"Be willing to be a beginner every morning" -Meister Eckhart

Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for me! I've mixed it up in terms of content delivery this week and made a slide show with the answers to your questions. In honor of Creole Month, I've set it to some traditional Creole folk music (you can see the name of artist and song on 1st slide).

NOTE: Make sure to view in full screen mode. The timing is set at about 20 seconds/slide, so if you need more time to read, hit pause! 😆

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"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible" -Thich Nhat Hanh

I have been thinking a lot about impermanence over the last couple of weeks. Buddhist teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh remind us that its our want for things to be permanent that makes us suffer, not impermanence. The semester came to a close last week. The last couple weeks were an even more hectic end-of-the-semester push than usual; in addition to finishing up my 3 classes, I was also trying to pick away at the packing and work my way through the online work/courses for the Peace Corps. Fun fact: hurricane season starts today! It has also been a time filled with saying goodbye. And while I plan on returning to this place after my service, last week the impermanence of everything hit me like a ton of bricks (on multiple occasions, lol). But here's the funny thing about impermanence--those feelings of sadness and loss are also impermanent. I have been filled with gratitude for my mindfulness practices that have helped me stay in the present moment and truly live in the ex

"Ask for help. Not because you are weak. But because you want to remain strong." - Les Brown

I've said before how I intend for this blog to be a place where I share the whole of my experience rather than just giving you the Instagram stories. The reality of life--any life--is that it is not all (or even mostly) sunshine and rainbows. And while I have had a lot of incredible, amazing, and joyful experiences since moving to St. Lucia, there are a lot of things that are not any of those. This second term of school has been really hard for a variety of reasons. While I'm committed to being open, honest, and transparent in this space, there are things that I just can't share here in any detail. I can paint with broad strokes and say that the amount of secondary trauma I'm experiencing at school has increased significantly. Initially, I think I was managing quite well. As a college professor, I've dealt with secondary trauma for some time. However, the key difference is that those students were adults--and it took me a long time to figure out how to man

"This wasn't a strange place; it was a new one" -Paulo Coehlo

Thanks again to everyone who submitted questions. A couple notes about this video: 1) my voice is a bit scratchy and crackly because there was burning happening when I recorded and the smoke messes with my voice 2) In some of the slides, it sounds like a teapot is whistling--my apologies that was the fan getting picked up by my headphones (its not too loud, I promise) 3) In the slide following my intro, I state that the "ministry of health" was involved when I meant to say "ministry of education" (the error is actually quite obvious, lol)

One Wild and Precious Life

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