Elizabeth Harper Neeld is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.
For more than two decades, Elizabeth has written about the courage of resilient individuals and the
triumph of the human spirit in the face of some of life’s most painful challenges. Her book
Seven Choices: Finding New Life After Loss Shatters Your World was requested and
distributed by the American Red Cross to their national staff and to individuals being served by the Red Cross
New York Disaster Relief Center after the September 11, 2001, attack. Her book
Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times has been
reviewed as “useful...well thought out...wise advice that will help many.”
In A Sacred Primer Elizabeth discusses ways that our
inner and outer lives can be balanced in harmony and quietness.
You can read more about Elizabeth Elizabeth's Latest Post
Global Mourning
All of us have some special location that speaks to our hearts. A field of corn as far as the eye can see. A mountain that draws our eyes upward. A beach or seashore where we gaze toward a far-distant horizon. A valley of wildflowers. An old homestead where even the footprint of an old structure stirs warm memories.
All of us, too, have had the experience of watching a place change in a way that destroys its specialness for us. A highway comes too close; toxic waste clogs a stream; developers cut off the top of a beautiful hill; smog obscures a distant vista. Something very important is lost to us. We feel sad.
Researchers in Australia assert that this is a new type of sadness. When parts of our landscape change in detrimental ways, we lose the sense of “home” that these locations provided us previously. A name has been coined for this phenomenon: solastalgia. Solastalgia comes from the root word that means comfort: solacium and from the root word that means pain: algia. Solastalgia is the condition when we long for a natural setting that is now changed forever. As one researcher put it, this is a form of homesickness we experience even while we are still “at home.”
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