JPSeibyl, MD - Holiday Missives

December 2007

December 2008

December 2009

December 2011

December 2007

Greetings,

As we write these words we are awaiting our first Nor’easter of the season. It’s the sort of storm that settles in for a day or so with incessant, penetrating northeasterly winds, rain, and sleet that seeps through layered clothing and even into one’s soul with a reminder of Nature’s power and the mystery of our own diminutive journeys on her earth. Short and diminutive as our journeys may be, we nonetheless pursue them with vigor, enthusiasm, and in all too rare moments of greater lucidity, a quiet gratefulness.

For Jenny, who turned fourteen in the summer, this meant starting high school at Choate Rosemary Hall, a private secondary school in Wallingford CT as a Third Former (9th grade). The academics are rather rigorous as she is in honors classes in math, physics, and Spanish. She has made an elegant transition, applying her penchant for organization and maturity to the task. Jenny is a volunteer in the Big Brother/Big Sister program, leads campus tours for prospective students and families, and continues to figure skate (which she does not like to be reminded is another way of mastering physics). This has been a year of transition for Cathy as well. She returned part-time to her position at the Department of Veterans Affairs in health services research. She has kept up with her weaving, winning an award at the biennial show of the Connecticut Handweavers Guild, and making high-end greeting cards which employ bits of intricately woven fibers in the design. These are sold at local specialty stationery shops.

John’s research at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (IND) and Molecular Neuroimaging (MNI) continues to expand. The research group is now comprised of about fifty individuals with the recent addition of chemists, a physicist, another neurologist, data management head, as well as two additional cameras coming next month, and expanded space. The group launched new research projects this year in Alzheimer’s disease and forged new collaborations with investigators and partnering pharmaceutical companies in the US, Japan, and Europe. We are proud of him but miss him during his time running about the world. John also continues to run in the literal sense. This year he won his age group in the 5K New Haven Road Race and oddly, looks to aging just a bit more to get to the next age decade, where strangely enough, he will be comparably better, even as he gets slower. We leave the metaphor in that to your own rumination.

Gus, our Shetland sheepdog, has been a wonderful addition to our family - full of energy, gentleness, and unconditional love. He is a creature of habit, some rather unfortunate, like sitting on John’s chest at 5:30 am each morning to lick his face in effort to rouse him to the day’s action.

We will celebrate Christmas with our church family in Branford and then head out to Cleveland for 4–5 days to visit with family. We wish you health, happiness and peace in the New Year. May it be a year of penetrating joy and in your own quiet, more lucid moments, filled with a genuine gratefulness for the challenge of your own journey.

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December 2008

Warm Greetings in this Holiday Season,

Three hundred sixty six rotations of the earth….fifty two weeks….twelve full moons…

each mark an inexorable passage of time which has played out over the past year in ways joyful and sad, profound and trivial, exuberant and melancholic… such that we somehow find ourselves and circumstances subtly different from a year ago, and in quiet introspection endeavor to discern a meaning and significance.

This year marked the passing of John’s mother following a five week bout with a rare immune disorder. After an acute flare up that lasted all of five weeks, she succumbed on August 1st. In the last weeks of her life she was surrounded by all those she loved and held close. She was ebullient, loquacious, and a great social connector, whose loss is deeply felt. “Do not go gentle into that good night….rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Jenny is a sophomore at Choate Rosemary Hall, a private secondary school. In addition to a full plate of honors classes, she volunteers in the Big Brother/Big Sister program, leads campus tours for prospective students, figure skates, acolytes at church and assists with Sunday School. Both she and her parents are mindful of the prospect of new freedom (and responsibility) as she turns 16 this summer and will be driving.

Cathy continues her work for the Department of Veterans Affairs in a group that does program evaluation and assessment of psychosocial and mental health initiatives for Vets. Weaving remains a strong passion, with its odd combination of mathematics and artistry and befuddling vocabulary of terms like “heddles, shuttles, and bobbins” which strangely sound like characters in a Beatrix Potter story.

John’s research at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (IND) and Molecular Neuroimaging (MNI) continues to expand with a staff of about 55, including physicians, chemists, physicists, nurses, technologists, research assistants, etc. The work is largely focused on Parkinsons and Alzheimers, developing techniques to image the brain with PET and SPECT to better track the efficacy of novel treatments. The year has seen the expansion of projects and collaborations in Europe, Australia, and Asia with much attendant travel.

On the youthful canine exuberance front.. we have increased the size of our family by one with the adoption of a 1 ½ year old male Shetland sheepdog named Shay – a diminutive version of our current sable Sheltie, Gus. The “boys” are great fun together, engaging in games like dog-sheep/sheep-dog where each takes turns chasing each other in dizzying circles in the backyard. While we may have to forgo beautiful flower beds come spring, there is something poignant and instructive in the intensity and sheer joy of their play.

May you find your own joy in the miracle of each moment, receiving these as the simple gift of time, perpetually wending forward and marking our collective journey. Whether you go forth in dizzying circles or more linear trajectories, we wish you Health, Happiness and Peace in the New Year.

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December 2009

Warm Greetings in this Holiday Season,

The cold has finally descended like an invisible curtain making distant the warm and succulent Autumn days of just last month. As I write this, a few snowflakes float whimsically by my window, the harbinger of our first snowstorm of the Season. They barely cover the ground, but soon will form white confluent mounds, which my dogs will curiously sniff, lick, and then romp through, having forgotten, that this happens every year. I suppose there is value in the forgetting, for keeping fresh and spontaneous, and importantly, not becoming numbed to the quiet miracles about us- like a snowstorm, or the flowers which will pop through that snow in two months time, …. or our own lives.

