From The internal Traveler

Ellen Barone

The year was 1991. I was twenty-eight, optimistic, and an American teaching maths in Forres, Scotland. When I invited the nine members of the maths department and their plus-ones to a traditional Thanksgiving meal, it would take the Church of Scotland, the butcher Macdonald, and the Royal Air Force to make it happen.

Ellen Barone

The Opposite of Loneliness: How travel transforms the experience of solitude and staying home.

Ellen Barone

Thirty-seven days into self-isolation I asked my husband Hank, “Are you lonely?” Like much of the world’s population, we are physical-distancing and staying home to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Would this, I worried, lead to loneliness? And, in turn, to biological effects as deadly as the virus itself? Instead, isolation has brought clarity to something we'd innately suspected all along.

Ellen Barone

Life On Hold

Ellen Barone

It occurred to me recently that sometime in the uncertain future, life will be perceived through the filter of two lenses: All that came before the coronavirus 2019 pandemic, and that which follows. And, like so many of us, I wonder what a post-COVID-19 reality will look like and how we can find hope, amidst despair, in the capacity of our own hearts and choices.

Ellen Barone