Sunday, January 19, 2025

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

Carolyn Newberger

After an academic career in psychology at Harvard Medical School, Carolyn Newberger moved to the Berkshires and established a second career as an artist and writer. She writes and illustrates music and dance reviews for The Berkshire Edge, often in collaboration with her husband, Eli Newberger, and records in paintings and prose the treasures and insights that she discovers in the Berkshires forest.

written articles

BOOK REVIEW: Julian C. E. Clauss-Ehlers and Caroline S. Clauss-Ehlers’ ‘Eating Together Being Together: Recipes, Activities and Advice from a Chef Dad and Psychologist Mom’

"Eating Together Being Together" provides abundant insights and ideas to bring the family together as helpers and partners in food choices, preparations, the community of meal and family time, and the many celebrations that food can provide.

U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin endorses Andrea Harrington

Raskin also delivered the Mona Sherman Memorial Lecture at the Mahaiwe that afternoon.

DANCE REVIEW: Dorrance Dance comes through for Jacob’s Pillow

"The piece conveyed a sense of elation, each solo and grouping ... part of a vital, vibrant community, making connection after the stress and pain of separation."

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 52: Keys

In the absence of that busyness, the challenge now is to engage in a different way, perhaps finding surprising richness in places we hadn’t noticed before. As with the forest, I am finding keys that unlock what I might have otherwise overlooked.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 51: Needing the forest for the trees

We don’t see each other much, living pretty far away. Our relationship is far from perfect, having its own burls and snarls. Yet we are a forest.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 50: A mother robin

The robin did not return, but we left the nest undisturbed just in case, sorrowful that we were so poorly able to protect her from ourselves.

Contagion

And yet even with my family and professional history, I am learning daily about acts of racial policy and violence in our country’s history and in contemporary life that I hadn’t known, and that connect the dots to reveal a country bathed in the blood of racism.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 49: You see what you look for, and you look for what you know

By toggling my vision from the forest as a system to the particulars of its elements, I am coming to a deeper understanding of the forest.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 48: Wildflowers

During this terrible time of police violence, protest, burning cities and pandemic, these woodland flowers call me to them like shelter in a storm.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 47: Balancing bears and ourselves

Through experiences such as these, people can come better to appreciate the natural world and to care about threats to its well-being.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 46: What trees can teach us

Trees embody the essence of life. They are a force, persevering, adapting, moving onward.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 45: Finding community in bears and cairns

This bear and her cub have, however, given us a gift. In this time of social distance, our mutual delight in the bears is bringing our neighborhood together.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 44: Finding our bearings

Through this season of tectonic changes in the world around us, I have become ever more tuned in to the day-by-day-by-day changes that in other years passed me by.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 43: The wheels of time in quarantine

Confined in our homes, we struggle to take in the scope and portent of this moment while trying to maintain as much of normal life as we can.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 42: A time of suspension

This is the state we find ourselves in now: a liminal state, where, in the absence of certainty in our present and future lives, we look for what we can count on for stability outside of ourselves.

Illuminating the Hidden Forest, Chapter 41: Filled by time and grace

We have nowhere to go and time stretches out in front of us.
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