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?
Angel On Five is the name of this drawing. It represents what I imagine my pop saw in ’71 as he left his body. He was 65, approaching the green on the fifth hole of his favorite golf course on a Saturday morning round with some buddies. He’d had a monster coronary a decade
Could it be that yesterday I heard a sentence never before uttered in the history of humankind? See what you think. Yesterday was Halloween Abundant Flamboyant on Main Street Beacon, NY—costumes galore, even a parade. For our part as soon-to-be proprietors of a Main Street gallery named Playful Loving Deep (opening a week from today
Two days ago a thought arrived, not for the first time, being a man who needs all the reminders he can get, including a tattoo on the heart since birth saying “Everything is a Gift”. The blessings of the universe have nothing to do with “worthiness”. Nothing to do with how practiced I am in
New to town, wanting to establish a connection with a medical professional should need arise, I checked in for my first visit to a clinic here in the Hudson River Valley of New York. As the receptionist was examining my insurance card from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, my home turf for the better
This is my contribution to our collective turn of mind and heart as we note 9/11 twenty-one years later. A sliver of ficton from a novel of mine.
The New Yorker’s latest edition (August 29, 2022) published profiles they’d first published long ago, including one by the late Nat Hentoff from 1964 of Bob Dylan, 23 at the time, and already recognized as a new, incisive voice. Among the things Hentoff illuminated is that Dylan ran away from home seven times––at ten, at
My favorite novel, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, was published in 1961, the year I graduated high school next-to-last in my class, ten years before taking up residence in Mr. Juster’s occasional hometown, Amherst, Massachusetts, as the oldest freshman Amherst College had ever admitted. Last I heard, The Phantom Tollbooth has sold around five
This photo is of where, three years ago today, Dear, my beloved, ended her physical presence in the incarnation we shared for 45 years. A fuller story, should you wish one, can be revealed through a few of my essays from that time. This one is solely about my sense of things today, what