Good Clean Reads

Traveling again.  Moving through time zones across the country.  I am in Baltimore at the historical Lord Baltimore hotel, which is currently under renovation. My room is one of the first to be renovated.  It is beautifully appointed, but they didn’t account for the single digit temperatures when they were dealing with the old single pane windows.  The bathroom is an ice box.

I am awake at 7:30...

Jim took his life on Friday evening.  The last time I saw him, I was at his newest restaurant with my son Luke for a late lunch.  He was there and spent time talking to us, about old times on the soccer team where Luke and his son, Henry played together for many years. We talked about their respective plans for college and he shared more about how he plans menus for his new restaurants. His restaurants had been favorite eating places since we moved here over a decade earlier. I had spent many hours by the side of a...

“Often we cling to our feelings as if they were signs from God- signs of either anointment or of being sent from the Garden. This superstitious relationship is the cause of many kinds of suffering.” -Gangagi

 

Many of us simply never learned the language and truth of our feeling self. We misinterpret our feelings as absolute signs of right and wrong, good and bad rather than the passing experience...

“How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.” ~Victor Hugo

As the days of giving and receiving gifts come upon us, let us not forget the true presence that most of our loved one’s crave from us may...

“Sex is more than an act of pleasure, it’s the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.” –Unknown

There might not be two words that are better matched side by side than gratitude and sex. What moment more fully embodies gratitude than the deep and...

This week I am bowing down to the body. Our body condition is our first reality and the one that supersedes everything else. I am reminded of this as I work on our new Positive Community Cures project which trains teens to make organic food for acutely sick people. We have a woman on our staff who has, in her 20s, struggled with cancer. We are bringing food to another woman in her 20s who has...

Contributed by Darlene Mars

(November’s Key to Gratitude Contest Weekly Winner)

For me, the key to gratitude is recognizing that absolutely everything that is happening in my life is a sacred gift. All experiences up until now, have converged to teach me, whether through pain or pleasure, how to live this life with greater reverence.

I have hurt. I have been hurt. I have loved. I have been loved....

Sex appeal is the most vibrant form of gratitude that we embody. It is a magical alchemy of feeling good enough in your body that you can say yes to all the visceral and sensory life experiences that are the stuff of memory and the container of relationships. Trusting yourself to say yes is to open up to the constant.

“It is not the same thing to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.” -Spanish Proverb

 

The gap between the genuine visceral experience of feeling and the more common mental masturbating we do to distance ourselves from our feelings is everything when it comes to healing and growing up. We know our feelings most clearly in the mess of them. Their expression creates indelible memories, whether the...