The Patron Saint of All Outsiders

This French version of Kafka, this cross between Pascal and Orwell remains unclassifiable. She is intellectually stateless,  prophet without any country in which she can be sure of honor. A Catholic Jewess who criticized impeccably…

Ginsberg’s Gratitude

And I never realized that [the cornices of the buildings] meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of…

Notice What You Notice

Primo Levi:  I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded…

What I Learned from Mev by Cami

My friend Cami Kasmerchak was generous enough to make this video for a talk I was to give at Visitation Academy, Mev’s alma mater, for the first-year students who were on retreat on Friday 16…

Remembering Mev

Last week anticipating giving a talk on Mev at her alma mater Visitation Academy, I inquired on Facebook if anyone from her Viz days had recollections about her. Stephanie Ortbals-Tibbs offered the following… I still…

I Was Talking to Ram Dass about You and…

How things were going in Italy–The heat, the workloadThe limited energy for creative endeavorsI sounded a little worried I supposeHe put his arm around my shoulders and said,“She knows the scoreShe knows gratitude is where…

The Good News of Tablet!

Given some of my preoccupations over the decades, I am grateful to have recently discovered Alana Newhouse’s Tablet. The following are a few essays and interviews that focused my mindfulness and provoked my gratitude. Rokhl…

Yoga Sutra Journal by Yael

Yael invited me to join her in a reading/discussion of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. We talk via Zoom or email each other on Friday mornings. The following is part of the first reflection she shared with…