Arlene Goldbard

Just about every spiritual tradition preaches it; just about every psychological tradition teaches it. So why is it so hard to learn to separate one’s desire from expectations of its fulfillment? Why is it so tempting to give up wanting what doesn’t seem to be forthcoming?
One of my strongest desires is help potentiate a paradigm [...]

Be forewarned: if you don’t feel like a rant today, save this for later. For the last few days I’ve had the strangest sensation. It’s as if I’ve been struggling to emerge from some intensely sticky substance—a vat of rubber cement, perhaps, or a freshly spun spider web as it might appear to a hapless [...]

I don’t know if this is a political problem, a spiritual one, or a psychological one: I’m fairly certain it’s all of the above. Or maybe it just feels that way based on all the space it’s taking up in my mind. How do people overcome the obstacles—fatigue, disappointment, magical thinking—that make them reluctant to [...]

My friends tend to a few views of President Obama and the Democrats at the end of Year One. They seem different, but actually, all are part of the Disappointment System, my new name for the combination plate of hurt and response which has become our national dish. As is so often the case, what [...]

I spent the first part of this week in Sacramento, where I gave a talk to a statewide “arts visioning retreat,” an audience of about a hundred artists and administrators who wanted to help lead a conversation about reframing the arts’ public purpose. (Download my brief introduction and keynote at California Arts Advocates’ Web site.)
The [...]

Judging by how many impertinent questions I asked in childhood, I came into this world with an inquiring mind. But in some ways, I have only just become a seeker, and I am only now beginning to understand what this means.
I am trying to notice cues and signposts that come my way, with the result [...]

“Philosophy” conjures dusty places and donnish faces, elbow patches on corduroy jackets, fusty squares straining to split hairs. But when I look back on this year, it is a problem in philosophy that commands my attention and gives meaning to my journey. Anyone who feels the suffering of our fellows and sees the hope of [...]

While the rest of the world is ho-ho-ho-ing, I’ve been oh-no-no-ing, pounding out what the friend who advised me to write them calls “anger chapters.” Lately, I’m on this path of inquiry into absolutely everything, and now it’s anger’s turn. You see, I don’t usually get very far with anger. Most of the time, I [...]

My ancestors were nomads and refugees, and I have carried on that tradition. Sometimes I think I was born packed and ready to go. I no longer speak the language of infants, so I can’t quote my exact thoughts, but I have the distinct impression that the synapses that fired when I first opened my [...]

Current controversy around a work of art has me asking this question: what is our obligation to respect what is sacred to others, especially if it has no such significance to ourselves? In this story, four different notions of the sacred have come into conflict. Talk about a teachable moment! What can be learned from [...]