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As I reflect upon the year that is ending, I am struck by the beauty of connection. I am grateful for the bonds that were forged and strengthened throughout 2014.
'Tis the season....for Wabi-Sabi. For those of you who aren't
familiar with this term, it is a Japanese aesthetic honoring and
celebrating the beauty of imperfection. Wow, what an amazing reframing
of our obsession with perfection, especially during the holiday season!
f wabi-sabi called kintsugi ("golden joinery"). 
Here is a little parlor game to play during this Thanksgiving holiday as you are with family and friends -- ask the group to to quickly shout out the color of a traffic yield sign. What did you and the others answer?
Nick died 12 years ago, so why do I still return to this place each
year? It is because Nick, like the other children who were cared for in
this huge, often anonymous institution are not forgotten — they are
remembered and honored year after year with the annual Pediatric
Memorial Service. In this medical mecca, children are not supposed to
die. We are fortunate to have some of the best and brightest medical
institutions in the world at our doorstep. Reports of miraculous new
cures abound in the media, but there are some children who are not the
success stories that are highlighted in hospitals’ marketing materials.
Pamela Katz Ressler, RN, MS, HN-BC 
I have been on a wonderful whirlwind tour of listening, sharing, and discussion in online forums this summer in preparation of the upcoming MedicineX panel I will be moderating with my rock-star panelists -- @SusannahFox, @MeredithGould and @Colleen_Young on September 7. (To learn more about the inception of our panel and follow our "flipped classroom" model, please take a look at the Storify that Susannah Fox has compiled)
Time on the Internet can often be measured by the millisecond. We bemoan the shallowness,brevity and sensationalism of topics that seek to capture our momentary attention on our news feeds. Yet in the early part of 2014, a controversy hit the Internet with the intensity of a meteor and then instead of rapidly burning out, gained in intensity and continued discussion. The controversy became known on the Twittersphere as #Kellergate and revolved around separate columns written by former New York Times editor, Bill Keller and his wife, Guardian columnist, Emma Keller opining on blogger Lisa Bonchek Adams' frequent use of social media as a platform for chronicling and sharing her experience of living with progressive, incurable cancer. Topics of public disclosure of illness, ethics, dignity, TMI (too much information), choices surrounding treatment and death and dying were thrown into the open forum of the Internet. Without any precedent for such public sharing in real time, dialogue became divisive and heated. What appeared to be missing from the discussion was the impact of social media tools and online communities on the large population of those living with chronic illness. Attempting to add some insight to the phenomenon of illness blogging, I wrote a piece in early 2014 for WBUR's Cognoscenti site: Memo to Bill Keller: This is Why Patients Blog About Illness 
As we enter the steamy months of summer, everything seems to expand and become larger than life, including rain storms. There is something awe-inspiring, fear-provoking, and finally soothing when listening to a summer rain storm. Perhaps not so unlike our thoughts and emotions? So, for this very rainy, awe-inspiring, reading a book on the couch, kind of 4th of July, I share with you a mindful haiku...
