A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, ...
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off fr...
Marriage is a million piece puzzle; a pristine and exciting pursuit at the beginning that gradually becomes a daunting task, usually more challenging than anticipated. It is only those truly committed to solving that puzzle who witness in the end ...
We can know what we do wrong even before we do it, but self-knowledge can't affect or change the outcome, can it? Everyone singing his own little song, convinced it's the most wonderful song the world has ever heard. Don't you see? We create our own ...
A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America more than a century ago and made some astute observations about the American way. He said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not p...
We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliter...
REAL people do not have to lie, exaggerate, or brag for they are self-contained in self-understanding and acceptance of themselves. REAL people can make a mistake knowing that even when they do, it is only a mistake and just because the outcome was n...
Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance, essence itself. A good word w...
Living in the land of, "What if....?" leads to emotional paralysis. It sets the stage for doom and gloom thinking. It prevents us from experiencing the beauty of the present moment. Happiness resides in the here and now. It can not thrive in a prison...
You are not what you have done, but what you have overcome. All the hardships, the mistakes, the rejections, the pain and all the times you questioned why have given birth to the wisdom and strength that will help you shine your light on the world, e...
J. Russell Finch: Lets stop arguing please! The only reason were together is because they only had one car. So lets get there, even if we are last. J. Algernon Hawthorne: Whatever the outcome of the day I shall never forget that you hit me when I was...
For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for...
Planning is worrying, only in a productive, proactive form. Worry has to be a large element of planning, or else how could you project different possible scenarios, situations, outcomes, and probabilities, and then plot a course of action? A worry-fr...
Neither Peter in his work to include Gentiles in the church nor the abolitionists in their campaign against slavery argued that their experience should take precedence over Scripture. But they both made the case that their experience should cause Chr...
It’s no surprise that a generation of women who were brought up being told that they were equal to men, that sexism, and therefore feminism, was dead, are starting to see through this. And while they’re pissed off, they’re also positive, bubbli...
Moreover, grandmothers of students who aren't doing so well in class are at even higher risk - students who are failing are fifty times more likely to lose a grandmother compared with non-failing students. In a paper exploring this sad connection, Ad...
Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of ...
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American N...
I tell you, Professor, growing up is a full contact sport. Somewhere in our brains, foolishness and naïveté join forces with a false sense of invincibility. Together, they score own-goals against their host’s interests. All this happens while tha...
Here we may observe fully developed the doctrine of passing away in God ( ) which from time onwards assumes a central position in the structure of Sufi theory. It was after all not a difficult transition to make from saying that all else but God is n...
Students of the psychedelic realm know that one's expectations are a powerful determinant of the direction, content, and outcome of the experience. So, we should say at the outset that the experiences recounted here were preceded by careful preparati...
