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‘My friend’s death proves we need better maternal mental health support’
I was feeding my four-month-old son when my phone lit up with the life-shattering message: ‘I don’t know how to say this and I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Sophie died this morning.’ The message was from the husband of one of my best and most brilliant friends. When I called, he confirmed that Sophie had taken her own life. Her daughter was 10 weeks old. I’d first met my curious, smart friend 20 years earlier on a plane to Moscow. We were travelling as part of a programme to teach English abroad and from those early encounters, we were inseparable. Sophie had a sense of adventure I deeply respected; her drive to explore new ideas and places was an extension of her desire to learn. Not all friendships…
Healing ancestral wounds
The sins of the fathers are visited on their descendants for many generations, or so the Bible claims. What is certain is that whether we’re aware of it or not, each of us is deeply affected by the lives of our ancestors and the choices they made. It’s a concept most therapists and geneticists understand well and one particularly core to ancestral healers such as Terry and Natalia O’Sullivan, authors of Ancestral Healing Made Easy (recently published by Hay House). The UK-based couple co-run workshops and retreats with the aim of helping people tap into their ancestry and uncover and heal matters arising from their lineage. What is it and why does it matter? Terry, also a spiritual medium and sangoma shaman (initiated in the tribal African tradition), describes ancestral…
The flirtation minefield
Flirting is terrifying. Flirting is exhilarating. If it’s neither of those things for you, then you aren’t doing it right. The scientific definition of “covert signals sent between individuals to indicate sexual interest and begin courtship” does not even scratch the surface of the alarming social high-wire performance that is flirtation. Flirting involves you stretching your metaphorical scrotal self (using scrotal in the non-gendered sensitive-privatebits sense) across the razor-sharp blade that is the opinion of another, usually a stranger. It is inherently scary, but it’s also fundamentally exciting because the rewards are equally as elevating as the downsides are desiccating. It is no wonder then, that for thousands of years, humans have studied the art and science of flirtation. Some of what has been found has been enlightening, the rest…
Spain’s Sun-Blessed Sisters
It’s not often I think about Gertrude Stein while standing in an olive grove overlooking the Balearic Sea, but here I am doing just that. “Mallorca is paradise,” she told the poet Robert Graves when he was considering moving to the Spanish island from England in 1929. “If you can stand it.” Oh, I can stand it. Because here I stand in a paradise not unlike the one Stein inhabited in her days on Mallorca. In the near distance, a 16th-century limestone manor house—now Sir Richard Branson’s Son Bunyola Hotel & Villas—regally overlooks terraces of centuries-old olive trees, their trunks tightly curved and the dusty silver of their leaves illuminating in the bright Mediterranean sun. Along my path runs a low, dry-stone wall that has been bordering this finca as long as…
The Perfect Employee
1/ An ability to manage up “I look for the ability to manage up and anticipate needs. I try to take the first in-person interview at a coffee shop, and intentionally arrive five minutes late. Theoretically, they arrive on time, and it’s interesting to see what they do with the time. Have they gotten a table? Are they pacing around outside? Have they gotten their own coffee or waited to see what I may want? We’re looking for self-motivated candidates, and you can learn a lot.” —SARAH DOGGETT EVENSON, founder, Marie Oliver 2/ Work ethic and cultural fit “I look for two things: work ethic and cultural fit. So I ask questions that aren’t just about what someone did, but why they did it. Like: ‘Tell me about a time you had to work…
A SECRET GARDEN
In the 19th century, the rugged beauty of the Hudson Highlands inspired the first artistic movement in the United States, the Hudson River School. While painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church sought the heroic in this wilderness, well-heeled New Yorkers found the landscape the perfect escape from the burgeoning city. For five generations, this 120-acre piece of land was a retreat for the family of a wealthy railroad mogul. It was acquired by its current owners 10 years ago. While the forested land here is now under conservation, the property’s gardens were once designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, one of America’s first woman landscape architects. Her work here had mostly vanished by the time the property passed on to the current owners, who imagined a new overall scheme…