour focused on conversation and connection among attendees. We hope to see you there!

Spring Virtual Book Circle

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

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

Meeting you along the Bountiful Path

We appreciate the opportunity to be part of your world.

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

See you on the path!

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

Maine March: snow days and sharper noticing

Last week in Maine brought multiple storms, including a few that delivered more snow than predicted to Littlejohn Island. Plows left tall banks along the roads. At times, the precipitation turned to mist and gentle rain. We kept our boots by the door and checked the forecast before heading out for our morning trail runs.

Between storms, a few clear hours opened up. The hush after the snowfalls made everything more audible.

One morning the bright notes of two cardinals lingered outside our window as the sun rose over the channel. Their crimson plumage caught the first light. Their duet soon expanded into a full avian chorale. Both the paucity and cacophony of birdsong held beauty.

The month of March, said to “come in like a lion and go out like a lamb,” holds two truths as we attempt our return to warmer weather. Sometimes it feels familiar and easy. Sometimes it feels different and more challenging. We never know quite what we are going to get.

Similarly, we never know quite what we are going to get when we chose to show up.

Visibility asks something of us, even when we choose it. The cardinals make themselves visible in late winter, red against snow and audible in the hush. Artists and creatives make themselves visible when they share their work.

This week, I practiced a quieter skill related to visibility: pause, listen, then choose what I will say out loud.

A new Sunday role: speaking plainly on WGAN

I recently stepped into a new role as co-host of A Healthy Conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Barkin at Newsradio WGAN. The show airs locally Sundays at 11:00 a.m. (AM 560, FM 98.5). It is also available via streaming and podcast platforms.

I know radio studios well. I spent years broadcasting regularly on WLOB. I also recorded intermittently at WGAN.

A Healthy Conversation feels different than the typical video podcasting I do because the format asks for something more immediate: reflection on current events, and real-time clarity.

Our first Healthy Conversation felt both natural and new. We touched on topics that pull people toward strong conclusions. As a family physician, I speak with people across the political spectrum every day. In clinical work, I rarely share opinions on current events. I ask questions, I look for context, and I try to find common ground. Common ground matters. Without it, people stop listening and the path forward disappears.

On A Healthy Conversation I will do my best to hold complexity, speak plainly, and keep dignity in the room.

Radio Maine continues to bring a different kind of social energy, as we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. One guest at a time. One focused conversation.

This week, we recorded five Radio Maine conversations that will air in upcoming episodes:

• Annie Kloppenberg — choreographer and professor at Colby; inaugural director of the Lyons Arts Lab; Affiliate Artist with Portland Ballet. We talked about curiosity as a creative engine and what changes when choreography enters dialogue with music and visual art.

• Victoria Zurkan — Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and painter, on the overlap between emotional insight and image-making, and what art can offer people doing hard inner work.

• — writer and disability advocate, creator of , on accessibility, joy, and building a life that successfully navigates and frames challenges.

• Kim Case — painter, on Northern New England landscape, intuition, memory, and the unseen parts of place.

• Cameron Kelly Rosenblum — young adult author (HarperCollins / Quill Tree), on writing toward grief and resilience with honesty, especially for teen readers.

Radio and podcasting work keeps me close to the human voice. It keeps me curious. It keeps me honest. It also trains me to choose words with care, without turning every topic into a verdict.

Radio Maine: Dr. Eric Brown and dissolving borders

This week on Radio Maine, we have a conversation with Dr. Eric Brown, executive director of the Maine Irish Heritage Center.

Eric described a preference that stayed with me: not simply combining disciplines, but dissolving the borders between them. He also spoke about discomfort as a sign of growth, and about the power of real conversation to humanize what feels stuck.

I left our conversation thinking about tables, not podiums. A table invites questions. A table makes room for another person’s story.

Off the Wall: Sarah Ingraham and color that keeps moving

This week’s Off the Wall feature highlights Portland Art Gallery artist Sarah Ingraham, a Maine-raised Brooklyn painter whose bold still lifes and patterns feel like a study in disciplined exuberance.

Sarah starts with shapes, recomposes for color, and lets invention guide the palette. She works across paintings, murals, rugs, and wallpaper. She shows up daily, even when she doesn’t feel like it.

Her practice reminds us that craft can carry brightness without forcing cheer. The work can stay honest and still choose color.

Bountiful Path Solo: The Listening Bench

On this week’s Radio Maine solo episode, The Listening Bench, we explore how pausing changes what becomes visible.

