This is a fast 30 second blog, but I just felt and overwhelming happiness about working on the web.  Yesterday I had a webconference wit 12 people - from 4 countries.  Today I emailed my professor partners at Doctoralnet one of whom lives in Panama and the other in India - our meetings are great fun as we share similarities and differences way beyond what would have been possible if I had stayed in the United States. Our move to Ireland forced my hand, I had to learn to work on the web or lose my professional connections, but like many life challenges huge silver lining has resulted. OK - back to work, but this is a quick message to the world (see the picture above) All the best to everyone for a healthy, happy and unimaginably good new year!

We spent New Year’s Eve at our friends house eating authentic Chinese food. There are very few things which I find as luscious as immersing myself, one way or another, in someone else’s culture, and of course food is one of the greatest delights. Warm memories of these shared hours is what causes me to focus on challenges and pleasures inherent in interacting with diverse people and cultures as my topic today and is part of my commitment for 2013 to feel more joy in life through greater awareness of my moment to moment existence. I think I first became aware of the concept of diversity, tinged with cultural awareness, as part of my work with low income or minority populations in the United States in the 1990s. Having been raised in the majority, it was shocking at first to think that people see and experience the world from such different points of view. Therefore, the context in which I learned about diversity, comes packaged a little with shame – the self adopted shame of…