To many people, this post will not make any sense. It has been several years now since my aunt died. She never went to college. She was heavy. She had human problems. But, dispatch for the local fire department, the whole community came together when she died. Every strong and…
As a poet and reader, I love words. As a child “dyslexicly” trying to make sense of inky scribblings and smudges on paper, I fell in love with the majesty of language. I was amazed at the way words can create whole new worlds and change the contours of how…
(portions of this article first appeared on positive psychology news daily: http://positivepsychologynews.com/news/sean-doyle/2013032525681) In my first post on this topic, I concluded that in the face of hardship, injustice or deep trauma, the only answer was love and holding even tighter to kindness. This seems naive, trite. However whether in the…
What good are words? Can there ever be a poetry that saves nations or people? Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out that “the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, with tanks and guns. It began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds.”
Today’s news is filled with the devastation and havoc caused by Typhoon Haiyan. Current estimates are that there at over 10,000 dead. Ten Thousand. That is a holy number. In the Tao Te Ching, 10,000 is meant to refer to something innumerable, too large to count. It is also a…