Browse Sections

From The Heart

As I learn to accept love as it is really given — not as I expect it to be — a vast amount of the precious stuff becomes available.

The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter

David often sketches people on buses and other kinds of public places and gives them the sketches. Poor people, he’s noticed, expect to pay for the sketch and rich people expect to get it free.

Unlocking The Map Room

We can’t simply question these beliefs. Rational arguments don’t matter here. What matters is felt reality. What matters is going to that place within the person where these beliefs are vivid, active, current, and therefore, available for change. Bandler and Grinder call this process “accessing.” We’re going into the space where reality can be decided upon, the map room. We’re going to see if we can change any of the maps.

Meeting The Monkey

I was an infant, clinging to an umbilical cord, and the stark truth of this world was that there was no one to clutch, cling to, no one to reel me in, no one to rescue me but myself. So I clumsily conceived a new self, one that did not need to design an intellectual wall of insulation against this vacuum.

Excerpts From The Incompleat Folksinger

I guess in modern life you have to plan. But there’s such a thing as planning too much. There’s such a thing as planning too early. Here’s what jazz musicians can teach the politicians of the world: we must plan for improvisation.

Journal

It scares me now, how much I told Chuck Roy. What will he think? Will he be blown away? It didn’t seem so unusual, my confessions, after he made some, and I did edit my original full confession. Still, will he be shocked? Was it necessary? What prompted me? Ego or some expediency?

New Age Politics: Healing Self And Society

Social action that is not based on a firm sense of self can only be based on guilt or rage — and guilt or rage do not allow us to see clearly; they render us, in fact, extremely susceptible to manipulation by demagogues.

He Took The Doorknob With Him

Book Review

The real drama of his life took place as he entered the almost monastic study of his mansion — when he closed the door, he took the doorknob with him — and wrote with a creative fury that few other artists can even imagine. Even he was so busy as to hardly notice what he was doing, but in brief moments of repose he was aware of it.

Conversations, Yet Unspoken: Spring

There is a day in winter when warmth and wetness first come together perfectly. It is Spring, though no calendar admits it. There is a surging up. And it always seems a Sunday.

The Bear

We have found that when we begin to turn towards or face our neurosis and unpleasant situations we become involved in working with ourselves and our conflicts in a meaningful way. When we no longer run from that which we are afraid there becomes the possibility of being responsible for our projections of aggression, ignorance, and fear.