As to our quiet miracles- Jenny is in her junior year at Choate Rosemary Hall, a private secondary school in Wallingford, CT. She has been fairly busy with a special intensive science research program (SRP) and will spend this summer as a research intern at the Yale School of Medicine. She has been taking driving lessons and logging the hours necessary for full license. It is both generational and gender, but I remain surprised and pleased at the very different tact she takes on this business of driving. Partly due to state laws regarding teen driving and partly her good sense, she would not, for example, take advantage of the change in weather to spin doughnuts in a snowy and slick parking lot, as I confess I would at her age and circumstance. I suspect Jenny will apply that same good sense to the season of college selection that stands before her.

Cathy continues in her work for the Department of Veterans Affairs doing outcomes research on programs targeting psychosocial and mental health initiatives amongst Veterans. It has been a challenging year at best with significant organizational changes- but she slogs through. Weaving, managing a Sunday school program (like being a Dean), and taking care of our canine collection, as well as the rest of us, takes a bit of clever juggling, if not equipoise.

My own research at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (IND) and Molecular Neuroimaging (MNI) moves along. We are still in a building phase despite being a relatively mature organization in operation for almost 9 years. We hired 15 additional staff in this past year to supplement our chemistry, image processing, and core imaging lab groups in a very tricky economy. We now have multicenter projects in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s taking place at over 250 hospitals/clinical sites on five continents. My group also has also been developing new brain imaging techniques using novel radiopharmaceuticals to assess different aspects of brain function and test the efficacy of innovative treatments. This continues to mean much travel on my part, but will not doubt serve as fodder for the travelogs I can write in my retirement.

The snowflakes outside dance a more frenetic dance, and in larger number, in dizzying clouds that form and dissipate within seconds, before settling on the now completely white ground. Whether you dance though this Season in dizzy freneticism or with more deliberate slogging, may you find succor in your own challenges and miracles. We wish you Health, Happiness and Peace in the New Year.

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December 2011

Cataclysms come in many form; dramatic natural events like earthquakes, hurricanes, and freakish autumnal snowstorms, all of which we experienced here in Connecticut the last year, but also in the quieter form of personal life events, which inexorably alter one’s psychological landscape in unanticipated and surprisingly life-affirming ways. Regarding the latter, a major event this past Spring was Cathy’s mother Elsie passing at age 90. There is as much to celebrate as there is to mourn over such a long and rich life, and we feel this odd mixture of emotions most poignantly now over these Holidays. The old house and property in Munson Township, Ohio were sold to a young couple starting out. We think Elsie and her husband Hank, who predeceased her, would be happy about that.

Other changes… Jenny started college this Fall at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. She made an elegant transition from life at home as a single child to two roommates, dormitory life, and the nuances of public transportation. The parents made no less a transition to an oddly empty nest after 18 years. Life has been quieter save the more frequent text messaging and a few trips back and forth to Saratoga Springs.

Quiet notwithstanding, our dogs haven’t missed a beat with Jenny’s departure to college, continuing in their frenetic, energetic, and optimistic canine ways. They are particularly keen on going on long walks off leash through a nearby wooded acreage, frolicking with each other and the other dogs they encounter on the trails. They are creatures of joy, we should take their cue in this regard, or at least endeavor to become some small measure of the person they think we are.

More changes….. we celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary in June, seems like yesterday I beheld my bride on our wedding day in the dress she made herself. We have slowly and imperceptibly been changed over the years, but I count that day some 25 years ago as the best decision I ever made.

It is now 10 years ago that I co-founded my company Molecular Neuroimaging (MNI) and non-profit sister entity, the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (IND) in New Haven. We continue to thrive, tough economy notwithstanding, and have been adding personnel over the year with some 80 employees, new lab space, and an international footprint with research studies in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America for the likes of Lilly, Pfizer, Bayer Healthcare, Merck, Amgen, Novartis, Janssen, Genentech, and others. Cathy continues to labor in the proverbial vineyards of health outcomes research for the Department of Veterans Affairs.

So perhaps “cataclysm”, with denotations of catastrophe, debacle, and calamity, is probably not the correct word to describe this year. Upheaval and change is par for life’s course, the magnitude and meaning of any particular event may be ill-understood with nearness in time, but is invariably thrown into sharper perspective with the passing of time, even as details fade into the fog. We grow wiser and know enough to be thankful that our milestones are not our millstones. We wish you a joyous New Year, may you also become the person my dogs would think you are. …. were they to chance upon you on a wooded trail.

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December 2013

The first snowfall of the season is proceeding apace, with fluffy wet dollops falling lazily, a kind of manna from heaven for my dogs, Gus and Shay. They stand perched, alert, and ready to fling themselves with complete abandon vertically toward the heavens to capture some flakes in their mouths, returning gracefully to earth, enjoined with their quarry. It is curious they feel compelled to exert the effort to jump to meet the flakes on their own terms, rather than wait safely on the ground- their alacrity for snowflakes in particular, or life in general, cannot be contained.

Perhaps taking a cue from this spirit, the year saw Cathy and I traveling to Guatemala to build houses, Paris to eat crepes, and the German Alps to hike; our own effort to reach closer to the heavens. Pushing ourselves physically, hiking with packs at altitude on precarious trails through eerie, treeless and stony landscapes was tricky and not without risk, as well as a deep-seated satisfaction and a penetrating exhaustion at day’s end. Whether hiking in the Bavarian mountains or mixing cement in Antigua, Guatemala, we appreciate that difficult challenges are as much about opportunity as they are about obstacles.

This year has provided the usual mélange of opportunities, obstacles, set-backs, and victories- for all of which we are humbly grateful. Jenny is a now junior majoring in psychology at Skidmore College. This past summer she interned at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and hopes to do her senior thesis building on her experience. Cathy continues to labor in the vineyards at the VA and received a 25 year service award this Fall. The company I co-founded 13 years ago, Molecular Neuroimaging, LLC is thriving and growing, now with 85 employees and an international presence with projects on five continents.

