“We are mirrors reflecting one another. The people with whom we surround ourselves shape us, and we shape those around us, too.” — Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness I had a conversation with two strong players in my circle of influence who both disliked The Banshees of Inisherin, a movie I absolutely loved. The movie…
“Research increasingly shows that what is important doesn’t necessarily get our attention, but what gets our attention becomes important. This mirrors a concept in ancient Buddhist psychology that is often referred to as selective watering. In short, the mind contains a diverse variety of seeds: joy, integrity, anger, jealousy, greed, love, delusion, creativity, and so…
“In the soul of man,” Herman Melville wrote, in one of his terrifying flights of prophecy in Moby-Dick, “there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.” Cast off from that protected world, he’d gone on, and “thou canst never return!” But the…
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion “You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities…
“There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.” — Martin Luther King Jr. On Martin Luther King day in the United States, I celebrated quietly by reading some of his words and doing my part to lift up instead of pushing down. No…
“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” — Joan Didion Life is change. Those of us afflicted with wanderlust amplify our lives with travel and exploration. But eventually, perhaps even relentlessly, we come home again. Whatever that means to us. In a few weeks I’ll have been anchored to the same…
Kindred comes from a combination of kin and the Old English word ræden (“condition”), which itself comes from the verb rædan, meaning “to advise.” — Merriam-Webster Dictionary Talking to a friend about poetry, I mentioned a poem by Li-Young Lee, and paused our phone conversation while she read it, waiting for the payoff when one…
It dawned on me in the shower just the other day that I’ve chopped countless onions in my lifetime. For me, the process is meditative, and the resulting transformation of the raw ingredient is integral to whatever it happens to be I’m cooking at that moment. Inevitably, and no matter how much I wash my…
He is seated in the first darkness of his body sitting in the lighter dark of the room, the greater light of day behind him, beyond the windows, where Time is the country. His body throws two shadows: One onto the table and the piece of paper before him, and one onto his mind. One…
Planning is generally done in earnest this time of year, but at some point, action must take over. Too much planning becomes procrastination. We can plan ourselves all the way to the grave if we let ourselves. We must do to become. I believe it was Melissa Heisler who said living is a verb, not…