On the face of it, my wife’s and my daily yoga practice doesn’t look especially grim. In fact, it looks like the opposite. We laugh a ton. We make lots of jokes. Like the one about how, if our uber-hip, 20-something selves could have peered into the future and seen us now, in our 50s, […]
The other night my wife Carolyn and I had just finished re-watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and were sitting on our couch, basking in the afterglow of Joss Whedon’s awesomeness, when I got a few texts from an old buddy of mine. The texts were links to YouTube videos of Trumpers who were devastated […]
Hello dear friends! It’s me again! Can you even believe it? I know I just posted/newslettered yesterday, but I decided this morning, after a lush, aquatic meditation, a meditation that seemingly took place in an octopus’ garden, that I wanted to offer a New Year’s Day blog post about joy. I could talk about the […]
A few weeks ago I was hunkered down in my little back-room office in our condo, having my Zoom session with my therapist, Patrick, and, at one point, out of the clear blue sky, he told me I was depressed. Apparently, I’d reported feeling bummed out for a few weeks in a row. Go figure. Now […]
So get this. In the second ring of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the people are consigned to spend all of eternity split into two sides, trying to roll huge boulders at each other. While doing so, each team shouts ragefully. (If I remember right, one team is made up of people who, when alive, […]
“Everybody is like an archaeological site…each individual is possessed of very complex ‘subjectivity’ that is made of archaic moments of adaptation. When confronted by the circumstances of life, you resort – at random, very primitively and very automatically – to these ‘solutions’…” “Memory is just an impulse to dramatize a certain archaic disposition. Thus, you […]
I think I over-bond with coffeeshop baristas. I keep it well-hidden, of course. Outwardly, I have impeccable boundaries. I never do any weird oversharing. I like to think I am a commensurate and equilateral sharer of the highest order, my repartee almost painfully appropriate. But it’s all an act. Deep down inside, I’m all over […]
One day last year, I was sitting outside at my neighborhood coffee shop, and three different friends all came up to me, one after the other, and told me they were having hard weeks. It was uncanny. I mean, that’s weird, right? One was Bill, an indestructible heroin addict with the erect posture of an […]
“All the while, what you want, and what you would give up everything for, is Happiness Itself, Utterly Free and Eternal. And this is, in fact, what you are all seeking. But you suggest that you are seeking all kinds of this-and-that. What you are really seeking is the Divine Love-Bliss-Happiness – Prior to ‘objects,’ […]
Last week, when I was writing outside at a coffee shop, I took a break to chat with this guy I know from around the neighborhood, James, who’d walked by with his amiable and faithful pitbull. While we were talking, a young man with friendly, thoughtful eyes came up and asked us for money. I […]