A friend asked me which five songs I would choose if I could listen to no other song but those five for the rest of my life. An impossible task, really. Beyond your wedding song, if you truly loved it, what do you choose? Hard rock? Dance music? Introspective music? Singalong songs? Jazz? Classical? Death…
People come and go from our lives all the time. This is felt most profoundly during the holidays, when family comes together, or sometimes doesn’t. We are each pieces in somebody’s complex life puzzle, and when we lose a piece the puzzle is never again complete. But we must carry on, holes and all. Unlike…
This time of year, a sense of place may overpower us. A feeling of being home, or yearning to be home, is natural when there are so many memories tied to it. We become rooted to a place, feel it become part of us, and in turn become reluctant to ever part with it. But…
“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See Sometimes we get frustrated by the forces seemingly aligned against us. I thought by now I’d have lived in a Paris studio apartment for a summer writing a novel. That seemed a far…
When despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do…
“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained…
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” — Lao Tzu We are time travelers, landing from one stage of life to the next. Each leap offers a landing, each landing offers a…
After dinner with my bride at a local tavern, she saw a neighbor across the room and went over to say hello. We would see this woman and her husband now and then at restaurants and joke that we never seemed to see them in the neighborhood, where they lived just across the street from…
To live in this worldyou must be ableto do three things:to love what is mortal;to hold itagainst your bones knowingyour own life depends on it;and, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.— Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods This is the time of year when the leaves release from the trees and…
“Be in the dojo wherever you are. It is your choice—live like a sage or exist like a fool. — Awa Kenzo, Zen Bow, Zen Arrow “Do your best at each and everything. That is the key to success. Learn one thing well and you will learn how to understand ten thousand things. Ten thousand…