Letting Go...To Grasp What Really Matters
“You can say what is, or fight for itClose your mind and take a riskYou can say ‘it’s mine’ and clench your fistOr see each other as a gift.We’re gonna get it, get it together right nowGonna get it, get it together somehow.”–Coldplay, Up&Up On many afternoons, a fourth grader in the neighborhood greets my middle school daughter on her…
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Within minutes of my feet touching African soil, I met Alice. She was in the welcome party of Changemakers waiting at the Kigali airport to greet the African Road Learning Team. Before she embraced me, Alice looked warmly into my eyes, as if greeting a familiar friend. Alice’s eyes seemed to say: I offer true, genuine connection. My heart eagerly…
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Don’t hold on to a song. That’s been my motto since I was a ten-year-old-mixed-tape-making, boom-box-loving freckle-faced girl. I spent endless hours in my lemon-yellow room with green carpet, making mixed tapes for people I love. Later, I became a master at burning CDs, which I inserted into fancy covers that I would mail long distances to excited recipients. When…
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Guest Post by Natalie Rebecca Stafford, age 15 I was around four years old when I started asking my mom for “Talk Time.” It was more like Question Time because I always asked her to tell me “something bad” that happened in the world that day. Somehow I knew life was not always like the happy stories I read in…
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“And then I realized that to be more alive I had to be less afraid, so I did it. I lost my fear and gained my whole life.” -Cleo Wade I remember exactly where I was standing when I told my husband that my 14-year-old daughter and I wanted to travel to a foreign continent. Scott reacted just as any…
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“Do the things you always wanted to Without me there to hold you back; don’t think, just do More than anything I want to see you, girl Take a glorious bite out of the whole world.” -Snow Patrol, You Could Be Happy Lately, I’ve been expanding my knowledge on teens. I’d like to write a book to them, or for…
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Facebook keeps telling me I have not written to you in a while… like I don’t know. The last blog post I wrote was J… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
I will never forget how my daughter described the hardest thing about moving to a new place. She described it as no… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Grateful to be part of the #PhelanLucky family and to help spread awareness and support for a resilient group of ki… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…