“It’s a question of understanding my destiny.” The quote above is lifted from an entry in Kierkegaard’s journal. Here’s the fragment I jotted down in my notebook: “What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know….It is a question of…

“Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?” ~ Henry David Thoreau A couple weeks ago while sitting quietly in contemplation overlooking an alpine lake a woman approached and asked, “What does your spiritual life look like?” There were a few utterances between us leading up to…

“A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.” ~ Montaigne When the corona pandemic began to unfold I was hopeful that perhaps this was the vehicle by which we all might come together, both globally and…

…of the Buddha. The last words of the Buddha were recorded to be: “Things fall apart; tread the path with care.” Siddhartha Gautama was born around 480 BCE. He wasn’t called the Buddha until a couple centuries later. It means The Awakened One. …

“We must be less than death, to be lessened by it, for nothing is irrevocable but ourselves.” ~ Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson I want to ask you a question and you have to promise that you will not do any mental calculations before answering. Here…

When Lucy died I mourned. The end snuck up on me and although, as I mentioned previously, I had been preparing for our separation, I was nonetheless grief-stricken. At night, when I was most challenged, there was only one method I found to bring relief: direct and immediate attention turned…

I heard recently, during the current impeachment hearings, someone accuse so-and-so of “lacking authenticity.” It caught my ear. Several years ago I was deeply hung-up in the pursuit of authenticity, or at least a workable explanation of what truly it is. Eventually I walked away, vowing never to use the…

A year or so ago while celebrating a milestone wedding anniversary one of our adult children asked if we could articulate the keys to a successful marriage. Carole went first. She spoke with intelligence and experience about the vital role communication must play when two human beings are committed to…

I study lives. My text book is the biography. The first grown-up book I read was a biography of Mark Twain. I was, I think, in 6th grade. The most recent book read, finished a couple days ago, is Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s biography of I read Bakewell as a…