The V-Word

“You can’t touch love, but you can feel the sweetness that it pours into everything” -Annie Sullivan

For a long time I believed love happened in the giving and receiving of affection, attentive listening, and showing up. It was in the exchanges where I knew that love was circulating in my life. I never knew that the love that came in was actually sitting in me steeping and changing me just because...

“Marriage: that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those who created it.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I love weddings. What is more reassuring than attending a ritual whose goal is to promise to love. Regardless of our knowledge or experience with it’s failure, we all want to believe in love and support the couples who are bold enough to take the leap. Wedding rituals are so...

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend of mine gave me this quote framed more than twenty years ago when I was moving away to a new life. It has been hanging in my home ever since and has come to be one of the...

“Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” -Kahlil Gibran

Our relationship to pain in life is an interesting one. The idea that a successful life could be measured by the amount of pleasure or pain we experience is as erroneous as the idea that as humans we seek to avoid pain. In truth, many of us seek out painful experiences, or at least knowingly and willingly...

“Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us. It may be that one of our great faults in prayer is that we talk too much and listen too little. When prayer is at its highest we wait in silence for God’s voice to us….” -William Barclay

I am trying to not just pray like this, but live like it, too. I want to...

“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” -Francois Gautier

Clarity is another act of grace. It is not at our beck and call, but rather an internal re-organizing and fresh perspective that comes through us when we are open and listening. Clarity is attracted to humility. It can fill us with an authentic and deep connection to our own truth when we give up the idea that...

Listen to author Jillian Lauren discuss her riveting New York Times best selling memoir Some Girls, My Life in a Harem. Exploring the nature of what it means to be female and sexual in our culture and the emotional crossroads that bring many women into paid sexual work, her interview, like her book is a breath of fresh air. True to her commitment to share the whole truth of her experience, she...

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need….” -Rolling Stones

This song starts to play in my head at interesting moments. Lately it is on instant replay as I sort through current events and try to organize them in categories of what I want and what I need. Here again I seem to be proving the Daniel Gilbert’s theory  of Stumbling Around Happiness, which...

“Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.” ~Robert Brault

I have been struggling with the big changes that are happening in my work. The idea of the change, which feels light years away is taking shape and bears little resemblance to the fantasy I imagined in my head, although it fulfills all the requirements that I set for the change. I didn’t figure in the...