Yang. We all use it. We can’t survive without it. Some of us have more of it than others. But when it is harnessed to serve an evil master, it is the strongest and worst force on earth. You’re listening to funky R&B or Pavarotti soaring and you turn it up and sing your heart out, energized and happy, pumped…
How to create rest during the busiest time of year
New things that come into our lives often have a learning curve, including parenting.
What happens when your family has lived in one place for more than fifty years, and suddenly that is gone? We’re about to find out
It is a whisper of feeling, almost intangible. Yet it is powerful. Suddenly you are in a different space. You feel almost weightless. The air is still, your breathing is slow, but what you are experiencing is clean and clear. You have been touched by a moment of pure grace. One recent summer evening I was eating dinner with my…
A number of years ago, my partner and I moved into a fixer-upper. I saw the potential of the inside—the good bones of the small but well-built house. He saw the rocks and woods and graceful space around the house—a little under two acres but completely suffocated by trees of every size, and no sunlight. I was frenzied. I had…
For some people, the words yielding and surrender might evoke romance novels—lovers swept away by passion, tearing each other’s clothes off, transported to an idyll of true-love-forever. Or yielding and surrender can raise the specter of submissive women who are ceaselessly compliant, handmaidens in the backgrounds of men’s lives. But there’s another perspective. Surrendering to a partner, yielding to his…
Always a bittersweet time, the beginning of September in the Northeast is upon us. There is a little regret I’m not starting classes of some kind, a relic of the excitement and dread of a new school year. There is also the refreshing specter of cooler, cleaner, dry air and the burst of energy that seems to come along with…
In the late spring of 2001, back in the days of innocence, before the complete rupture of innocence, really, I flew down to visit a friend of mine who was renting a house in Charleston, South Carolina. It was my first time in the real South. The weather was perfect and I felt carefree. My friend had tickets to several…
