I’ve chosen trailblazers in literature, music, painting, political activism and medicine. Many communities lost their own notable...
Can Radical Empathy Turn the Tide?
I spent the Labor Day weekend at my country retreat in midcoast Maine where I own a cottage on a quiet country road sprinkled with modest homes. I make a practice of taking daily walks on this road, which I like to think of as my walking meditations. On Saturday I stopped in my tracks after noticing a flag at a home’s entrance. The words [...]
Pat Taub
Easing into Old Age
My grandmothers and mother lived well into their 80’s, transitioning into old age with only minimal complaints. While they followed healthy diets and exercised moderately, they didn’t obsess over their daily routines, or fret about their extra pounds or wrinkles. They simply didn’t stress about aging. Granted they lived at a time [...]
Pat Taub
How Women Give Away Their Power
Women give away their power when they accommodate in a way that stifles their voices, where they don’t honor themselves, but silence themselves because they fear upsetting the other and putting the relationship in jeopardy. It’s a hard pattern to break because, since the beginning of time, women have been conditioned to please others, [...]
Pat Taub
You Can’t Make Old Friends
GUEST POST by MARY LOU SMITH* When I was young, I would hear my elders say, “My circle of friends is getting smaller,” The words passed right over me, without listening or understanding. Now that I am eighty-three, I am in the midst of living those words. The recent death of my soulmate, friend, and “sister” Lucille, of fifty-three [...]
Pat Taub
“Barbie” Meets Two Old Women
GUEST POST by JANET WEIL “Barbie” is the Talk of Summer 2023. I saw this hyped movie as a break from move-in housework, as I’ve just transitioned to the Barbie heartland of Southern California. Some laughs and a mild satire of the iconic doll were all I expected. Instead, my mind was blown by this ambitious dive into the representation [...]
Pat Taub
The Gift of Grief
GUEST POST by JACOB WATSON At first and for many months after my wife died, I felt brutalized. Grief is brutal, a word I used often when my grief was fresh. Then slowly, way too slowly for inpatient me, a transformation began to happen. I remembered a class I took in my doctoral program taught by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the feminist author [...]
Pat Taub
Living in An Upside-Down World
At a recent wedding reception, I found myself in conversation with a woman marine biologist with a sad face. When she shared her concerns about the warming oceans and her despair over the failed response of government leaders to address our diminishing sea life, I attributed her sadness to that shared by climate scientists who keep telling [...]
Pat Taub
Finding Freedom
GUEST POST BY MARY LOU MACKIN Twenty-two years ago, I stood before a judge in a courtroom full of strangers trembling and bewildered, to petition for a restraining order from my abusive husband. I was the mother of a one-year old son, and I was terrified for his future more than my own. I felt the sudden presence of someone by my side, [...]
Pat Taub
Great Summer Reads
It’s that time of year when I share my picks for summer reads. My selections include reads by literary prize winners, a popular psychologist, a gripping WW II espionage story, a dystopian tale, and a background for understanding the war in Ukraine. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover Just a few pages into this mesmerizing novel, I could [...]
Pat Taub
Gardening Up To The End
GUEST POST by LISA SAVAGE Around where I live people grow food starting in earnest this time of the year. No matter what our religion or political persuasion, once the soil is warm and dry enough, we all of us poke in some seeds. Some years it rains so often that the seeds fail to germinate and instead rot in the ground. It’s not great [...]
Pat Taub