This playground
is meant for every person
who aspires to use all of life
––the brutal, the glorious, the just plain nuts––
to cultivate a well-honed heart,
one increasingly playful, loving and deep.
All part of the grand adventure of answering
life’s two most important questions:
What’s going on,
and what’s the healthiest action I can take
in this moment?
Six years ago today, 22 July 2017, two years before her death, Dear and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. (This photo was taken long before that). Here’s my journal entry that day. I said to Dear this morning when I brought her coffee in bed that it’s a strange phenomenon when the years we’ve
Four years ago this morning, my beloved surrendered her physical being to God. The common refrain, “losing Dear,” while understandable, is far from my experience, despite its imprint on my tender human heart.
27 June 2023: My friend and yardman for 20 years, Jim, died yesterday morning in hospice care where he’d been for a couple of weeks. He was 85 or thereabouts. We created a lot of beauty on a Vermont mountainside, and never had a cross word.
A recent journal entry So many days since my beloved left the planet I awake in what I feel is the depression of discombobulation, of having a life with too many moving pieces and too few stationary ones to accomplish much in the way of worldly ambition. Then I have a cup of Death Wish
To enquire “Who am I?” is the only remedy for all the ills of the world. It is also perfect Bliss.~ Ramana Maharshi My answer to “Who am I?” is “Manifestation of God.” Then again, that’s my take on all of existence. Of course, how completely I experience that answer in a given moment defines
Dmitri Hvorostowski was born October 16, 1962, the same year as my son Peter, and the same day nine years later that my father would die. Hvorostowski himself died of a brain tumor on Peter’s birthday, November 22, 2017. Perhaps these dates are the way the universe underscores the importance to me of Hvorostowski as
A quote I can’t find the source of at the moment goes something like, “The measure of intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination.” I’m not a fair judge of that sentiment because I’m infatuated with my imagination, a source of all-but-unprecedented joy. Knowledge is fun and useful, to be sure, but for whacked-out delight
In so many ways life is simple, except perhaps between our ears. If we focus our attention outside our own consciousness, our own heart, our own soul—which is to say in the direction of the worldly world—the experience of duality is the only sure thing. Everything, and its opposite. As a result, we are