In the category of surreal and ironic challenges, I am diagnosed with Parkinson’s; a disease I have studied all my professional life, developing brain imaging techniques for diagnosis. My first thought about this news was that this is not possible; it must all be in my head (denial). After all, I am the diagnostician, not the diagnosee. I realized of course, one way or another, it is definitely in my head (acceptance). Now I simply feel that God has a pointed sense of humor…….. as do I (integration). Who can be so lucky as to be able to get up each morning and go to work on unlocking the secrets of the disease that one is afflicted with? This throws into a sharper relief the immediacy, urgency, and personal relevance of our research work, as well as provides unique opportunities for advocacy. Curses become blessings, obstacles become opportunities.

Even as the snowflake-chasing exploits of my dogs serve as a metaphor for living in the moment, with alacrity and enthusiasm, we wish you too might joyfully roil against the constraints of gravity, embrace challenge, and find opportunity. Peace and blessings in the New Year …. and take a moment to catch a snowflake or two.

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December 2014

There is something I have come to appreciate about long international flights, flying at 38,000 feet, untethered from the internet, off the grid, undistracted, with the leisure to let thoughts meander as they will. I write this letter in just this setting, flying over Alaska enroute back from Japan. I watch the inexorably beautiful tumult of clouds tumbling over each other, piles of animated cotton, cajoling, rolling, splitting, merging and separating again. There is something special about looking down at the clouds under your feet, never to be rained upon, above the fray, a godly perspective. These clouds call to mind the bustle and frenzy of life; the chaos, tumult, and seeming randomness of each day. Yet, for clouds, each individual, seemingly random cloud contributes to a powerful and organized force; a weather front, or a more benign march of like-mannered, spinning, wispy, tumbling allies dancing together across the sky as part of something larger, beautiful, ordered, and with less serendipity than we suppose. Likewise, each single, random moment, each day, when taken together becomes part of something larger; a precious memory, an experience, even a life, like pieces of a puzzle that only make sense in their joining.

Let me tell you about some of these pieces in 2014. Overall, a good year bringing its own surprises, gentle and not so gentle. Jenny is in her final year of college, completing her bachelors in psychology at Skidmore College and looking to the greater world of gainful employment for next year. She has really managed her time in college well, (I envy that, I was more random, vague, even capricious) taking advantage of a broad liberal arts focus while evolving specific interests in developmental psychology, and picking up ice hockey on the Skidmore women’s club team along the way. We are all looking forward to a grand commencement weekend in May, a new beginning. With a little luck she will still have her front teeth, hockey notwithstanding.

Cathy continues to exercise her passion for the fiber arts by weaving elaborate and sublime pieces. I am awed by the complexity, discipline, mathematics, and artisanship of her weaving. In June, Cathy will take an early retirement from her position at the Dept of Veterans Affairs where she has worked the greater part of the last 27 years, having woven together countless reports and program data analyses for VA mental health initiatives combatting homelessness. Her plans after retirement are ambitious but not unexpected; more artistry, heading up the pastoral care ministry at church, and travel. The latter will be with me- she really needs to see those clouds.

That travel is largely associated with scientific meetings, congresses, investigator meetings and business development in my work with my company Molecular NeuroImaging, LLC, which continues to grow and diversify; we now have over 100 employees, running projects on five continents, and have had our best year ever in 2014 with double-digit revenue growth for the fourth year in a row. We tried out the model of Cathy accompanying me on trips; this Fall we went to Gothenburg, Sweden. A highlight of the trip was sampling the Swedish healthcare system after Cathy stepped on a cobblestone in an awkward fashion resulting in an avulsion fracture of the proximal fifth metatarsal of her left foot. She spent a couple days on an elegant Scandinavian-designed pair of crutches with reflectors, front and back.

Our dogs Gus and Shay don’t travel much, being content to engage in their shepherding lunatic behaviors closer to home, as the spirit takes them- poster dogs for living in the moment, they are pure loyalty, alacrity, and elation. We do love our boys, as ridiculous as they are, they have lessons to teach.

Finally, our most warm and heartfelt wishes for a prosperous, surprise-filled, and joyous New Year. Check out a few clouds, understanding you may get rained upon. Otherwise, may those singular days and experiences in 2015 be your own source of learning, happiness, and gratitude.

With our warm wishes, blessings and peace,

Catherine, Jenny, and John Seibyl

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December 2016

The first snow of the season fell overnight here in Connecticut, coming in stealthily, covering everything with blankets of pure vibrant white. There is something cozy about being momentarily trapped, hunkered down in a warm place protective against a cold piercing wind, making its noisy howl and clatter as it drives snow in all directions, a benign dust storm that paints the clapboard sides of our house with white speckles. Such is the backdrop against which I write this letter, from a warm cozy place; physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

Which is another way of saying that life, on balance, is good. 2016 has been as an eventful year as perhaps the past few combined. Cathy and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary in June in typical understated fashion; we went out to dinner. But at the dinner realized we didn’t need to make a special celebration, as every day is a celebration of sorts. Cathy still teaches me things, mostly unwittingly, and I teach her, mostly wittingly, and hence together we are students of the relationship. This is a quiet miracle to me.

We also celebrated Jenny’s new job, working at McLean Hospital, outside Boston, as a mental health worker on a residential adolescent treatment unit. She’s working with teens with psychiatric disorders complicated by substance abuse, so-called “dual diagnosis” individuals. While this is a tough group, she is learning a great deal, appreciative of the strange admixture of exhilaration and humiliation at being on the steep part of the learning curve. She models perseverance and kindness for her clients, and the world in general for that matter, including me.

