We have to make ourselves available to one another, or we can’t experience goodness. It’s not so much us seeking God, tracking Her down with a butterfly net; it’s agreeing to be found. The Old Girl re...
We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, Hello? Is there anyone there? We can pray, Am I too far gone, o...
Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me t...
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back...
To participate requires self-discipline and trust and courage, because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, as my friend Dale puts it, How alive...
To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissis...
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds...
This is one thing they forget to mention in most child-rearing books, that at times you will just lose your mind. Period.
This family business can be so stressful - difficult, damaged people showing up t spend time with other difficult, damanged people
They ask that we pray for their families, and for kinder leaders, and for the homeless, and people with AIDS, and people in other countries in crises of starvation or war.
They always threw their arms around and hugged me while crying our Yiddish endearments. Yet none of them believed in God. They believed in social justice, good works, Israel, and Bette Midler. I was n...
There’s freedom in hitting bottom, in seeing that you won’t be able to save or rescue your daughter, her spouse, his parents, or your career, relief in admitting you’ve reached the place of great unkn...
There's freedom in hitting bottom
There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixi...
There is flow everywhere in nature—glaciers are just rivers that are moving really, really slowly—so how could there not be flow in each of
The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?
The world can't give that serenity, he said. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts. I hate that, I said. I know. But the good news is that by the same token, the world can't...
The whole game in the fifties and early sixties was for no one to know who you really were. We children were witness to the total pretense of how our parents wanted the world to see them. We helped th...
The way I dance is by writing.