In Eckhart Tolle's Lecture: Living a Life of Inner Peace (available on Audible.com), he points out that the opposite to LIFE isn't death ... that DEATH's opposite is BIRTH, not LIFE. Because in LIFE, birth & death happen, as do other opposites like peace & war, joy and&sorrow, feast & famine. Tolle sites the teachings of many historical spiritual teachers including Buddha and Jesus. At first when I heard him site Jesus, I wanted to turn him off because I've been unable to stomach the ways in which modern Christianity has been held hostage by humans who practice an exclusionary, judgemental and insultingly shallow interpretation of Jesus' teachings. It...

Never before have I read a book quite like BLUETS by MAGGIE NELSON. I finished it yesterday on the plane as I was seated in 10D, a window seat, which allowed me to look out the window at the clouds encased by blue. And in that moment, in reading passage 168, I understood Nelson's reference of words attributed to Cézanne: '"If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance," he said of painting a man's face." So to paint clouds, I don't need to paint them. Just the blue that surrounds them.   I don't want you...

When I started reading THERE THERE by Tommy Orange, I thought it was a collection of short stories. And then after about 50 pages, I realized it isn't a collection of shorts, it's one cohesive novel ... where seemingly unrelated stories and characters intersect, interrelate, inter-tangle. The older I get, the more I realize that everything is connected. I realize that a person from this interaction is related to a person from that interaction and that this word affects that word, and this treatment affects that treatment.  There is righteous rage in this book. The kind of rage I felt a...

I almost gave up on this book (FLORIDA by Lauren Groff)... a collection of eleven short stories. After the first 67 pages, I had downed the first three short stories and felt like I was in a senseless storm ... up, down, here, there, wind, dirt, sweat ... and for what? I said to myself: "My time is more precious than to use it up in a nonsensical storm." I put the book away and started another, which I rarely do. Without a clear explanation as to why, I put FLORIDA back into my hold and read the next short ... The Midnight...

I’ve been starting most days this year by writing letters to people. With a fountain pen and actual paper. (So old-fashioned that it feels refreshingly modern, right?!) This morning’s letter was to say thank you to my friend for making and giving me this lovely ID-bracelet-inspired bracelet that contains one of my roller skating personas on it: #clarityclause. It sparked a beautiful memory of a 1975 evening when my family had been in America for just a year. It was hot Friday night. It was spelling test night. My dad had made it a practice to give my brothers (Jim and Jinil)...