There are two reasons, I suspect, why I keep a distance from the world in almost whatever form it appears. Well, other than the offerings of saints, nature, art, fellow travelers who know they’re on the inner road to everywhere, and anyone standing in front of me I can serve in the moment. One,
What’s it take to be sober 35 years? Probably every recovering alcoholic on earth knows the cliché answer: Don’t drink; don’t die. Sobriety, when it means abstinence, has always been easy for me. I knew from day one of recovery that my long romance with drinking and dope smoking was over. There was no question
I’ve been knocked around my whole life by the following question: To live in the ferocious blaze of Eternal Divinity, what must I attempt to remember in every moment? Big toe in decade nine, here’s what I’ve learned so far:
Penned in my journal this Christmas morning: In the night, I would have been as unsurprised as I can imagine if I were to leave my body. Which is to say death was in the building. Not necessarily to announce “Your table’s ready,” as Robin Williams put it, but for some other reason under the
Getting out of my car upon arriving home I came upon a dead rabbit in the gravel driveway. It had been there a short while, not long enough to attract bugs. Clearly, I had run over it, the tire track on its corpse being conspicuous. It must have happened when I backed out earlier in
The upheavals of the past five years, none of which need further explanation here, complemented by the actuarial implications of life’s 9th decade, add a certain sense of wonder to the ever-present mix of considerations of worldly-world existence, a sense encapsulated in the question: “Are you ready to give up your body?” My answer is
The Trash Fashion Show in Santa Fe is part of a delightful celebration of one my favorite definitions of life: Take what’s in front of us and create beauty. And as we know, what’s in front of us can get pretty wacky strange, mundane, ordinary, even what we consider ugly. Turning whatever into our best
Halloween, 30 years ago today, having been in love for just shy of two decades, Dear and I moved from Bloomfield, New York to Moscow, Vermont. It was, you might say, a reaffirmation of our commitment we labeled “Go Big Or Stay Home.” Ever since, some powerful forms of surrender to the vastness of our