Cathy, now in the second year of her retirement, finds her days filled with weaving, coordinating pastoral care services through church, managing our homes and dogs, and occasionally traipsing around the world with me. The plural ‘homes” is correct in the last sentence, as this Fall we purchased a second home, a converted military powerstation on Great Diamond Island, Maine. The house is a short ferry ride from Portland, a journey which allows a psychological transition from my usual anxious freneticism to a calmer, unhurried, recreational and measured affect. We look forward to temperate summer days hosting family and friends to a place that relaxes, recharges, and re-creates.

The timing of the purchase was related to the sale of my company, Molecular Neuroimaging, LLC to Boston-based inviCRO last February. We refer to the acquisition as “geeks meet doctors”, albeit geeky doctors. The combined company is about 230 employees with sites in Boston, New Haven, Kalamazoo, London, and Cologne. I am one of four Managing Directors and Distinguished Scientist. The latter sounds a little haughty, but actually speaks to the activity which is most fun for me, working with a lot of smart people solving problems in applying imaging tools to probe brain function in health and disease. It surprises me how much fun this has been- nearly a year in. It worries Cathy l imagine as she would like me to join her in retirement someday where I can torture her with my incessant word games, dry humor, and scientific skepticism, while she can continue to unwittingly teach me about compassion.

Perhaps we can all do a little better on the compassion front, despite our tendency to tendentiousness and tribalism, of us vs them posturing, and narcissism. We create the psychological space we live in, whether the snow newly fallen represents beauty or annoying hassle is our call. Even when life throws obstacles in our path, we determine in our response whether there is an opportunity for growth or an exercise in complacency, complaining, and loathing our fate. We wish you all the best in your own challenges and opportunities for creating, re-creating and re-imaging. May you find in the glaringly brilliant light of a Winter’s sun on snow, metaphor for an internal light granting illumination of the interconnectedness, frailty, beauty, and miracle of the short sojourn we each take, together, on this earth. Happiest of New Years.

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December 2017

I stare dreamily out my home office window at the fusillading waves coming in from Casco Bay, struggling to string together a few coherent thoughts about this past year. It seems I would rather write about the water, how the color is always changing, today a brilliant royal blue, reflecting, chameleon-like, the perfect cloudless sky. Yesterday the water picked up the grey clouds of an impending storm, mixing the steely grey with an algal green. Bay and sky in artistic embrace. The palette is endlessly changing, the portrait textured by the churning waves, steady and cyclic, crested with white-caps teased out by the wind.

Against this backdrop life happens… marine ducks, drab in their dark colors, bob like corks closely gathered in protective formation against a scavenging eagle, a slender mink emerges from his hole by the beach plums and slides effortlessly into the water, and Cathy calls me downstairs for dinner. Breaking my trance I follow down the hall toward the stairs, the aroma from the kitchen intensifying along the way, an olfactory appetizer.

All of which is to say that we have been enjoying our home on Great Diamond Island, Maine. In our first year many guests, friends and family shared the beauty of the island. We are gradually feathering this nest, finishing off a fourth bedroom into a new master bedroom suite using designers and labor imported from Ohio (my brother Paul). Meanwhile, 2 hours south in Boston Jenny is in her second year of employment at Maclean Hospital working as a psychiatric educator on a residential treatment unit for dual diagnosis adolescent males. A tough group to work with by any accounting, but offering valuable personal and professional growth. Jenny hopes to leverage this experience with an advanced degree and is applying to graduate schools for the Fall.

Cathy continues schooling of her own taking weaving classes and producing in the course of her studies blankets, rugs, table runners, floor runners, wall hangings, coasters, placemats, and other, well-executed, but unidentified swatches of lovely woven materials. I have interrupted this productivity by dragging her off to Vienna, South Africa, and London this year on trips for both business and pleasure.

Our hope is the ratio of business:pleasure will shift more toward pleasure with my semi-retirement in January 2018. Invicro, the Boston-based company which bought Molecular Neuroimaging 22 months ago, was in turn acquired by Konica-Minolta in November providing me the resources to slow down a bit and work on the next phase of life; travel (hiking New Zealand’s South Island in February, Chile in March), writing (scientific papers, essays, poetry), working in our non-profit teaching and assessing the impact of mindfulness training and restorative practices amongst elementary school children, Parkinson’s advocacy work, and watching out my window that amazing body of water.

The latter makes me realize that like the Bay we are always changing, reacting to and reflecting the events, people, and experiences which run up against us; those joyous and painful, desirable or unpleasant. Ironically, even as our world is perpetually in flux, a part of us remains immutable as the ocean, grateful for the abundant gifts received and trying our best to return to our world some measure of good to try balance the equation between what we receive and what we give. I know in my case this enterprise is doomed to failure. Nonetheless, the fundamental appreciation of being abundantly gifted creates a sense of humility, thankfulness, and quiet joy, enabling an internal stillness and listening presence, even in the face of disruptive or transformative change.

We wish you all the best in your disruptive and transformative journeys in 2018; may you seek constancy and embrace change, may you reflect the beauty and good of the world, may you learn what is to be learned in sitting quietly, looking out the window perhaps, and listening to the tidal rhythms of your spirit.

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December 2018

14 December 2018

It is 6 am at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. I am sitting quietly to compose this letter, my head filled with images, ideas, sentence fragments, sound bites, all churning in a roiling chaos of undisciplined thought. This stands in stark contrast to the serenity of the morning unfolding around me. The diffused light of the sunrise calmly intensifies out my window revealing a peaceful street, mostly empty save for the occasional whoosh of a passing car and two Tom cats patrolling the sidewalk as the streetlights sputter off, one by one, each in its own time giving its charge back to the day. In my room I hear only Cathy’s steady and measured breathing as she sleeps, the sounds in syncopated chorus with the rumbles and pings coming from the heat vent. It is at points of contrast, at the bounding interfaces of dissimilarity like my frenetic internal mental state and the calm of the morning, when things are thrown into sharp relief and clarity emerges. Each contrasting view refines the understanding of the other, a yin-yang tug-of-war resulting in some sort of synthesis, lessons learned, or other small epiphany.

