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Practice Losing Everything

I challenged my students to interrogate their own religious inheritance, and I spoke frequently of the “ethics of faith.” I asked whether they’d arrived at faith through honest inquiry or by suppressing their doubts.

Stirring the Pot

Leading a strike, starting trouble between sisters, feeding strangers

The Danish

Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

Wild Animals

Swimming with whale sharks, hearing a mountain lion, refusing to eat a snake

Graffiti

A tag on a dumpster, poetry in an outhouse, Viking runes in an underground tomb

Eight Tenets

This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.

Sunbeams

Good and evil, as we term them, are not antagonistic; they are ever found hand in hand. Humanity has never achieved a single conquest without the aid of both. Indeed how can she? What adds to moral strength, but a grappling with temptation?

Sarah Grimké

Yard Sales

Hunting for bargains, letting go of possessions, emptying out a home