Calibrating Your Compass A compass is designed to aid in accurately navigating our travels. Ships and aircraft have highly refined devices, but nearly all of us carry a compass around in our phones. For the most part, my phone GPS saves me time and aggravation. Except when it decides to misbehave and send me off…
Tenille Farr loves Big Ocean Women. She proved it by finding time to chat with me for this article in the midst of company, three teenage sons involved in homecoming, ball games, her garden “on full strength,” canning, and a truckload of fruit to distribute. Seeing her jam-packed life, I offered to wait until another…
My first experience with a compass was when I was in the 9 th grade. By some sheercombination of dumb luck, limited entrants, and determination, I found myself representing myjunior high school in the Geography Olympiad. There were several categories that we had tostudy to prepare; I was good with maps, countries and capitals, but…
Photo Credit: Frances Oldham Kelsey, MD, PhD, receives the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civil Service from President John F. Kennedy in 1962. Photo credit: Special Collections Research Center/The University of Chicago Library When I first learned of Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, my immediate thought was that she embodied this month’s tenet: “We recognize and…
Last night I had a very simple but powerful experience. In the quiet winding down time of the late evening, I was scrolling through Facebook, as I probably do too often, and I saw a post from a local yard sale group. Instead of listing something for sale, a woman was asking for help. She…
As a young girl I became fascinated with the stars. One of my favorite things was to lie out on a blanket and watch the night sky. One year while attending a summer camp, an astronomer explained where the North Star was and that before we had all this great technology, people used the stars to navigate direction. The astronomer…
Spring is a season stuffed full: of damp grass and flowers emerging riotously from the earth, of the sussurating sound of bicycle chains and the grate of lawnmowers blistering the air for the first time in a handful of months, of children running from one end of the block to another forgetting in the burn…
“We are free to choose and willingly accept responsibility for our choices.” At the outset of 2020, there seemed to be so much promise: a fresh start and the promise of new hope and enthusiasm as citizens the world over hoped to move forward with greater understanding, empathy and cooperation. Since I am writing this…
I love art. For me a painting or a photo can explain feelings and emotions better than any spoken language I know. In my home I have all kinds of paintings and photos. Each of them is displayed because they evoke a feeling or teach a lesson through their image. One piece, however, is…
The seeds for the new cottage in Ecuador were planted in 2016 when Big Ocean representatives attended Habitat III there. Vilma Sagebin saw Ana Carolina Gualinga Cuji (also called Anita) and her friend enter a Big Ocean Women presentation and offered to translate for them. When she sensed their uneasiness as the hour grew late,…