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Wild Heart

Walking alone through a wild land, our perceptions soon alter. We begin to experience the earth anew, know the very place we stand as the source and locus of our own rediscovered wild heart.

Hidden Clues

I did not begin training as a psychiatrist with an open mind. As strange as it might seem for someone beginning a career based on insight, I had resolved not to change. I was frightened that my personality might be pasteurized by the process, that forces would make of me a blank slate on which others would feel free to write their life stories.

Walking To My Office On Easter Sunday Morning

Homeless, But Not Crazy

Shortly after 1 a.m. recently, on-call in the psychiatric emergency room of a Boston hospital, I was asked to evaluate a homeless man, and in the process I confronted the limits of my professional empathy.

January

I take another drink and rouse slowly from the state I entered when I first rested the rifle across the wheel line. It is a state that I impose upon myself at such times, a suspension of thought in favor of impartial and necessary action.

Answering Phones In A War Zone

Bryant-Maddox makes war. It’s hidden under files of paper covered with legal jargon and beneath sappy 1970s love songs droning from ceiling speakers. It’s hidden under the respectability of secretaries and file clerks and men with ties who go to meetings.

Selected Poems

How To Kiss The American Dream Goodbye

Here’s one small metaphorical leap from travel literature: the journey of life can be enjoyed even in cheap hotels. This idea is standard in any folk philosophy — better to have modest means and do what you enjoy. Even in the carpeted corridors of yuppiedom, people are considering “downsizing” their frenetic careers, although this is more a search for sanity than the pursuit of an ideal. What I advocate is more radical than winching down from six digits of income to five.

Gestures Of Protection

“It’s like a spiritual cruise ship, a love boat,” says Joan. She’s determined to be positive. The lounge on the first floor is decorated with large posters of attractive, radiantly smiling men and women who have given money to the ashram.

Sunday Before Thanksgiving