We are here in Germany to enjoy the seasonal festivities, the Weihnachtmarkt or Christmas market, in rare opportunity to travel for pleasure. I must say these opportunities have become much less rare with my semi- then subsequently full-time retirement this Fall. In February we took a two week walking tour of New Zealand’s South Island and in May visited Vancouver spending an extra few days on one of the islands in the region. Over the summer, we spent a good deal of time on another island, Great Diamond Island, Maine. Our home there at Diamond Cove is nothing short of therapeutic in helping untangle, unwrap, slow down, reorganize, and replenish. I notice this from the moment I step on the ferry for the 20 minute ride out of Portland to the Island. Cathy, Jenny, and I also feel strongly about sharing this resource with our family and friends, holding two family reunions, and gratefully (and I hope graciously) receiving a goodly number of guests.

Meanwhile, back in Branford Connecticut where we mostly live, Cathy continues to weave up a storm (an odd metaphor but I’m going with it) becoming involved in the Board activities of the nonprofit Guilford Arts Center where her creativity manifests. Jenny enrolled in a Masters program at Harvard University for two reasons; first, to obtain an advanced degree from the school of education, second, to nettle her father, a dyed in the wool Yale man. She also added a new family member, Arlo, the cockapoo puppy. He is a bright, enormously entertaining bundle of alacritous energy, who approaches the world with complete and utter optimism. This is in contrast with the staid, more cautious, skepticism of my two old shelties, and myself for that matter. These predilections notwithstanding, we are not so ossified as to miss seeing a lesson in young Arlo’s tornadic fervor and spunk.

Other contrasts- my father Walter, ventured his way from the high desert of Las Cruces, New Mexico to coastal Connecticut and a wonderful retirement community in nearby North Branford, CT. He has a 2 bedroom “villa apartment” in a complex which is a cross between elderly housing and a five star resort, with rather favorable male:female demographics for my father when seeking a pleasant conversation over dinner.

I am all for pleasant conversation in a rancorous and uncivil, if not toxic moment of our collective lives. May the spirit of the season inspire us to do better to see contrast and difference as a source of strength and empowerment to new, unimagined possibility, ideas, and epiphanies. May a mindful wisdom permeate and guide our attitude and approach to each day, grateful in the appreciation of the quiet miracles around us; family, friends, the Arlos of the world. Perhaps 2019 will bring us closer together, closer, for me, to the kind of person my dogs believe me to be.

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December 2019

Several years ago I found myself in a place similar to where I am now; sitting on a plane girding myself for the 14 hour flight from China to the US watching the whimsical and joyous tumult of clouds far below and waiting for some words to come to me for this letter. The words always come, perhaps a little slow at times, at other times they come like fusillades of bursting water balloons; explosions of sounds and sentences all inundating my mind, bursting bits of phrasing, alliteration and rhyme, loosely spinning, joining up and separating, creating new associations, improbable links, a whirling chaos of memories, thoughts, and ideas, and most oddly, a sense of centered, listening calm. With a little patience, perspective, and perseverance the blank page before me fills, serving as record of the integration of the chaos of formless thoughts about this last year into a kind of gift of words, both warmly intentioned and gently provocative, served up with the pervasive gratitude we feel for family, friends, and acquaintances who have so enriched our past year.

Everything changes, sometimes dramatically, more often imperceptibly, until some challenge or stress throws things into sharp relief, casting a perspective on how far things have moved along, whether good or bad. In the good category, Jenny completed a Masters degree in Education in May after a one year intensive program at Harvard, the second greatest university in America. Cathy and I watched her graduate with a deep sense of pride and gratitude in our hearts, even as one us, begrudgingly wore a Harvard baseball cap to the festivities, as promised. Crimson is just not my color- too hard to get matching accessories. After spending a few months looking, she took a position at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, within the Yale Child Study Center at the School of Medicine. It’s been great to have her and her lovingly mischievous little dog, Arlo around and about. The latter is entrepreneurial in the creativity and passion with which he plunges into his world, a bit of the puppy still left in him perhaps, but more thoughtful and directed with his own brand of emotional intelligence, or more accurately, devotional intelligence.

Cathy and I are retired persons now, although how this manifests in our life together is a great empirical experiment. Recall I write these words from six miles above earth returning from a series of lectures in Beijing and Guangzhou to train nuclear medicine physicians in the evaluation of Alzheimer’s disease by assessing brain beta-amyloid accumulation using positron emission tomography. This is not work, taking on purely fun projects, at my discretion, and even getting paid for it. Some would argue otherwise, that I am doing a lousy job of retiring from my job. I just feel a sense of gratitude and humility that I still have something to offer the world, as a scholar and patient with a neurodegenerative disease, and a moral imperative to do so.That being said, Cathy and I enjoyed some other non-brain imaging related travel to California and to Europe, taking a walking tour of Alsace, in eastern France. We spent a lovely week strolling through vineyards and small villages perfectly well appointed with bursts of colorful flowers in window boxes and wafts of fragrant grapes at harvest. It was a walk that was more about the journey and less about the destination. This of course can be said about other journeys, indeed one’s life itself.

Our wish for you in your own journey is that, even amidst the churning, roiling march of change and the sad tribalism of national politics, even at times of angst, spiritual disconnection, and worry, even during periods of self-doubt, sitting amongst your own whirling chaos of memories, thoughts, and ideas, you too, most oddly, find your own sense of centered, listening calm. It’s at such a place one begins to hear the music of the Spheres and feels the sure steady rhythms of the soul. It is at such a place of uncompromising gratitude where one’s mature life really begins.