Benches show up across my weeks: along running trails, behind clinics during brief breaks between patient visits, and in places of personal meaning, including a bench dedicated in honor of my father.

A bench makes stopping easier. That small shift changes what I notice.

Why this may matter to you

Lately I’ve been thinking about the cost of being visible. Artists feel it when they show their work. Leaders feel it when they speak “from the heart.” Clinicians feel it when they try to be real and steady inside hard conversations. Even social media asks for a version of us that stays ready for judgment. Courage isn’t the problem. The question is how we make courage sustainable.

Many of us live inside a constant demand for opinion: react now, pick a side, post the takeaway, move on. Over time, that pressure can shrink our capacity for nuance. It can also shrink our capacity for relationship, because it trains us to speak at people instead of with them.

In medicine, I watch what happens when someone feels unheard. Bodies tense. Stories shorten. Trust thins. The solution rarely comes from one more fact. The solution comes from a different quality of presence: slower listening, cleaner language, a willingness to name what’s true without humiliating the other person.

This is why the arts matter in weeks like this. A gallery opening asks you to look longer than you planned. A radio interview asks you to stay curious. A bench asks you to pause long enough to feel your own nervous system settle. None of these practices fix the world, but they do something quieter and more powerful: they keep you human while you live in it.

Closing reflection

When we finished the first taping at WGAN, I stepped outside into cold air and a parking lot edged by snowbanks. My takeaway this week is that return does not always feel smooth. It can feel awkward, honest, and a little exposed. The practice is to show up anyway, gather ourselves at the threshold, then speak in a way we can respect later.

Visibility will keep asking for a version of us. Some days it will feel like song, and some days it will feel like exposure. Either way, we get to choose how we show up: what we share, what we hold close, and when we step back long enough to hear ourselves again.

Pause + Reflect

Where do you need to speak more plainly right now, and what helps you do that without hardening?

Leave a comment

Related to visibility, I’m truly grateful to each person who takes the time to connect, whether by leaving a comment, sending an email, speaking with me directly, or simply reading along and thinking about topics that we bring forward. Your caring and support make this work meaningful.

If you like having a simple cadence to follow, here’s ours: Solo episodes on Monday, Radio Maine on Tuesday, Off the Wall on Wednesday, Books on the Boat on Friday, and The Bountiful Path Foundational Posts on Sunday.

We appreciate your welcoming us into your world.

✨ 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.

There is another way to move through this season. We can treat life as both art and craft so our days feel chosen instead of crowded.

Over the river, through the woods… in running shoes

Last week, our calendar looked like a busy town dock in the summer at high tide.

With many members of our extended family in Maine for Thanksgiving, we easily filled the time with both longstanding and emerging traditions. We headed to the local movie theater as a large group, sang “Happy Birthday” multiple times, and gathered for our annual Christmas tree outing with our children, their significant others, and our first grandchild who is celebrating her inaugural holiday season.

In the middle of it all, I travelled on foot to a baby shower for my brother and sister-in-law, incorporating my weekly long run into my journey across town. Along the way I paused, as I do every week, at my father’s granite memorial bench.

My route took me across the Littlejohn Island causeway and Cousins Island bridge, through the wooded paths of the West Side Trail, and along the Royal River.

The river cuts a familiar line through my hometown and my memories. I have known many parts of it, from many perspectives. I’ve skated on its frozen surface with my high school ski team and dipped my toes in its shallows as a schoolchild. I’ve lived and practiced medicine in multiple locations along its banks. I’ve run and walked with my children beside it for decades.

I have written before about the Royal River as a waypoint back to myself: a small, chosen pause in the middle of full seasons.

This weekend, as I crossed the river on Route 88 and headed up the hill, I heard an old carol in my mind:

Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go…

When I was little, I imagined this exactly as it was written: horses, sleigh, bells, and snow.

On this particular day, I was the grandmother in running shoes, cutting through the woods on the way to celebrate a new baby. The only “sleigh” in sight was my brother’s car that passed me on the hill, full of excited children and in-laws.

Same tune. Very different life.

It struck me that each of us carries our own version of that song, including our own images of what holidays mean, what “family” looks like, and what a good life feels like.

The art of intentional living is the ongoing effort to understand one another’s definitions, hopes, and dreams.
The craft is the quiet work of weaving those hopes into something that actually works for everyone involved.

None of us lives in isolation. I have never met a truly self-sufficient human. We are all, always, in the work of co-creation.

It echoes a children’s book that has long guided my own compass: the call to “do something to make the world more beautiful,” not perfectly but on purpose.

