Can you recommend five essays from your blog (the first five that come to mind)?

Sure here are the links…

Pro Life and Pro Choice

Art Education and Mental Health

How to Foster Civility

For Improved Relationships, Shine

Thoughts About Cross Pollination of Ideas and Butterfly Chasing

What is your definition of God?

I think Mary Baker Eddy’s definition of God is brilliant and has made a huge, positive difference in my life:  “God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.”  (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures p. 465)

What were some pivotal experiences you had early on that influenced you a lot?

• Winning a national poetry award in 10th grade solidified poetry as a life long outlet. I still wear the ring on my right hand that I bought with some of that prize money.
• My mother was underutilized as a stay-at-home parent, which had the effect of me always working, and striving to have equality in my marriage.
• I spent a lot of time looking at Kandinsky’s art in my very early, formative years, and my mother (a fine artist) used to admonish me repeatedly that “copying is not art.” Both were instrumental in making me into an abstract artist.
• Travel: I visited all the national parks in the contiguous 48 states (and went to Scandinavia) before I was 18. I spent a lot of time in nature, hiking, camping, swimming, bike riding, and painting outside. I love all that still.
• I needed to overcome some seriously overt sexism early on in order pursue math (I was shut out of the higher track in 7th grade because it was only for boys: we fought it and won) and in engineering school (I was one of three girls in a program of 5,000, and they clearly did not want us there).
• Being the youngest in a family of mostly women: my dad and six females: my mom, my two older sisters, my dad’s mom, my mom’s sister, and me. They wished I was a boy. I was not understood much; I was literally underfoot in a lot of preoccupied bustle. This galvanized me as independent, rebellious, and not caring much what other people thought.
• I’ve collected wisdom quotes for as long as I can remember; it is deeply authentic for me. As a very young child, I talked to the sun in the sky like it was God, and I used to like to “perch” in the forest on rocks, sitting still and quietly for lengthy periods of time (basically I was meditating). I was brought up in an atheistic home, while my natural tendency was always to reach for something beyond the human.
• I couldn’t read until very late, but was light years ahead in math. Being an asynchronous learner helped me carve my own path, as well as be compassionate to others with differences. It also makes me really appreciate reading and not take it for granted.

Please send me your questions for me to answer next month!