December 2020

Warm Wishes and Holiday Greetings to our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow sojourners during this most strange, challenging, and surreal year. Ostensibly 2020 was the worst of times with the passing of my father, Walter Seibyl in February, the loss of our dogs Shay in May and Gus in December, a time of a raging viral pandemic with the attendant stress of lock-downs and social isolation, people losing livelihoods and losing lives, all during a period of national acrimony, divisiveness, and tribalism. The swirling chaos notwithstanding and in counterpoint to this dizzying array of calamities in 2020, there were also inspiring examples of humanity at its best. We saw expressions of the good within and around us, manifesting as an indefatigable spirit of hope, of empathy, honor, selflessness, and of connectedness in that we are in this together. To borrow shamelessly from Dickens, 2020 was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

The quarantine many of us were confined to for most of the year was a difficult gift, but a gift nonetheless, providing precious time with family, slowing personal and professional timetables, reducing overall levels of busy freneticism, and introducing a different tempo on the internal metronome pacing our lives’ activities. This is a kind of reset, where new options, possibilities, and opportunities lurk, a reset to things we forget about, the spirituality inherent in the seeming banal and common place, the miracle of the machinery of our bodies’ immune responses in handeling the rampaging bits of protein, nucleic acids, and glycoproteins comprising the infectious corona virus, and for those vaccines that train the immune system to protect us. We reset to the profoundly instilled gratitude for what we have been given, and the larger gratitude felt in being able at times to give this back to someone else, unfettered by expectation of return. The acts of giving and receiving, like breathing in and out, are all part of the same process, the currency of our connection as friends, neighbors, citizens of our country, citizens of the world and of our shared humanity. At its essence is the realization that we are all on the same team, that the health, welfare, and growth of any one of us depends on every one of us and to be respected for the unique persons that we are, just because we are…. each a singular, miracle of our person, of mind and body and spirit; fragile, yet resilient, foolish, yet wise, incredulous, yet faithful, despairing, yet hopeful, in short, simply human.

In sharing this past year with my wife Cathy and daughter Jenny I have come to see the detailed complexity and depths of their persons, their capacity for caring, generosity, and love. We were in close quarters for most of 2020 faring remarkably well, mutually supportive, developing strategies for avoiding infection, and working more as a team than I ever recall. While Cathy and I are retired, Cathy ostensibly more-so than myself, Jenny without a hitch went into work at home, keeping more or less regular work week hours in her position at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. I was quite impressed with the discipline with which she and her dog Arlo went up to our finished attic with a make-shift work area, came down for lunch, then went back up to the next Zoom meeting. Over the summer Jenny found an ideal apartment in a house near the historic central Green in the beautiful New England town of Guilford, CT, just the next town over from us. Cathy continues to serve in the same town, on the Board of the Guilford Arts Center, wistfully weaving whenever circumstances vis-à-vis Covid allow. Although as Co-President of the Board, she might have some pull. She gifted me with a beautiful blanket for what she views as my uncomfortable leather couch (uncomfortable due to her shorter legs) in the study whose renovation was recently completed at our home on Great Diamond Island, Maine.

This place, this spot in the middle of Casco Bay, a short-ferry ride to Portland brings me to the matter of the image on the front of the card enclosed with this letter. The picture might be a bit confusing due to its unusual perspective. The photo is an aerial view of winter, of glistening blue-tinged snow and ice, of long morning shadows cast by white birch and pine trees illumined by the wan low-arching winter sun making its seasonally-shortened journey across a crystal-brilliant blue sky. The dark horizontal line running through the top third of the image is the shoreline, with a frozen-over Casco Bay on the bottom and the land at the top. The picture on the back side of the card is the same scene; of land and sea, ice, snow, and birch trees taken just 300 feet away (down), five minutes before the other. It is much more accessible, understandable, and familiar. This is what 2020 has been like, confusing, uncertain, a bit frightening when seen through the 30,000 feet high lens of a global pandemic, but by changing the viewpoint, seeing now through the lens of our humanity the scene becomes more familiar, a course of action clearer. We better understand our fundamental interdependence, connection, and reliance on the wisdom and experience of others, scientists, clinicians, informed civic leaders to manage the vaccines and guide us to the end of this Kafka-esque tunnel. May we emerge from 2020 safely and with new insights resulting from a pandemic-informed perspective on who we truly are, our individual humanity. May this lead us to a fuller appreciation of each other, our collective humanity, and to the personal growth that comes by not just surviving, but also in the striving to thrive in these strange times; the best of times and the worst of times. Pacem vobiscum.

To the top

December 2021

Our warm greetings to you in this 2021 Holiday Season. At the onset of this year, we eagerly anticipated emerging from the deep and murky miasma of COVID, and to some extent, three shots in the arm later, that has happened. However, this re-emergence was not as straight-forward as we would’ve liked. With recurrent bursts of new cases from the delta variant and the persnickety evolution of newer variants which carry threat of higher virulence and morbidity, it feels like I’ll be cogitating on, ruminating over, conspiring against, and planning for life around this for some time. All of which is to say that the long shadows cast by the pandemic still influences one’s perspective in subtle and inexorable ways. In particular, I’ve changed in the way I think about life’s changes, becoming more aware and more respectful of those things over which I have no control or agency, seeking a more enlightened place of psychological equipoise between inevitable change and a desire for stability and permanence. I suppose this tension reflects a cosmic interplay that drives personal growth and may be fundamental to achieving a kind of wisdom, even as we grow wizened.