Listening as leadership: philosophy at the kitchen table

On a this week’s episode of Radio Maine, I spoke with Dr. Jana Mohr Lone, who has spent decades exploring philosophy with children, not as a lecture, but as a shared inquiry.

She described preschoolers asking questions like:

• Why is there hate in the world?

• Can dogs think?

• Can you be brave and afraid at the same time?

These are not “cute” questions. They are big, human ones. Jana’s work is not about providing answers. It is about creating space where children’s voices matter and where they can wonder out loud and be taken seriously.

We often tell children how important it is to listen, but mostly we mean: listen to adults. We do not always model reciprocal listening, and truly attending to what children think, notice, and fear.

This is where intentional living becomes leadership practice:

• At the holiday table, when a child says, “I do not like big gatherings,” and we are tempted to insist.

• In clinic, when a teenager’s silence carries more meaning than the adult’s explanation.

• In our teams, when the quietest person in the room offers a single important question.

The art here is curiosity, letting someone else’s perspective surprise you.
The craft is the structure we build around that curiosity:

• Refrain from raising hands while someone else is speaking.

• One voice at a time.

• Regular check-ins that begin with, “What do you think?” instead of, “Here is the plan.”

I have written before about this approach in my own profession as a constellation of care: the overlap of medicine, writing, art, and conversation that only works when we keep making space for other people’s meanings.

The same is true in our families. We might inherit a tradition, such as Christmas Eve at one house and New Year’s Day at another. But each year, the people inside those traditions shift. Children grow. Parents age. New partners arrive. Grief rearranges the seating chart.

Intentional living asks us to keep listening and adjusting, instead of assuming that what worked ten years ago must work forever.

When everything breaks at once

This season of intention is not only about cozy walks and gentle realizations. Sometimes it begins with a crumpled garage door.

In this week’s episode of The Bountiful Path | A Radio Maine Series, “Big and Lovely Something,” I share a short story about one of those weeks when everything seemed to fall apart at once.

In the midst of that week, author Anne Lamott’s words from Traveling Mercies came to mind. She writes about times when many things go wrong at once, and suggests that it may be to protect “something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.”

I will not give the whole episode away here. What stays with me is this question:

Looking back on hard seasons, I can see how each was also an opening. These weeks become their own waypoints in the flow. In other words, small markers that say: this happened; this touched me; this changed me.

In leadership, in medicine, and in family life, the art of intentional living is staying curious enough to ask:

The craft is how we respond: the phone calls we make, the boundaries we draw, and the way we keep showing up with as much honesty and kindness as we can manage that day. It is the quiet work of moving toward the light, even when everything feels broken.

Intentional living is not about controlling outcomes. It is about meeting what comes with a posture of willingness.

Sneak preview: Evergreen, Off the Wall, and Artful Escapes

At the Portland Art Gallery this week we will gather for our Evergreen art show opening and holiday party. Evergreen is our annual group exhibition and celebration. The walls are filled with many artists’ work, and the rooms are filled with conversation. It is one of my favorite expressions of art AND craft. The art is on the walls. The craft is in how we curate, light, hang, and host, and in how our community chooses to show up for one another in the darker months.

If you are local, I hope you will join us at the gallery this week for the Evergreen show and holiday gathering. Your presence is part of the co-creation.

This week’s Off the Wall (releasing tomorrow) will feature Portland Art Gallery artist Liz Prescott.

When Liz looks at the working waterfront of Portland or the quiet rocks along the Schoodic Peninsula, she does not just see boats or shorelines. She sees movement, color, and constant change. Her paintings hold the shimmer of harbor light, the echo of reflections, and the pulse of water against wood. She has said that the subject could be anything and that really, “the subject is paint for me, and color.”

Our conversation with Liz reminds me that art and craft are iterative. Whatever the medium—whether painting, music, writing, or designing a garden—layers build on one another. Over time, mistakes, edits, and surprises become part of the final image.

This is the craft of intentional living: showing up again and again without demanding that today’s layer be the final masterpiece.

As winter nears and days grow quieter, we will lean into the theme of intentional living at the gallery’s 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.

Why this may matter for you

You may not be planning an art show or sketching a harbor. You may not be designing a travel itinerary or leading a philosophy circle with children. But I suspect you are holding a lot: work, caregiving, emails, group texts, unspoken grief, postponed joys.

Intentional living will not empty your calendar. It can infuse your days with more coherence and less resentment. It can help you move from “I have to keep everyone happy” to “We are co-creating something that honors more than one story.”

