This has been a strange time in my little world: I’ve been traveling for work while my computer stayed home and lost its mind. I’m glad to say that sanity (i.e., memory, software, and general order) has been restored, and while I still have the sort of compulsive desire to tell the tale that afflicts …
Many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later. Pope Francis, …
I’m going through one of those bumpy passages on the journey to belonging. I moved a couple of months ago, and while the reason was love and I feel the opposite of regret, the adjustment to a new community is pushing some ancient buttons. As with many children of immigrants, I know what it’s like …
It happens so often, doesn’t it? Something burrows its way to the surface of your awareness in the little world of face-to-face, and then you see the same dynamic writing itself across the globe. For instance, I spent Yom Kippur in services with dear friends, grateful for the opportunity to pause, reflect, reorient. One feature …
The day will come when you will trust you more than you do now, and you will trust me more than you do now. We can trust each other. I do believe, I really believe…that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous and people are …
Silence, as every meditator knows, confers the opportunity to notice what matters most. This past week, I’ve been noticing our ideas about age and thinking about an important event approaching fast: On November 3, The Shalom Center (where I have the honor of serving as president) will honor Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Gloria Steinem with …
It’s interesting to have opportunities to give advice to young artists. Each time, I learn something about myself, something about the way I may appear in others’ eyes—and something about the gap between them too. I suppose the easiest way to explain that gap is that to those several decades my junior, my life—or at …
I was on the tarmac in Las Vegas, gazing from my window seat at the dusty prospect below. Ten yards away, three robust men in fluorescent pink-and-green vests and orange jumpsuits crouched in the shade made by the roof of an empty luggage-wagon, resting between loads. The youngest jumped up and walked to a spot …
If you stick around long enough writing books and essays and giving talks, people come to you for advice. Very often, the requests I get turn on choices between alternate futures. Graduating students, youngish artists and activists, members of an older generation considering “encore” careers or avocations—sometimes, people seek me out for advice on what …
It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and—big news …