While the behavior of the Russian government, Putin and Putin punks are abhorrent, nothing will be changed by boycotting the Sochi Winter Games. In fact, those who are appalled by the treatment of LGBT Russian citizens will lose an incredible opportunity for the world to show their disgust.

I'd come to the country to do my Thoreau bit, so I needed an office that looked out onto the woods for inspiration. I converted one of the bedrooms into my workspace and through its windows watched the wildlife appear each morning with the sunrise. Many were the days I would sit in wonder, coffee in hand, for hours.

Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care.

I love books, I love art, I'm a fanatic nature and wildlife person. People assume I'm a political animal, power hungry, wanting to run for office. And anyone who knows me knows that none of that's true.

As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I'd resided my adult life.

All of my peers died of AIDS, and I have no one to celebrate my past or my journey, or to help me pass down stories to the next generation. We lost an entire generation of storytellers with HIV.

Change comes with both fear and some pain. Those two ingredients create mistrust, misunderstanding and misinformation. Such is the process of democracy.