Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.David Whyte, Sweet Darkness If you prefer, watch my little video on The Return here. Characteristics of The Return Refusal and Lingering Rescue or…
Begin with you.You’re invited, and bring your friends.If you could have one beautiful thing happen tomorrow, it would be~For what are you longing~Consider your requirements to feel happy, healthy, and strong.Caring for you is not selfish. It’s a necessity.It is time for a revolution of honesty about what you need. Self care is ongoing attention…
I have a working premise that anything can be understood with an evolutionary lens. It helps sometimes, like appreciating the resurgence of moon exploration and deciding to vote for the local recreation district. Why we are motivated to explore the moon is the perfect example. In the Sixties it was a race to be first,…
You know how sometimes you start something, then end up wishing you had done it differently? Like inviting people to a fancy dinner party in the woods and belatedly realizing you didn’t think about dirty dishes. Or Halloween festivities with elaborate decorations, legions of stemware, and jello in the carpet. Guess mine are all about…
Thank you for joining this experiment in generating more conscious community. Experiment because we’ll shape and iterate this together. That’s community. First Wisdom Teaching Tat Tvam Asi. Thou art that. This is a Sanskrit epigram from the Indian scripture Chandogya Upanishad. It can be translated as: Thou art that. That thou art. That art thou.…
There’s your Life Story, the How I Got Here. It’s usually interesting enough, and…there’s another one. The one underneath guiding the whole show, like an iceberg you may not see. I’ll Out mine so you know what I mean. My surface story is that I grew up in nice middle-class Ohio and got to teach…
Something Very Unusual happened when I was hunkered into my little desert retreat. I knew it was possible to piddle away the time, lollygagging in the sunshine, running around to favorite haunts. So I made a resolution to stay focused, unpacked my stack of books, and looked up hiking trails. Then it happened. I woke…
Three years ago the London Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen produced a series on Stravinsky called Myths & Rituals. Holy Archetypes, do I fly around the world for 30 minutes of The Rite of Spring and the dynamic Esa-Pekka? I binged on Longmire to keep myself in the American West. Now, Holy Everything Symphonic, Mythic, and…
I’m fascinated by the 2007 Washington Post experiment with Joshua Bell. Of course, I’m just smittened with Bell, who is handsome, plays a mean fiddle, and is willing to goof off in Mozart in the Jungle. The Post placed Bell and his Stradivarius in a subway station to busk. Although his hotel was 2 blocks…
I thought I going to work on a book. The purple sunset desert with sunny winters has been beckoning for years, so I headed south to dive into the Thoreau Project. I figured a few days to get oriented and tweak some business loose ends. That took three weeks and opened completely different currents. I…
Dear friends, colleagues, and neighbors~ Thank you for including me in your bright communications—I am delighted to read them and consider your offerings. Due to the preponderance of communiques with stylistic misdemeanors, I am compelled to offer my unsolicited opinion. First, if you are using exclamation points in multiple sentences and especially in one sentence…
Why in the name of Heaven does this get said to me? A LOT. Not just my mom. Enough that I’ve begun the process of Wonder Why This Happens and I’m Annoyed. Am I…not careful? Do I have a…reputation I don’t know about? Whenever Something Happens, 99% of the time it’s on me. I’m the…
We must be wired to obsess. I’ve been watching myself run through temporary obsessions, and I figure you do too. It makes sense—how else would anything big and cool get done? Art, elaborate buildings, landscaping, engineering jets, biological research, anything innovative. Currently I’m obsessed with Mary Poppins, Lady Gaga, trees, the composition of the ground,…
The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention…the reward for attention is always healing…more than anything else, attention is an act of connection. ~Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way The wisdom traditions teach there’s some kind of result in where we…
I’ve been listening to different perspectives on something many of us share—growth and change happenin’ way too fast. The guy in his longtime second home wants to relax instead of doing chores. Can’t find anyone to hire. The home-builder wrangling subcontractors who shirk responsibility for their unacceptable work. Friends and neighbors feeling overwhelmed~ more traffic,…
Luminaire 