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Greetings!
I grew up outside Boston in Belmont, MA on Lawndale Street in a duplex right next to Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church.
My uncle Matt bought the house in 1940 for his brother, sister, and mother. My parents, Jim and Clare, my older sister, Marianne, my two younger brothers, Ed and Matt, and I lived on the first floor.
My paternal grandmother, Catherine, my father's sister, Kathleen, and her husband Bill lived on the second floor.
From 1940 through the mid 40's (wartime) my mother's sister Mary and her three children, Larry, Molly, and Donny, and my mother's mother Elizabeth, who was ill and whose husband Ed died suddenly, also stayed with us on the first floor for extended periods of time - 9 people.
I was raised, nurtured, and embedded in a relationally dense, supportive home and neighborhood with lots of human connections, struggles, adventures, and learning opportunities to experience.
My siblings and I played with our friends on Lawndale Street, always aware that there were watchful eyes looking out for us and the other kids sharing in our delights and ensuring our curiosities did not get us into too much trouble.
I was known and cared about not only by my family, but also by my neighbors and faith community.
Even today, I can go up and down the street in my mind to each neighbor's home and can smile warmly in remembrance of their care and support.
Fall and winter are times of reflection for me and an annual renewal of family ties, old and new friendships, and the celebration of the community we built and shared.
This is the time we gather together at a common table, share food and memories, engage in past and present rituals of family, faith, and community that have sustained us over the course of our lifetimes.
Today we live in a different — and in many ways — more complex, world.
With the rapid changes of a digital age, expanding forms of media, AI, we can be constantly bombarded by the realities of ongoing wars, human suffering, economic, political, and societal unrest, both locally, nationally and globally.
Though our world is seemingly more connected, statistically, we are lonelier, more isolated, less healthy, and disconnected from ourselves and others.
We long for a live human voice that we feel shares the human experience to connect with as opposed to a machine or AI directing us through a series of commands and loops that ask us to leave a message, or just hangs up!
Being connected with other humans serves, and is, a deep biological unescapable human need.
We become who we are in relationships.
We are at our core social.
Relationships shape how we think, speak, act, behave, and believe. They enliven our lives.
We now spend more time in relationships with screens than with one another at great risk to those human connections that nourish and encourage living healthy, mutually supportive lives.
Life and living has always been a process of changes and challenges.
We progress from infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middle age, and elderhood and are constantly recreating ourselves in the context of our family, friendships, colleagues, community, belief systems and culture.
Living by its nature can be stressful.
There is good stress, eustress, that keeps us loving, healthy and growing; and distress, stress outside our ability to cope which provokes fear, inhibits our growth and impacts our health.
When the flow of our lives is not moderately predictable and in our control we lose our sense of personal safety and our brains resort to the survival strategies of fight, flight, or freeze strategies.
The sense that we are in a safe, caring and supportive relational environment is as essential to our health as food and water.
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