The New Year is often a time for assessing things: For looking back over the past twelve months or twelve years, at our successes and shortcomings, our rejoices and regrets, and for looking ahead at what we hope for the future. The hard thing with any self-assessment, is not the…
I am so grateful to Senia Maymin and the whole team at Positive Psychology News Daily for their interview of me about Mud and Dreams. You can watch the whole interview here. Please share with your friends!FacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedinDiggRedditemail
I am excited to announce that my first full book is now available. (You can find it here.) Mud and Dreams is a series of essays on the poetry and science of living. A work of “motivational poetics” the book speaks directly to the human concerns at the center of…
The stories we tell ourselves matter. However, so often these tales that are so fundamental to who we are, are based upon just some of the truths from our complex and beautiful lives. When we change the narrative, we open new possibilities for our happiness and effectiveness and well-being. (Read more on the Narratives…
The poet Czeslaw Milosz once asked, ‘What is poetry which does not save/Nations or people?” In the 1989 work Zinky Boys, Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, shows us what is at stake. Alexievich, a Belarusian literary journalist, won the 2015 Nobel for her collections of haunting interviews. In Voices from…
For my wife’s family, life is filled with dance. Every New Year’s and Christmas, each cumpleaños and quinceanera, everyone would laugh and yell, cry and dance. And in the culture of her family, when the music is playing, it is the duty of the man to ensure that no woman…
Jack Kornfield tells stories of forgiveness, heroic and true. Of Buddhist nuns brutally imprisoned for saying their prayers, afraid only that they would lose their compassion for their captors. Or of the mother who welcomed the killer of her child into her home, and nurtured him and made him kind. They…
I don’t know whether I can be called a Christian. I don’t believe in the divinity of Christ. At least, I don’t see his holiness as anything different than my own. Or different from yours. Or from the effulgent heart in each of us, even if occasionally dulled. What I…
It is so easy to get caught up in all the chasing. There are the goals and dreams and aspirations. We pursue a vision, or our aim, or any other number of respectable things. To swing, as the poet said, “the earth a trinket at my wrist”. But after the…
Are there virtues that we forget? Personally or as a culture? Ones that simply fade like the faces on ancient Roman coins? For Aurelius, Clementia – mildness, gentleness, mercy – was one of the noble virtues. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange.…