On this point of change we lost two elderly dogs, Gus and Shay in 2020. This dogless state opened up our time a bit but lasted only a few months into 2021, when we took the bold step of acquiring a puppy. Winston is a Shetland sheepdog with striking coloration and a sweet, calm disposition. He evidenced a penchant for service from the get go in his gracious offering of his gift for paper shredding. Our card wishes you “Peace”, Winston wishes you pieces. His breeder played an endearing little trick on us. She knew that we were naming him Winston and registered the dog with the AKC using a middle name of her own device, “Finest Hour”. She was fortunate we didn’t name him Winston after the cigarette brand and city in North Carolina, his middle name would need to be “Salem”.

My persiflage aside, 2021 was a welcomingly quieter year than its notorious predecessor, yet not without its highlights. Jenny upgraded her position at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence having completed the two year training appointment working now as a regular employee with a raise to boot. She is grateful for that, although I think that she well-deserved it, unbiased as I am. Cathy is very involved as co-president of the Board at the Guilford Arts Center and spends time here on strategic planning, board development, and generally helping navigate the nonprofit through the challenging times. I have continued to lead a bit of an academic life, semi-retired as I am, writing and lecturing at virtual scientific meetings on brain imaging in neurodegenerative diseases, Parkinson’s disease drug trials, Alzheimer’s dementia imaging as well as consult to various and sundry groups. As for Cathy and I, now in our 35th year of marriage, we enjoy cooking together, doing philanthropic work, and walking in the woods.

For the latter, even beyond the beneficial effects of the exercise, walking offers us a place of perspective, reflection, and remove from the frenetic humdrum of extra-sylvan life. There’s something transcendent about walking in a space that is bursting with life and energy and interaction; a place perpetually changing, where seasonal cycles make their mark on the forest, their rhythms giving a sense of balance, wisdom, and divine equipoise. Each burgeoning moment is completely unique and different from every other moment. The paradox is that the basis of the forest’s permanence lies within its continual dynamic change, like a river that stays, yet still departs. We are similarly creatures of change and adaptation, microcosms of the cosmos, both Beings and Becomings. Despite feeling otherwise at times, we do have some control and agency over how we live our lives, divide our time, choose our roles, and identify our work and play, all helping to bring finer definition of who we are and who we might become.

Our wish is that 2022 be a year where the pieces all come together such that you might experience your own finest hour.

The Seibyl Family

Cathy, John, Jenny (Winston and Arlo)

December 2022

Greetings and Best Wishes of the Season to family, friends, and others who touched our lives over this past year. We are truly grateful to you.

Mercifully, 2022 turned out to be a transition year from pandemic mode to life almost back to its normal challenges, turns, and vicissitudes. Akin to the image of the small boat moored at the dock on Great Diamond Island, Maine we find ourselves feeling more secure, more anchored, more connected. We don't delude ourselves from acknowledging that a passing storm can send our little boat out into rough seas to deleterious consequence. So we keep watch of the horizon, for even though the seas are calmer the water is still unpredictable…. and exciting.

Cathy and I experienced a bit of excitement on our travels to Vancouver, BC for a small vacation around a scientific meeting. It turned out to be less a vacation than we hoped, our plans truncated by my contracting COVID. Fortunately, Cathy did not get the infection and my course was mild. The Canadian quarantine rules were stricter than the American so Cathy and I spent the good part of a week constricted, confined, and contained within the four walls of a hotel room. After several phone calls to health officials in Ottawa we figured out that we could leave the country because I was vaccinated, had resolving symptoms, and agreed not to travel by public conveyance enroute to Seattle. Unfortunately, private conveyance was hard to come by; there were no rental cars available and very few cars for hire. Eventually we did find a find a limo company which only had a single stretch limo, a gleaming alabaster white beast with the full accompaniment of flashing LED lights inside, a fully stockable bar (we foolishly opted out on the offer), and room to stretch out. We wore masks not so much in good pandemic hygiene, but to hide our identities as we slinked into the car, embarrassed. I’ll know next time to pack a lime green polyester leisure suit for more appropriate attire. It turned out the car was actually the perfect vehicle to travel hermetically sealed across country boundaries and not infect anyone including the drivers who are sealed off from us as well. Sometimes life is funny.

We enjoyed other travel in 2022, (COVID-free and less nettlesome than Vancouver): one trip to Savannah GA with some friends and another to Cleveland for my 45th high school reunion. The latter intriguing insofar as one is a member of a peer cohort with whom you journey through the years, gifted and gifting each other in the sharing of biography and the connections that serve as a kind of comparator group for the experiment we call life. The stories of compatriots’ experiences; the ebb and flow, the hurly-burly, writhing, roiling messiness of change, the triumphs and tragedies, successes, and failures; all of which lead one to take the 30,000 foot perspective on our sense of Self. At that altitude I find an attitude of deep and abiding gratitude.

At times that gratitude is appreciated only after the fact, heightened by the contrast with the uncertainty and fear attendant to an event as it unfolds to resolution. This was the case this summer when our 1.5 yr old Shetland sheepdog, Winston, walked out on to the front porch with an erratic, uncoordinated, stumbly gait (aka ataxia). The dog stopped, drooled, slumped down, and lost control of his urinary bladder. We knew he was having some sort of neurologic event and rushed him to the veterinary hospital. Within a few minutes after examining him the vet told us that he was intoxicated with cannabis. This shocked us since it's not a pleasure we indulge in and tried to figure out what had happened. It turns out that earlier Winston went for a walk on our town green which the day before was the venue for a concert. We speculate that he picked up and ate a marijuana butt someone had dropped and it took about two hours for the pharmacologic effect to manifest. The news brought a great wave of relief and bad jokes about Winston’s sudden interest in the Grateful Dead, philosophical questions about whether a dog can get the munchies, can one purchase tie-dyed collars, etc. We were just grateful he was alive.