It does not require a dramatic life overhaul. It begins with noticing:

• the tune you hum as you cross your own “river and woods,”

• the questions your children or colleagues are already asking,

• the way your days, like Liz’s paintings, are quietly built in layers, one small, imperfect stroke at a time.

Pause + Reflect

As you move through this early-December week, consider:

Where is life asking you to be both artist and craftsperson, and what is one small adjustment you are willing to make in response?

Closing: carrying the song forward

This year, when I hear “Over the River and Through the Woods” playing softly in a grocery store or sung loudly in a school concert, I will think of more than sleighs and snow.

I will think of running shoes on a familiar trail.
I will think of my father’s bench and his living legacy of family.
I will think of children asking brave questions, coastal light breaking across a harbor, and layers of paint slowly revealing what was there all along.

Most of all, I will think of the quiet, ongoing work of living on purpose:

• listening for each other’s meanings,

• honoring what is trying to be born in messy weeks,

and crafting just enough structure for love, beauty, and honest conversation to find us again.

This week, may you find your own way over the river and through the woods, not toward a perfect holiday season, but toward a life that feels increasingly, quietly, like your own.

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

Warmly,

Lisa

Gather with members of our Bountiful Path and Radio Maine communities, as well as Off the Wall-featured artists and other creative-minded souls, at Portland Art Gallery’s Evergreen.

Opening Reception December 4th, 5-8pm.

Welcome the season intentionally with art, connection, and community.

Click here to RSVP

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

When we cram every margin with feeds, meetings, and messages, the colors blur and connection thins. Autumn shows opening restores contrast; with white space, we can see the path ahead and one another more clearly.

Seeing the sky again

Out our Maine island windows, the leaves have opened room for the sky. Through increasingly bare branches, the gun-metal gray of Casco Bay expands its presence and the rising sun becomes molten silver upon the sea. Nature entertains us daily with the changes she brings as the seasons evolve. As things are subtracted, others emerge in the negative space.

Negative space, in art and design, is the intentionally empty area around and between subjects; it shapes what we notice and gives the eye a place to rest.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, autumn is associated with the color white, which is often used as its own form of negative space. White can look different depending on where you stand. In some traditions it marks union; in others it marks mourning. The common thread is purification, a clearing of what is no longer relevant. Physics tells a related but seemingly paradoxical story: white light carries the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, which only emerge when a prism is introduced.

When the branches empty, more of that white light reaches us, and the birds on those branches return to view. What seems like absence is often the space that lets things be seen.

Proportion in care and leadership

Medicine teaches us the importance of intellectual and emotional space. Overwhelm a patient with facts, tests, and to-dos and we often get very little action. Offer too little context or time and we get the same result. Partnership lives in the middle, with the right amount in the right order and a little breathing room.

The same is true in leadership. A trellis that is too sparsely constructed gives the vine nowhere to hold; one that is overbuilt overshadows the life it should support. Strength comes both from what we place, and from the clarity between placements.

Relationally, space between people is not always distance; it is dignity. When we stop filling every silence, others step forward. When we edit our help, shifting from Rescuer to Coach in the Empowerment Dynamic, we make room for someone else’s capability and collaboration.

Listening as white space (with Dr. Chuck Radis)

On Radio Maine, I recently spoke with Dr. Chuck Radis about his new book, Mystery in the Room: A Physician’s Journey Treating Patients with Rare Diseases. His cases turn on listening that leaves room for the story to shape the diagnosis.

We also explored how technology, including AI, can serve by subtraction: fewer clicks, cleaner notes, more eyes-up time. Life on Peaks Island keeps his priorities ordered. Island weather and finite resources edit the calendar.

Release what is extra, and what matters holds.

Proportion you can feel: palette and room

Mix every color and you get mud. Choose a few and the eye rests. Last week at Radio Maine Live, the balance felt energizing and connective: the right number and mix of voices, enough contrast to keep the signal clear, enough space for connection to form. The lenses we bring shape the palette we notice.

That same principle shows up in how we interpret the symbols represented by color. We often see only what our habits allow. Paradigm blindness is what happens when a familiar frame makes other meanings invisible. For many of us, the color “white” defaults to Western weddings, union, and purity. If that is our only lens, we can miss other readings.

A brief anchor: Taoism (Daoism) is a Chinese philosophical and religious tradition oriented toward living in harmony with the Dao, “the Way.” It emphasizes naturalness, simplicity, and non-forcing action (wu wei). In the yin–yang symbol, white marks yang qualities: brightness, clarity, activity.

