Ram Dass, who described himself as a Hin-Jew, said that ultimately we’re all just walking each other home. I love that. I try to live by it.
Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.
Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water. I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-da...
Peg came over with dinner tonight and told me about this dumb schmaltzy poem she heard someone read at an AA meeting. It got me thinking. It was about how while we are on earth, our limitations are...
Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You ha...
Other days, though, my writing is like a person to me—the person who, after all these years, still makes sense to me.
One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.
One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was that I was going to need a lot of help, and for a long time. (Even this morning.) What saved me was that I found gentle, loyal and hilarious companions, w...
Now. Maybe you think it is arrogant or self centered, or ridiculous for me to believe that God bothered to wiggle a cheap bolt out of my new used car because he or she needed to keep me away for a few...
Nell's husband has short-man syndrome. Eddie is one of those deadly dull people who is so upbeat that I suspect he would subconsciously like to go through the neighborhood, house by house, with a mach...
My lifelong and core belief, right after the conviction that I was defective, mildly annoying, and better than everyone else was that my help was helpful.
My favorite moment in Jeanne Moreau's latest movie--a comedy called --takes place in a kitchen, when she proclaims that every human has something to cry about. When mocked by the owner of the kitchen...
Mercy means that we no longer constantly judge everybody’s large and tiny failures, foolish hearts, dubious convictions, and inevitable bad behavior. We will never do this perfectly, but how do we do...
Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgiveable.
Maybe, I thought, after a few months of sobriety, you could successfully smoke marijuana again, or maybe every anniversary you got to have one glass of a perfectly chilled California Chardonnay.
Look at us, he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down’s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with them...
Kill the pain. I don't smoke or drink anymore. I'm too worried to gamble, too guilty to shoplift, and I've always hated clothes shopping. So what choices did that leave? I could go on a strict new die...
It was not facing what life dealt that made you crazy, but rather trying to set life straight where it was unstraightenable.
It was never meant to be permanent. You must have known the tide would come back in.
It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not whe...