Otherwise on a more mundane front we are doing well, staying alive, avoiding getting one virus or the other, etc. Cathy continues to be deeply engaged (Board Co-Chairwoman) in the leadership of the Guilford Arts Center. We opened our house in Maine to visitors and had a number of pleasant stays of friends and family. Jenny continues her work at the Center for Emotional Intelligence at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven. I'm writing scientific papers, some poetry, and dribs and drabs of prose. My plan for slowing the inexorable progression of my Parkinson’s disease, in part, entails eating blueberries and exercising on my stationary bike with its attached display carrying the visages of fit, young men and women imploring me to pedal faster.….. to good effect.

What is perplexing is that after almost a decade of living with a chronic neurodegenerative disease the sense of despair, self-pity, anger, and victimhood are all replaced by, of all things….gratitude, again. Like my heat pump in Maine that somehow extracts the warmth from the 38-degree F outside air, gratitude is extracted from the soupy caldron of affect and negative emotion, over time becoming for me larger and more present. Gratitude walks with generosity and love as companions, and does not abide pettiness, rapacious self-interest, or hate. Gratitude is the tide that lifts all boats.

We wish you an uplifting 2023. May you find a place of calming presence within yourself as you play out your own biography. May you pilot your boat through gentle and rough seas with integrity, focus, and resolve, if not gratitude.

- Cathy & John Seibyl

P.S. Dogs always have the munchies-my view.

Christmas 2025

Salutations and hearty greetings this Holiday Season. It’s been 365 rotations around the Sun, four seasons, and 5,054,000 beats of my heart since last sitting down to write a holiday missive. Normally I would wonder where the time went, how quickly the year has passed. Not this year, whose passing feels longer than 12 months. Why? The answer is in the brain’s propensity to seek out the novel, different, and unusual, encoding in memory these experiences more readily than the routine and familiar. With less devotion of precious memory resources to the routine or repetitive experience the moment falls back into unremembered obscurity.

Notwithstanding the neurobiology of the perception of time, 2025 was hardly routine or obscure, but rather rife with luxuriant and poignant memories. It was a year where Cathy and I set down new objectives and reinforced long-standing priorities-like travel, maintaining and improving our 1893 home in Connecticut and our naval powerplant turned home in Maine, Parkinson’s research and advocacy, weaving, philanthropy, etc. We seek recreation in the service of “re-creating”, refining, and improving our knowledge and insight about others that we might develop new insights, if not epiphanies, about ourselves.

As for new priorities, we are engaging more deeply with fellow islanders on Great Diamond Island, Maine and some of the other Islands in Casco Bay in endeavors to educate ourselves and others about strategies to address the powerful erosive effects of winds and waves on our shoreline bluffs. This is in the context of a trend toward stormier weather over the last decade, e.g. in Jan 2024 we had two “once every 50 years” storms a few weeks apart. We are working on the upland management of our own property with an assessment of water drainage and best practices plantings to improve resiliency of our shoreline, making it a demonstration case study for teaching others.

Along lines of a demonstration project, our daughter Jenny embraced homeownership with steadfast focus and energy, engaging the various trades (roofers, painters, exterminators, electricians, landscapers, etc.) for opinions on projects great and small. Her work at the Center for Emotional Intelligence at the Yale Child Study Center continues to move apace in a difficult funding environment.

As for travel, we tried to cultivate meaningful travel experiences for both short local destinations like overnights to New York city for a museum or a show as well as longer international trips to places well-tread and comfortably familiar (Vienna, Spring 2025) to the more exotic, esoteric, and edgy (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, (Autumn 2025}. Southeast Asia (formerly French Indochina) is particularly illustrative of this point. Our small tour group of six persons and a guide visited a family coconut processing business in the Mekong Delta, learned how to cast a fishing net from local fishermen, went fishing for squid in Ha Long Bay, fed bananas to elephants at a rescue facility in Laos, hiked through strange hybrids of jungle vegetation and ancient temples in Cambodia, -- even crossed the street in Ho Chi Mihn City (Saigon).

The last may seem a little bit anticlimactic, but proved to be one of the more meaningful experiences of the trip. The city has as many motorbikes as there are people and the roads are without traffic lights resulting in a constant flow of bikes carrying one to four people, mothers with small infants, chickens in bamboo cages, wicker baskets and flowers, etc. As you stand by the street curb there's a 10-meter-wide swathe of motorbikes running unendingly in a counterclockwise direction around the traffic circle like so many fish swimming in a bowel, but more synchronous and coordinated.

The odds for a pedestrian successfully crossing the street seem quite low, unless you have one thing …...trust. Trust in the notion that it’s in no one’s self-interest to collide. You demonstrate this trust by holding out your hand and just walking slowly into the maelstrom letting the motorbikes stream around you. If you move too fast the riders can't adjust in time and you'll get hit. If you freeze and don't move at all you're similarly stuck. Here's why I think this is important: those motorbikes are a metaphor for the events and encounters which constantly pop up. We can try to avoid engagement by running around crazily, seeking distraction, or we can do nothing, or finally we engage and proceed, armed with the belief in ourselves and our sacred humanity. We address each encounter, each vicissitude that washes by and sometimes in doing so, adjust the course of our own journey.

Back to neurobiology and my own vicissitudes, Parkinson's disease slowly yet inexorably challenges Cathy and myself. After 14 years with mountains of medications, medical discussions, evaluations, trials, gains and losses, and victories and defeats, I feel it’s going well, better than most with a similar disease duration. This is in spite the overlay of an aging body about which the Scottish poet Andrew Young wrote:

These living bodies that we wear
So change by every seventh year

That in a new dress we appear;

Whatever dress you wear, whatever street you cross, whatever cross you bear, whatever challenges are thrown your way in 2026, may you approach these with quiet confidence, humility, and trust, steadfast in the grateful understanding you have come well and shall go well. Happy 2026!

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