In the Five Phases tradition that interweaves with Taoist and medical thought, white belongs to Metal and autumn, the season of pruning and release. In Chinese ritual culture, white also appears in mourning.

When we hold more than one frame, the season’s “white” stops being a single answer and becomes a doorway to nuance.

Three small moves for more white space

Name the center. Naming clarifies choice, so that everything else can be measured against it. One line is enough: “The purpose of this meeting is…” or “The feeling this painting should carry is…” When the center is known, excess shows itself.

Limit the palette. Two key metrics for the month. Three colors for the series. One question for the check-in. Constraints do not confine; they kindle. Fewer choices, more momentum.

Install a pause you already have. First sip of coffee. Hand on the doorknob. The moment before you open your charting window or your design file. Let that everyday threshold be a cue to release one thing before you add one more.

Why this may matter for you

If your days feel like mixed paint turned gray, you may be painfully oversaturated. Autumn offers a compassionate correction: reduction as renewal. Releasing one thing at a time restores color separation, which restores energy. Because you reclaim attention, connection to self, others, and work has space to land.

Pause + Reflect: What one element—task, tone, tab, or talking point—will you release this week to let more light through?

Standing at the window again, we see that the branches are not barren; they are articulate. The white behind them is not empty; it is generous. Union and letting-go, purity and possibility: two sides of the same season.

When we release what no longer belongs, what does belong emerges in full color. Walk your bountiful path a little lighter, and see what appears.

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

Warmly,

Lisa

We often associate leadership with strategy and self-care with rest. But in truth, both are practices in balance—and both demand the quiet courage to adjust in motion.

Just like the body maintains balance through thousands of micro-adjustments, leadership requires us to adapt in small, often unseen ways. Not by holding still—but by staying responsive to what’s shifting beneath us.

Leading Through Motion, Not Stillness

On the latest Radio Maine episode, I spoke with Mike Keighley, an Army veteran, IT analyst, and trauma-informed yoga instructor who now teaches movement and breathwork to veterans, first responders, and underserved communities.

After years in the military and the intensity of multiple deployments, Mike found himself unmoored. Yoga gave him a new way to build identity—not by suppressing discomfort, but by honoring the body’s innate wisdom.

“What do I need today? What is my body asking for?” That question, repeated often, becomes the root of resilient leadership.

Leadership Is Its Own Ecosystem

I’ve spent my career learning to lead from many seats. I started out running my own medical practice, with an emphasis on lifestyle medicine and acupuncture. Every day required nimble thinking, systems-building, and shared leadership with my small but mighty team. As I once wrote for a national online publication,

In my own medical practice, I handled everything from clinical care to communications. My patients often gave back in unexpected ways: a basket of garden vegetables, a hand-penned note, sometimes—especially in summer—more basil than I could possibly use.

That’s leadership, too: receiving, sharing, and trusting that what we give away will return to us in time.

Folding Chairs and Backstage Angles

Shirley Chisholm once said, “If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

It’s a quote I’ve carried with me throughout my journey—as a doctor, as a mother and as the oldest of ten children who learned early that leading often starts with listening.

Artist Jean Jack, whom I previously interviewed for Radio Maine and profiled in our Off the Wall series, brings a similar vision to her paintings. Her work isn’t about precise replication, but essential presence.

Jean photographs old houses and empty barns, sometimes returning years later to revisit their lines. She’ll shift the sky, remove the clutter, or add water where there wasn’t any—all in service of what she calls “the backstage angle.” That subtle shift in viewpoint allows something deeper to surface—something we might otherwise miss.

Leadership, in its own way, is like that. We revisit. We revise. We strip away what no longer serves. And we offer the clearest version we can of what truly matters.

Self-Compassion as Daily Practice

Mike Keighley reminded me that yoga—and leadership—isn’t about perfection. It’s about showing up.

In our fast-moving world, the most sustainable leaders are those who make micro-adjustments. We don’t chase stillness—we move with integrity, balancing with each breath.

✨ Reflection Prompt

As we continue walking together, I invite you to consider:

Where are you carrying more than your share—and what can be given or received?

What “backstage angle” might offer new insight in your life or leadership?

Where might you bring your own folding chair and reshape the conversation?

Thank you for being part of this community. The Bountiful Path is growing, and I’ll soon be sharing news about our virtual book circle and upcoming live Radio Maine events. I’d love for you to be part of them.

Let’s keep tending the sparks—and walking forward with intention.

Warmly,
Lisa