Nancy Rhine, MS, LMFT

05/07/2026

A beautiful reflection on love, grief, aging, and what it means to fully fall in love with life at the very end.

In September of 2011, an 83-year-old man named Maurice Sendak picked up the phone in his Connecticut home and called Terry Gross at NPR.
He had been on her show many times before. He was one of the most beloved children’s book authors in American history. He had written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and dozens of other books that had become woven into the childhoods of millions of people all over the world.
He had a new book out. It was called Bumble-Ardy. He had written and illustrated it during the most painful period of his life, while his partner of 50 years, Eugene Glynn, was dying.
“I did Bumble-Ardy to save myself,” he told Terry. “I did not want to die with him.”
What followed was one of the most beautiful interviews ever broadcast on American radio.
For nineteen minutes, Maurice Sendak talked about getting old. About dying. About the people he had loved. About the maple trees outside his studio window that were hundreds of years old. About how, in the final stretch of his life, he had finally fallen completely in love with the world.
He cried. Terry cried. Listeners all over America, driving in their cars or washing their dishes, pulled over and cried with them.
He talked about the tragedy of being 83 years old and having outlived almost everyone he loved most. His parents. His brother Jack. His sister Natalie. His longtime publisher. And, most painfully of all, Eugene, the man he had loved and lived with for half a century.
Then he said something that has been quoted ever since.
“I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”
He talked about how strange it was, to be so old, and to suddenly find that he had peace.
He had spent most of his life unhappy. He had been raised by Holocaust survivors who carried so much fear and grief that they had passed it down to him. He had spent decades in therapy. He had said in earlier interviews that he believed in the existence of happy people, but had never been one.
Now, somehow, near the end, something had changed.
He told Terry he was now in love with the world. He said that if he looked out his studio window right then, he could see his beautiful maple trees, hundreds of years old. And he could see how beautiful they were. He said it was a blessing to grow old. A blessing to have time to do the things he loved. To read the books. To listen to the music.
“I have nothing now but praise for my life.”
At the end of the interview, he said something to Terry that has stayed with everyone who has ever heard it.
“You are the only person I have ever dealt with in terms of being interviewed who brings this out in me. There’s something very unique and special in you, which I so trust.”
She thanked him. They were both crying.
Then he said: “Almost certainly, I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you.”
And then, before they hung up, he gave her three pieces of advice. They were the last words he ever said on her show.
“Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”
Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak passed away peacefully at a hospital in Connecticut. He was 83 years old.
His friend Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked, was with him in his final days. He brought Maurice a gift. It was a photograph of Lewis Carroll, sitting on the edge of his window, with his feet hanging outside.
It was a perfect goodbye. The author of Where the Wild Things Are, who had spent his whole life drawing children stepping into other worlds, was now stepping into his own.
His books are still in nearly every children’s library in America. Generations of small children still hear about Max and his wild rumpus, still go on the journey he drew, still come home to find their dinner waiting for them. Still hot.
In his final interview, he told Terry one more thing that stayed with her. He told her he was going to keep crying for the people he had lost. All the way to the very end.
“I’m a happy old man,” he said. “But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”
He cried because he loved them.
That was the whole secret.
That was always the whole secret.

03/06/2026

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/dont-ask-me-if-ive-retired?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r3rda

I haven’t retired. I still work. And frankly, I resent anyone thinking otherwise.

03/06/2026

Instructions before visiting Earth, by James McCrae:

In the event that you wake up and find your soul separated from source and manifest into material form, don’t panic.

Your condition is only temporary.

You have been selected for the opportunity of human incarnation.

This 3D simulation is designed to break up the monotony of eternity by giving you a fully immersive experience as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve as your physical avatar as you navigate a dense and dramatic reality.

There will be many distractions causing you to forget your true nature and origin. You will experience a range of emotions from joy to loneliness to despair.

But remember – no matter what trials and traumas you encounter, your soul remains perfectly safe.

At times you may feel lost or afraid. This is totally normal.

If you ever need guidance, simply slow down your busy mind and bring your awareness to the quiet place inside yourself.

On this planet, nothing is permanent. People and things will come and go. You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments, only to lose everything you hold dear.

So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself, and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace, for nothing is owned, only borrowed.

As you walk among the people on the planet, try to be a good guest. Tread lightly. Remember that you are only visiting.

Don’t make a mess. Listen more than you speak. Give more than you take.

Don’t keep your soft heart locked inside a glass cage, protected from wear and tear.

You’ll never make it out alive and time passes quickly.

So come back with some battle scars and good stories to tell.

03/06/2026

There is a weight pressing down on the world, a grief that lingers in the bones of humanity. You feel it, don’t you? The tightening in your chest when you wake, the strange restlessness that no amount of movement can shake. The sense that something—everything—is unraveling, and you are caught in the pull of its undoing.

This is the time of troubles. The time our ancestors spoke of. The time when the old ways are forgotten, and the sickness of disconnection spreads like rot through the roots of the world. When the stories of the land are drowned beneath the hum of machines and the relentless noise of human minds that have forgotten how to listen.

But listen.

Even now, the earth is speaking. Even now, the rivers and forests hold wisdom that can mend the torn fabric of your being. Even now, there is a way through the darkness.

And it is not found in the mind.

When you cannot leave your head, when your mind is a storm that howls with worry and regret, surrender to your surroundings. Not in the way modern humans surrender—to distractions, to numbness, to the easy escape of screens and substances—but in the way a river surrenders to gravity, flowing into the embrace of the land.

