Look at all the pretty words and how they pale before the Great Law of Life That all must die at last. Grief is a humbling visitor. It drains us of vanity and painted faces, of eagerness and righteous ignorance. It leaves us naked, bereft of words and meaning. But for writers, grief compels the [...]
1 Victory! How sweet the sound of Victory (or was it Hope, her older sister?) when the fever broke (briefly) as dawn approached on the fourth day. The promise of effortless being! The gift of taste, ebullient mingle of life-sustaining pleasures … returned. The gift to swallow, in sweet self-absorption, like a breeze on a [...]
Another vignette I wrote for the Halloween Enchantment Festival of 2014. It's the story of the Night Weaver. (Night Weaver stands at a big loom with long drapes of black cloth.) 1 What a busy time of year it is for me, the night-time weaver! I need to make long yards of cloth to fill [...]
I wrote this vignette for a Halloween festival at my daughters' school in 2013. It's the song of an overworked gnome who is put in charge to write a lullaby for the plants to go to sleep as fall is coming. (Gnome sits on desk with paper and quill composing, crumpling up papers and throwing [...]
If there is one thing I hear over and over when working with couples it's this: "We are not communicating". This can mean a number of things: 1) Partner A talks (a lot); partner B is not listening. 2) Partner A talks (a lot); partner B doesn't. 3) Partner A makes a comment; partner B [...]
Do you feel you can never do anything right? Do you often compare yourself to others, and come out as the loser? Many people (you?) wrestle with deep seated feelings of inadequacy. Frequently, this feeling has a long history and goes back to growing up with a critical mother or father. Maybe their parents openly [...]
Teenagers are not the only rebels. Many of us 18 and older are rebels still. We are rebels with a cause. We continue to fight our aging parents and try to make room for who we want to become. We are, it seems, stuck in a state of arrested development. Maybe you didn't get to [...]
There is grief, and there is Grief. One is a wet, heavy blanket on the chest, the other a torrent of uncried oceans. One we can walk around with unseen, the other stops us in our tracks and exposes us to the raw force of mortality. Grief makes us helpless. We become like little children [...]
by Lama Gyurme & Jean-Phillipe Rykiel All forms appearing in the vast three thousand worlds I offer as the supreme mudra of body. Please grant the siddhi of unchanging form. All sound, and sources of sound, appearing in the vast three thousand worlds I offer as the supreme mudra of speech. Please grant the siddhi [...]
I must have been eleven or twelve when I saw this film. What I remember most vividly about it were the main characters: grown men and women actors with the voices of young children. And not only that, they also behaved like children: they bickered, grabbed, pulled hair, pouted and threw tantrums when something wasn't [...]
