the Anywhere Clinic

It does not matter to me if you succeed.
It matters to me that you try.
I don’t care if you are bound to fail.
Try anyway. Effort matters.

I am tired of hearing my mother tongue mangled in the mouths of my students because the people publishing their textbooks cannot be bothered to put tone marks on the wo...

Over lunch yesterday, someone was talking about the patron saint of the mentally disabled, St Dymphna, who started the tradition of families taking in a mentally ill person instead of gathering them all in a single institutionalized asylum that is still practiced in Geel, Belgium today. He said that the average stay was 21 years, where the 'patient' really becomes part of the host family and requires much less intervention than those in standard psychiatric care who are institu...

I wish someone had told me how profoundly my expectations of myself would have to change. I wish I had known that it would be years before I recovered some semblance of equilibrium. I wish someone had told me that grief can't be scheduled, that I would not be able to cry at his funeral but would burst into tears randomly at the grocery store or driving on the highway past trees whose leaves were changing color for the first time since his death. I wish I had known it would not ...

Written to an 8th grader from Albany Middle School on Friday, March 10, 2017:

​Any habit you want to make, you can form in 21 days. I've written ​up ​a list you can pick from. If it's something challenging (e.g., I have the toughest time remembering to floss nightly), use happy face stickers on a wall calendar to keep track of your progress, and to reward yourself. Who doesn't enjoy stickers?

Here's an interesting article written by an MD who became an acupuncturist

...first by taking the 2-weekend workshop course designed for biomedical professionals, then through the 4-year Classical Chinese Medicine program at National College of Natural Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, where my capstone mentor Sabine Wilms teaches.