Get a copy of Mud and Dreams.
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…
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…
Many of you know I host various philosophy and well-being discussions groups each month throughout the Raleigh-Durham area. You can find us here. At our lunch meeting last week, we had a wide-ranging and robust discussion on enlightenment, presence, and the relationship between sacred experience and the connections between people.…
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…
In January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche went insane. Armed with metaphor, irony and aphorism, the German philosopher carved his influence deep into 20th century culture, criticism, literature and psychology. Freud, Mann, Yeats, Richard Strauss and countless other artists and thinkers were shaped by the “first Immoralist”. In popular culture, Nietzsche was…
Resilience. Grit. Sisu. Post traumatic growth. Different researchers emphasize the subtle distinctions within the larger truth that more often than not, we are better than we think we are. We are stronger, more adaptive. When things go wrong, most people, most of the time, do not dry up, crumble and…
When we first moved to the place I would come to call home, a boy, five years my senior, knocked on the door to meet his new playmate. He introduced himself, spelled his last name, and every weekend and summer we played: Sometimes in the woods pretending we were soldiers…