Why We Listen Better To Strangers Than Family
Once you know people well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out because you think you already know...
Turning Ourselves Toward Stability And Hospitality
The Benedictine-Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart says it very well: “We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an...
Into The Chrysalis
Chrysalises both inspire and baffle me. The thought that a caterpillar can crawl into a sac made of its own body and dissolve its form...
Keeping The Smoke Hole Open
In Siberian myth, when you want to hurt someone, you crawl into their tent and close the smoke hole. That way God can’t see...
Life May Itself Be A Koan
Consider the Zen practice of the koan, the question or problem proposed by Zen masters to each other or by masters to students. The koan...
Pandemic
What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath -- the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and...
I Have No Need For An Enemy
In passing my sentence, the judge said, “There’s no hope that you can ever be rehabilitated.” My sentence of 60-90...
Releasing Willpower From Movement
Initially, I used to move from willpower; I was concerned only with results. In retrospect, I realize that this created a sort of tunnel...
In Eyes Of God, We're All Minorities
Krister Stendahl, former dean of Harvard Divinity school, told a reporter shortly before his death in 2008, "In the eyes of God, we...
The Liminal Space
What do you do when a friend has lost a child and you can’t ease their grief? Or when your partner loses her job and you...
Being Human
I wonder if the Sun debates dawn some mornings not wanting to rise out of bed from under the down-feather horizon if the sky grows...
When Someone Deeply Listens To You
When someone deeply listens to you it is like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with...