Please Let Me Call You by Your True Names
Someone recently sent me the following note… “Mark” I rarely call you this But you feel like a Mark right now A mark upon my life A mark of brightness in a grey background A…
Word of the Day: Maitri
“Maitri is translated in a lot of ways, maybe most commonly as love, but the way Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche translated it was unconditional friendliness and in particular unconditional friendliness to oneself.” — Pema Chödron
The Power of Bollywood Shmaltz
At a red light at 14th and Tucker Listening to “Soni Soni” My eyes fill with tears Thinking of you
Audio with Hedy Epstein
The Torah Scroll Leaving Resolving Hatred Links are forthcoming!
Taking a Stand
“The maddest I’d ever seen him was the day he came to bail me out of jail after a peace rally at UCLA. Driving me home, he was in my face. ‘How can you do this?…
Be Light (After Reading Mary Oliver)
For Lo Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that…
Timing
“I am totally immersed in my work and cannot, cannot be disturbed.” Anton von Webern [Two days before Nazi troops stormed into Vienna]
An Incomplete Gathering of Maxims from M. Y. Golden
Dear Bella Levenshteyn On Monday, I was talking on the phone with Natasha, and we reminisced about her teacher, M. Y. Golden, a therapist she had respectfully nicknamed the “Wizard,” because he was so skilled…
The Daily Miracle of Memory
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of…
An American Satyagrahi
Brooke Adams sent me this message: Thought of you when I saw this cause you taught me what it meant. Mohandas Gandhi: “A satyagrahi bids good-bye to fear. She is therefore never afraid of trusting…