If you think of something you wouldn’t want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you’ll have thought of something worth staging or filming.–Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre In Defense…
Care is something one learns by observing the way careful/caring people live. It is not a quality that can be learned from a text on moral psychology or Buddhist ethics but only by living and…
Practice recognition of complete emptiness of all things at all times, under every condition, everywhere, and you will learn by yourself what Buddha preached. Free from Desire: What I really only want, what Ma’s given…
In the summer of 2022, I found out I was not God. It might sound like a silly conclusion to come to, or a good one if I’m an otherwise self-absorbed, prideful narcissist. Whatever I…
I came back to pottery at the beginning of 2021 after a long break. I’m a psychotherapist, a recovering academic, a deep feeler, and a chronic over-thinker, which means that I often spend long hours…
“… and you know I’m not a father who goes around bragging about his kids–but on the subject of Beilke …” Tevye, in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Awkward and Embarrassing Things You happen to say something rude about someone, and a child who overhears it repeats your words in front of the person concerned.— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney…
Like other works, [Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets] is concerned with the nature, and, more importantly, the limits of human achievement. It assumes what its surrounding works assume: The continuity and dignity of the…
“Do you look at the stars a lot? Do you know them? Plato said that sight is not truly precious unless it helps us to know the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun….
But whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it, for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect. –Samuel Johnson, quoted in Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the…