What does it mean to live a life that matters? In recent years, my work in healthcare has quietly but insistently shifted my answer to this question toward Emily Dickinson’s. . . . 

“Let us nourish beginnings” says Muriel Rukeyser, for “the seeds of all things are blest.” Still in the first month of this new year, many of us are contemplating, planning, and initiating new beginnings. . . .

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem below on Christmas Day in 1863, at one of the darkest moments of his life. . . .