When I was a girl and traveling around the world on a freighter with my family, we sailed through the Straits of Malacca and paused in Singapore to unload our cargo of copra. There we took a sampan into the city and found an elegant, red-and-gold restaurant where we ordered the specialty: sarang burung, or bird’s nest soup. […]

 

January 2012 – It’s time for a paradigm shift. How often have you looked at a sunset and said, “I love that sky!” Or you listened to the radio and said, “I love that song!”

Recently, I realized that it’s time to experience this differently. These past few weeks, walking on the beach early every morning, contemplating the years past and the years ahead, filled with intense emotion, relentless thoughts, and focusing on the steady rhythm of my bare feet on cool sand, I continued to long for stillness, peace, and even joy. It all seemed so
elusive. […]

WriteSpa – An Oasis for Writers

 

One of my grandmother’s – and my mother’s – favorite tenets in life was this: “Don’t let your possessions possess you.”

Traveling as they both did, during tumultuous times, when you could count on very little, and yet both of them owning some of the loveliest items in the world (an antique Renaissance dining table, exquisite Victorian glassware from my grandmother’s grandmother, rare Florentine leather-bound books, signed paintings from aspiring and famous artists), it must have been hard to know what was important to keep and what was important to let go.

When my mother was ten years old, she and her family were living in a tiny fishing village in Caldes d’Estrach in Spain. When civil war erupted in the late 1930’s, they were ‘rescued’ by a British destroyer that moved into the bay to evacuate them, since they were the only Americans residing in that area. My mother and her brother and sister were told they could only bring three things with them: a bathing suit, a sweater, and evening dress. […]