Every September the mental health and addiction recovery community comes together to celebrate the gains made by those in recovery—just like we do for people recovering from other health conditions and diseases. Recovery Month is about educating our communities that substance use treatment and mental health services can enable those with a mental and/or substance use disorder to live a healthy and rewarding life. 

Fall is a favorite season for many people. The heat of summer is just about over and our gardens can breathe a sigh of relief.

Dogs are amazing. They can do incredible things. Well maybe not my dog, Sherman, who is more likely to get into mischief than save mankind but we’ve all heard stories about detection dogs sniffing out drugs, explosives, cadavers and disaster survivors. In the mid 90’s, handlers started training them for conservation tasks such as sniffing out scat from endangered species and detecting trafficked ivory. Now their olfactory prowess is being used in the fight against invasive plants and insects. And this year dogs are being trained to sniff out Covid 19 odor with 82% accuracy. The list of how man’s best friend is helping us just keeps getting longer. 

Eventide…The day is past and the toilers cease

This world is like nothing we’ve seen before and hopefully nothing we will ever see again.  No one has gone unscathed: loss, fear, anger, exhaustion, grief, loneliness, disbelief.  If you were teetering on the edge of mental and emotional stability, you may feel like everything is crumbling.  You may feel like you are crumbling. 

Eleven yr. old Noah Hall stood in his yard, looking at the flames on the ridge above his half-built home in Boulder Creek, preparing to evacuate. Holding a small 6” wooden cross he had made during vacation bible school, Noah wondered, ‘Should I take it with m-? Should I leave it here?’ Noah set the cross down beside the garage of the half-built home, got in the car, and evacuated to Felton to a parking lot to spend the night. The next 2 weeks were spent in an evacuation center, eyes peeled to TV updates, to see if their houses made it.

Sometimes we have the right people at the right place at the right time. Sometimes in-the-midst of tragedy and misfortune, the best of us shines and the stories we tell, uplifting.

Back to school season looks different this year. Everyone agrees, children learn best with in-person learning, but that isn’t a possibility right now. So...