10 Questions To Ask In A Different Way

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…

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Mud and Dreams (Now Available!)

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…

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Changing the Narrative (Part 2)

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…

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Changing the Narrative (Part 1)

The stories we tell ourselves matter. They make a difference in how we think about who we are and the way we structure our lives. They affect the paths we blaze and those we follow. Our stories inform every sigh and every tear, keep us afloat, and connect us to…

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Humanity and Saving a Nation

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…

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Learning to Give, Learning to Dance

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…

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Sharks and Stoics

One day my wife and daughters were at the beach enjoying cups of ice cream and sun and walking out on the pier. My youngest looked over the rail, and bursting with joy, shouted, “How cool! A shark!” Her excitement was absolute and unrestrained. My older daughter, turned and glanced…

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Is This Forgiveness?

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…

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