Everyone is born into a scene that is not of their choosing. And so begins the initiation between dream and acceptance, to find a way, to run away, only to come home, in yourself and in the world. If blessed, we suffer enough to relinquish blame for those who brought us here. For they were unsure of their own beginnings. It is the hardest journey to shed everything that is not you. And still be thankful, as the tree is... Read more

How do all these forms come out of what is formless and how do they return? The worm, the bird, the drip of dew, the tip of lavender, the cub, the mole, the stingy one, and the one who gives all. The nail and the boards it holds together, the cloud, and the root that keeps going deeper. And the idea we think we have thought, though it arrives like a drop of honey in the center of our mind... Read more

When Chomei, an ancestor to Basho, saw Kyoto burn in 1177, he was crushed, not knowing how to continue. And five hundred years later, when Basho himself saw the pine-covered islands off the coast of Matsushima, he was leveled by its beauty, not knowing how to take that beauty into his life. And when Beethoven heard the opening of the Ninth Symphony flutter into his consciousness like a thousand birds returning home, he trembled, not able to ink the notes... Read more

My grandfather on my mother’s side was a furrier in New York City. He was one of six sons who came from Russia. He and his brothers had dispersed around the globe: to Paris, Israel, Spain, Amsterdam, the United States, and Venezuela. When I was about nine or ten, my grandfather’s elder brother, Itzhak, came for a visit from Caracas. It had been twenty-five years since they had seen each other. We all met in my grandfather’s small brick home... Read more

I learned today that in 1917 the novelist E.M. Forster was in Egypt for the first time. As a conscientious objector  in World War I, Forster served as a Chief Searcher (for missing servicemen) for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt.  Fate kept making him look for what was missing. It was during this time that Forster, who was openly gay, fell deeply in love with an Egyptian tram driver, Mohammed el-Adl, an affair that changed his life. Eventually, Forster had... Read more

Along the Via Campo, a young man is walking against the flow shouting to everyone he meets, “You are my sister! You are my brother!” I don’t know if he’s drunk or a prophet. So goes the journey of our lives: Do we seek a life of vengeance or build a better world? Do we build beauty atop the ruins? Do we walk through the days intoxicated with the distractions of the modern world insisting we are strangers? Or do... Read more

Life has been happening long before we came on the scene. All we know is that the Whole of Life and how it weaves and works is still a mystery—The Mystery. Every part of life has energy that we can call life-force. Even this is a guess. But we have to start somewhere. At once, the presence of life-force emanates like light while drawing other life to it like gravity. Since the beginning of the human journey, people have had... Read more

What I drop, you will pick What you lose, I will find. And where you close, I will open. Where I stumble, you will dance. And what I struggle to know, you will assume. So don’t feel guilty if you should know joy while I suffer. We take turns being light to each other’s dark, being the gold to fill each other’s cracks. We take turns catching each other when we fall. After hours in the café struggling to know... Read more

Life is an ever-flowing river interrupted by things large and small that stop the flow. And the purpose of love is to remove the interrupters. When fear pins me like a boulder, I need you to roll it off my heart. And when complication falls like the bough of a tree after a storm blocking your door, I will haul it away. I used to dread the interrupters, but without them, we would never have come to mean so much... Read more

When we insist on rowing with just one oar, we go around in circles. This is what happens when we insist that we are right. When we refuse to walk with some form of light, we bump around in the dark. This is what happens when we react without listening. When we cling, our hands stay closed and we can hold nothing. This is what happens when we are defensive. It seems a modern condition: to row in circles in... Read more