In this time of uncertainty, when so much that we understood and believed about the world, and the way we organized our lives, has been turned upside down, there are a few things we can remember and do to maintain our center and make the best choices for our health and…
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.
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. 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…
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…
In the Republic, Plato gives us his “allegory of the cave”. Prisoners who are chained to their spots underground see only images flickering on the wall. They have no other reality. They are shown shadows of puppets without dimensions, without substance. Our poor little creatures know nothing else of life.…
Abraham Joshua Heschel said that our goal should be to live lives in radical amazement. ….to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. What everyday things still give you a feeling of beautiful astonishment?
“Each one of us has at our fingertips, access to so much meaning and hope, goodness and beauty, in every moment, if we would only let ourselves see.” From Being Human by John Sean Doyle
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…