Browse Sections

A Dictionary Of Childhood

Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.

William Butler Yeats,
Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916)

Remember Your Essence

You are an essence / in a world of essences.
You burn, / like those around you burn, / with an energy called life.
Life reaches out to life. / Essences sing to each other.

Back To The Real World

Reflections On A Course In Miracles

In retrospect I have realized that I could not have been more ready for the first section of the Course workbook, described in its introduction as “dealing with the undoing of the way you see now. . . .” Because my life had not been working, the way I saw things was quite ready to be undone.

On Writing

Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk.

What To Do About The Past

The phone wakes me during the night. I rush to answer it because I have just been dreaming of Dad and imagine the call might be about him. It’s a wrong number, but I’m not annoyed. Catching a dream of Dad is like catching a rare, prize fish. The unconscious has goofed and let me see something it usually hides.

The Heart Of Understanding

If you look into this sheet of paper, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in it. Without a cloud, there can be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Inter-being” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “to inter-be.”

Refrain

I didn’t understand what he meant when I first heard John Lennon sing, “No one can harm you. Feel your own pain.” But I knew his words were true, just as a sudden change in the weather is true, just as the alarm clock with its shrill ring is true.

Depression As A Loss Of Heart

Our materialistic culture breeds depression by promoting distorted and unattainable goals for human life. And our commonly held psychological theories make it hard for people to make direct contact with depression as a living experience, by framing it as an objective “mental disorder” to be quickly eliminated.

What’s Eating Me

A Memoir

My mother never held a baby that way. Even when she was feeding my brother, he always somehow rested on her arm, never melted into her body. In New Hampshire, I finally said something to my brother about never having been treated that way when I was a baby. “No,” my brother said. “Our mother would have held us out there with a pair of tongs if she could have.”

Roses On Fire

My mother sang and laughed. She had dark hair that gradually turned silver. She felt that no matter how little the money or how bad the loss, it was OK to have fun.