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...

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)...

I could tell you that the night is young and that we are still out on the town celebrating New Year's Eve as I take a quick bathroom break to post this photo. Or I could tell you that we WERE out earlier but that we've been back home for a while now, all cozy in sweats and watching movies. How could you tell which version of the story is true? After all, narrators have the ability to exaggerate, understate, obfuscate. Narrators are so very unreliable. That's one of the points of the movie that I just watched titled Life Itself. That narrators are unreliable....

  When I'm making art, I'm thinking about my body. When I'm cooking I'm thinking about my body. When I see a newborn baby I'm thinking about my body. When I am with the elderly I'm thinking about my body. When I'm walking, talking, traveling, singing, eating, reading, playing the viola, watching a movie ... doing anything at all, the thing that is and has always been on my mind is my body. Will my body allow me to do all that I need to do, all that I want to do? Will I have loved and respected and enjoyed my...