Good Clean Reads

“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...

“When I let go of what I am I become what I might be

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow.

Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like

To attain knowledge, add things every day

To attain wisdom, remove things every day

To love someone deeply...

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”  -Albert Einstein

We were both thinking about time as I walked down the beach with my husband today. I was flashing on the last time we walked this same beach fifteen summers before. In Bandon, huge sea stacks mark the beaches; architecture from the sea that is unforgettable. I was remembering how small my 18- year- old son...