The Blog
Here’s where I share thoughts on the work of moving toward our biggest lives and baddest selves.
‘Hey, buddy,’ yourself: A brief guide to self-compassion
This is a friendly reminder – to you and myself – of some things that are perfectly understandable, all the time and especially in this tense moment in history: Feeling scared, anxious, worried, sad, and/or shut down Feeling hopeful, playful, joyful, and/or...
Gritty, Determined, Stubborn Optimism
On Saturday night, Theresa and I hunkered down for the two hours and 40 minutes of theatrical goodness that is Hamilton. Like many people, I’ve had my kick of listening to the soundtrack on a loop and yet though every bit of dialogue in the production is...
Rearranged Socks, Rearranged Thoughts
I was 19 when I bought a proper piece of furniture for myself for the first time. The man at the junk shop – which is to say, the kind of antique store that can be found along poorly traveled roads, selling this and that out of old ramshackle buildings that...
Who do you want to be when things go sideways?
A week or two ago, during a newspaper-inspired conversation about the coming election, Theresa asked, “What are we going to do it if it doesn’t go the way we want?” Admittedly, I gave her a pat rah-rah of an answer, a somebody’s-got-to-keep-doing-the-work kind...
The Often Overlooked Critical Component to Survival
It was 2004 or so when I first heard of the Slow Foods Movement. Started in Italy, Slow Foods was a reaction to, you guessed it, fast food. The movement embraces the way our culture lives in food long after the traditional dress, customs, and even language...
Joy and Sorrow as Humanity’s Warp and Weft
It astonishes me sometimes – no, often – how ever person I get to know – everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything – lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer...
Your Psyche is Made of Velcro
In her memoir Why Religion? Elaine Pagels described noticing that she’s attracted to a female friend. A little background on her: Raised by atheist parents, she chose Christianity as both a faith tradition and focus of scholarship in her early adulthood,...
Prison Abolition for This Guy?
Twenty-four years later and it’s still a touch surreal to me to think that I was nearly murdered at 18. I’m not sure there are other words for it: My ex-beau had stolen a knife from his steakhouse job and sat outside of my mom’s house until she and my step-father left...
When Old and New Trauma are Shaken AND Stirred
Since making my first entry in September of 2016, my five-year journal has paid dividends, both each evening as it cues me to ask myself, “What do I most want to remember about today? An event? A feeling? A question? A thought?” and as I look back through the...
Unlearning My Way Forward
A handful of years ago, I asked my mom to recount for me a bit of family lore. It was the kind of story that infuses most families, so deeply interwoven that it doesn’t often occur to us to examine it more closely, to check whether the story was, in fact, woven...