serves fellow explorers of life’s two most important questions: What’s going on, and what’s the healthiest action I can take in this moment? To this end, Steve champions the most fear-provoking point of view the world has ever known: Everything is a gift, and the business of life is discovering how come. He finds the spirit of the universe to be playful, loving, deep. Besides laughter and the sharing of experience, his expressions of this spirit include several hundred essays, a novel, some 2000 drawings, countless stone sculptures built & photographed on his Vermont mountainside over a quarter century, and a portfolio of professional communication for clients who favor a collaborator who aspires to write like a freight train driven by Mother Teresa.
Bowing to the Future
The tsunami of the heart triggered by my beloved’s need to exit this incarnation reminds me how valuable it has been to have spent so much of my life trying to grasp how the universe works. Not that I hold an answer that’s useful for anyone but me. The one I do have
The Meaning of Difficult
The car radio was broadcasting an interview with Dr. William Kaelin, a Harvard guy who’d just been awarded this year’s Noble Prize in Medicine. The news raised no eyebrows among those familiar with leading edge medical research. In recent years Dr. Kaelin had received several other forms of recognition that are often precursors to the
Dreams After Death
When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has found. ~Sufi proverb Two months ago my beloved died. The person I was died with her. We were soul playmates for 45 years. I look forward to being able to share stories of her life and how she came
But Wait, What Do I See?
Another mark of depression’s weariness is me sitting in my journaling chair, penning these words into the Moleskine, rather than head out in my pj’s with my camera and search for an image of a stone sculpture in rare repose thanks to the early morning mist. The magic will come again, I rationalize. Though no
I Asked For This
Depression’s insidiousness can include an almost complete obliteration of one’s perception of life as God and nothing else. Maybe more than almost. This is especially unsettling when that has been one’s default orientation for decades. Over the past thirteen months, my beloved’s internal world has become more and more both numb and agitated––empty and overwhelming––despite
I am Thailand’s Coach
So the U.S. women’s World Cup team thrashes Thailand 13-zip, the most lopsided result in World Cup history. A squabble ensues over whether all those goals, and the jubilant celebrations following each one, exceeded the norms of sportsmanship. My interest is elsewhere. I wonder about Thailand’s coach. What if I had her job? What would
Hearing the Unhearable
Vermont’s popular former governor, former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland, author, poet, Madeleine May Kunin, 85, gave a talk and read some of her verse. My beloved and I attended. I had never before seen Ms. Kunin in person. As it is for many people at a certain aging time, her voice no longer enjoys