Hope is Enough
Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill. —Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory Greene makes his statement about a starving dog with a broken back or broken legs that drags herself to the door of…
Which Way?
If Diamond had had to find out the riddle in order to see Mr. Raymond again, I doubt if he would ever have seen him. “Oh then,” I think I hear some little reader say, “he could not have been…
The Touch of the Unknown
I don’t know that a year can go by without me vowing, again, to read all the poems in The Giant Book of Poetry (edited by William H. Roetzheim) that I bought in 2011, when I decided to embark upon…
Where Does One Begin?
Now, it is no longer a child who is going to tell this story and that is regrettable. It is a man. Worse yet, it is the university professor I have become. I will have to guard myself very carefully…
White, Grey, Black
“I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?” “No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly…
Cowardly Bravery
“Practicing courage, compassion, and connection in our daily lives is how we cultivate worthiness. The key word is practice.” —Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection I am tempted to copy down more of the paragraph from page 7 of Brown’s…
Daring Despite the Danger
“The known, our current story, protects us from the unknown, from chaos—which is to say, provides our experience with determinate and predictable structure. … When we are in the domain of the known, so to speak, there is no reason…
What Makes Us Whole?
“The central issue in this book is the conflict between the things we feel—the things our bodies register—and the things we think we ought to feel so as to comply with moral norms and standards we have internalized at a…
We Can’t Let the Light Go Out
“Men do not learn when they believe they already know.” —Barbara Ward I added that quote to the signature line of my email long ago. I am still unsure about who Barbara Ward actually is or was: an author (probably), an…
Know It All
The Volume Library. God love you, Dad. When you signed on the dotted line for that scam, you were trying to do the right thing. Your blood sugar may have been on the way down and you just wanted your…
A New Way of Living
Today is the first day of my new life. It sounds dramatic, I know, but I spent my old life avoiding drama at all costs. So, let’s double down on the drama: everything I thought I knew was just guessing.…
Go Ahead, Be Fresh
“I am not a cruise director” is one of the statements I used to make to my children more often than I would have liked, but certainly not on a regular basis. It was my almost reflexive response when one…
