A discerning eye and loving heart transform life challenges into life lessons MAKE SOME THINGS RIGHT AGAIN When I was a child growing up in a family where things were often dreadfully wrong and no one knew how to make them right, my siblings and I had to carry some pretty adult-sized burdens at far too young an age. In little ways, large parts of our childhood were stolen in order to help my mother keep my fathers impulsive decisions from capsizing our wobbly family boat in rough seas. He didnt mean to create such chaos, but he had the nature of one who grabbed for what he wanted when he wanted it, and the pieces were left for my mother and the children to pick up or put back together. One example of this phenomenon a relatively small blip on an already chaotic family radar screen is an era I have always spoken of, heavily punctuated with sighs, as The Horses! THE HEROIC JOURNEY Ruth, a very dear Quaker friend of many years, is slowly entering the last stage of her heroines journey home. Now in her mid-seventies, Ruth was diagnosed six years ago with Primary Progressive Aphasia. The first signal that her brain was changing its course was that she could not retrieve some common words she had always used with ease. Working with healers in various traditions, including indigenous healers, she was able to stand her ground against these progressive losses for five years, but more recently, the changes are coming quickly, and she has been losing balance, words, and memory with advancing speed