Good Clean Reads

“Remember that pain has this most excellent quality. If prolonged it cannot be severe, and if severe it cannot be prolonged.”  Seneca

My abdominal surgery was three days ago. One thing I have learned in these last few days is how subjective and changeable is our experience of pain is. There are moments white hot, bringing tears to my eyes, as well as others like a constant ache that are comforted...

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”  Martin Luther King Jr.

I am a fan of historical fiction and almost always in the midst of how other people lived through the challenges of a distant time. Witnessing history through fictional personal stories makes it real for me and has often left me marveling at how my own existence has never been swept up in any of the vast sea changes that political...

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Simone Weil

I am a daily meditator, which is another way of saying that I work with my own attention every day. As anyone who has ever tried to sit in quiet will attest, for as many days as I get to fall back into a deep pulsing vibration of stillness, there are the minutes of watching my mind flit from one thing to the next, repeating old...

“Only work on stuff you love … when I don’t, I fight with my wife a lot more, I’m snippy with my kid.” Joe Swanberg, creator of EASY

Seems like every time I turn around this week, I have been hearing the word “easy”… from my phone which continues to light up with texts from old friends I haven’t heard from in years, “LOL, saw you on easy…”, to the shipping guy at UPS- who suddenly recognizes our...

In the Western world’s most famous story of forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet commit suicide rather than go on living apart. In Shakespeare’s version of the story, they are thirteen years old, which, along with Shakespeare’s poetic writing, can make their suffering seem like the dramatic stuff of theater rather than life.

But suicide isn’t just a tragedy; it’s also a reality. According to the...

“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  Voltaire

1. Bathe in your senses

Pleasure is entirely dependent on our physical capacity to experience the world through our senses. We open to pleasure when we become deliberate about learning more about our capacity to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. Doing this is easier than you might think: just by adopting the practice...

“The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.”  The Upanishads

The freedom to pray and worship and believe in whatever form of God is meaningful, to us, is a freedom that we often take for granted. Yet, in fact it is this freedom, above all others, that has drawn the vast diversity of people and religious beliefs that...

“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”  -Charlotte Joko Beck

I am not much of a planner any more. Even as my tiny homespun love company has finally moved into the growth stage of being able to track and predict sales data, I still balk at making plans. For most of my adult life, I have witnessed my best laid plans for how things will go, from the dozens of business plans I have...

“I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted. And that distorted me, damaged me, and almost broke me.” –Stanford Rape Survivor

Sexual assault is so common that it occurs every two minutes in this country to one in six women (and one in 33 men). Until this week, it’s rampant existence has remained largely out...