I know we sort of said goodbye, but I don’t have anyone else to tell this to and I’m going to burst with it. You know EBB’s verse: God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed For in our face, A gauntlet wi...
Some women seem so voluptuous in every sense, richly bountiful and fertile with generous gifts of plenty, sensual and confident in their female strength that they are called "earth mothers." That’s how some days —when they are bountiful and ferti...
The cycle of optimism and euphoria leading to greed, fear and capitulation, giving way to hope and building back to optimism, drives the expansion and contraction of our financial world in a market cycle of collective human emotion.
We can easily teach our kids hot to be kind, compassionate and respectful when we are kind, compassionate and respectful to them.
I imagined my first night alone in bed with my stranger. I conjured our future years together unhampered by worries about money or officialdom. We would enjoy the day, the night, a smile, a word, a kiss, a glance. All lovely thoughts. All pointless d...
The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to ...
True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.
Love's night and a lamp Judged our vows: That she would love me ever And I should never leave her. Love's night and you, lamp, Witnessed the pact. Today the vow runs: "Oaths such as these, waterwords." Tonight, lamp, Witness her lying - In other arms...
The faintest cry is then loosened from her in a lucid expression that does announce her bestirring itch for me. Over and under each other’s lips, we now find ourselves salivating in each other’s recalescent and inundated Elysium, turning about as...
But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water...
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl! (…) Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to ...
Our relationship to the past is marked by deep indifference, even if we do say something to the contrary, even if we mean what we say when we say it is a matter of the greatest significance. Because it is a matter of the greatest significance, yet ne...
We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it d...
. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonement finite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preserving will not permit forgetting; destroying only when we can no longer beg or argue with time to preserve the brief beni...
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
We tell ourselves that intimacy (and marriage) takes two people who are willing to work at it-but, unfortunately, we rarely have the slightest inkling of our "job" assignments in this project.
We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are trul...
I jerk around and see Sister Dora, a portly woman who's the head cook in the kitchen, staring daggers at me. This is nothing new. She stares daggers at everyone who walks through the lunch line holding a tray, as though our needing sustenance is a pe...
But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circu...
It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