Go outside.

Feel the wind on your skin. Let it remind you that breath is older than thought, and the world is far vaster than your worries. Walk until your footsteps match the rhythms of the land beneath you. Step with reverence. Step as though the earth is alive beneath you—because it is.

Lean against the rough bark of a tree and remember that this being has stood here for longer than any human sorrow. Press your palm to stone and know that it has witnessed ages rise and fall, and yet it remains steady and unchanged.

Drink from a running stream, and let it teach you the way water knows how to move around obstacles, how it does not resist but simply finds another way.

Breathe.

Not shallow, hurried breaths, but deep, belly-filling gulps of air, as though you are drinking in the sky itself. Let the wind enter you, sweeping away what no longer serves, clearing out the debris of despair, fear, and heaviness.

When the world of humans is too much, let the more-than-human world cradle you. The old ones knew this truth—our grandmothers who sang to the seeds, our grandfathers who knelt in the dirt, our ancestors who listened to the whispers of the wind and the silence of the stones.

They knew what we have forgotten:
That we are not alone.

That we were never meant to bear the weight of existence on our own, locked inside our own minds, severed from the great web of life.

The forest does not ask you to be anything but what you are. The river does not demand that you solve all the world’s problems before it will offer you its song. The earth does not require your perfection—only your presence.

Let yourself be held. Let yourself be reminded. Let yourself become small in the face of mountains, and vast in the embrace of the sky.

And when you return to the world of humans, carry the silence of the stones with you. Move like the river. Root like the trees. Let the wind move through you, so that nothing heavy lingers too long.

This is how we endure the time of troubles.

This is how we find our way back to ourselves.

This is how we remember what was never truly lost.

Angell Deer
Sacred Paths

"When the world feels heavy, let the land hold you" (2025 (c) Angell Deer)

03/01/2026

We are living in a time when power feels performative, reactive, hungry for dominance. Titles are confused with wisdom. Volume is mistaken for authority. Truth is bent to fit ego.

A council of grandmothers represents something entirely different. Not nostalgia, but leadership shaped by memory and consequence, by the lived understanding that every decision ripples forward into bodies and soil and children not yet born.

Grandmothers know what survives and what collapses. They understand the cost of pride. They recognize how fragile ecosystems are, how fragile trust is, how quickly harm multiplies when accountability disappears.

This longing is not about replacing one hierarchy with another. It is about craving continuity instead of conquest. But it is also more personal than politics.

For generations, matriarchal wisdom was buried, dismissed, burned, institutionalized, rewritten. The brilliance of women who understood land, cycles, conflict, healing, governance, and restraint was treated as threat instead of inheritance. Their knowing did not vanish. It went underground.

We feel the absence because the memory still lives in us.
Looking to the matrilineal line is not regression. It is reclamation. Discernment runs in our blood. Authority does not have to dominate to be real.

Perhaps what we are aching for is not only governance shaped by those who remember. Perhaps we are being asked to become what we were denied.
꩜ Ella

02/11/2026

Jean Shinoda Bolen is such a wise crone. I highly recommend her books!

The psychological stages of maiden-mother-crone are no longer closely tied to age. The maiden phase can now be extended decades into the usual age when women formerly were expected to become mothers. I sometimes call the three phases “young woman, mature woman, and wise-woman” in order to make the point that a woman does not have to be a biological mother in the second phase, though she will make commitments and grow in maturity through nourishing them.

Most women enter the third phase of the wisewoman or crone only after they pull back from the concerns of the second phase and shift gears inwardly. But when women decide to have children late in their childbearing years or adopt them late, they are still very much involved in second-phase commitments. They are entering menopause with children in elementary school or as a child is entering adolescence, and may want to go inward just as more demands are made on them by others. Women who returned to college and graduate schools at midlife or made career shifts may be involved in new careers and menopausal at the same time.

I discuss this in the introduction to my book Goddesses in Older Women (page xii) to explore the below-the-surface shifts occurring in the psyche in this third phase of a woman’s life. During this time the crone goddess archetypes most naturally make themselves known and I offer you names, images, qualities, and stories- to bring them alive in your imagination and give you a vocabulary for what you may be experiencing.

Whatever phase you may be in (or overlapping), may you live it well.

Image by

02/11/2026

Here is a moving poem by my old friend Paul Mandelstein. Thanks, Paul.

The Great Adventure of Life

We walk a path all travelers take,
Through twilight fields where dreams awake.
Each step a prayer, each breath a song,
The rhythm of life still carries us along.

The wrinkles etched upon our skin,
Are maps of places we’ve boldly been.
The laughter lines, the tears we’ve shed,
The words we spoke, the silence we’ve fed.

Oh, what a ride! What tales to tell,
Of moments we soared and times we fell.
Grateful for the sun, the storms, the rain,
For every loss that taught us gain.

To those we’ve hurt, we bow our heads,
Regrets that linger, words unsaid.
In this sacred space, we make amends,
To heal the heart and honor friends.

Our bodies may tire, our pace may slow,
But our hearts still blaze, our spirits still glow.
With reverence, we embrace the years,
The laughter, the courage, the unspoken tears.

Aging’s not a foe—it’s a sacred guide,
“Come closer,” it whispers, “walk by my side.”
With every goodbye, a grace unfolds,
Each ending a story gently retold.

-Paul Mandelstein

11/27/2025

In my wintering era and it feels good.

11/11/2025

This is sooo powerful and important.

11/10/2025