Vacation time! Exciting, right? You’re jazzed about hanging out on the (overcrowded) beaches and eating at the (overpriced) restaurants. Then you think of the endless list of things you have to do to get ready – a year of loose ends to tie up in the next week. And...
Summertime brings hot, muggy days, the perfect weather for flowers – and bugs – to bloom. Mosquitoes, stinging ants, and ticks lurk in the soft green grass, and their stings can harbor infectious diseases including West Nile virus, dengue fever, malaria,...
What does Earth Day have to do with medicine? In my world, everything. As a teenager, I began backpacking. The first time out, on a four-day trek in the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio, I had blisters on every single toe, my shoulders and low back were...
Gardeners dream in seeds. All winter those potent points of life slumber, waiting expectantly for the first stirrings of spring. Now, as the days pass the spring equinox, the light luxuriously out-stretching the dark, the gardener in me stirs. I read seed catalogs...
Within a month of graduating from college, I headed West to Vision Mountain north of Spokane, Washington. That summer I spent four days sitting on the mountain, praying for a vision for my life. Never before had I sat in one place on the Earth for several days in a...