A Mindful Life

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default […]

Lately I’ve been hearing two Tracy Chapman songs on an endless loop in my head. So I’m sharing. Turn the volume up and take the ten minutes listen, really listen. Embed not working: Try this. Embed not functioning? Try this.

God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled. -Author Unknown Until I attended graduate school at St. Edward’s University, I didn’t know much about Dia de los Muertos. In 1997, after I’d left the fundamentalist non-denominational church I’d been with for years — and with it my entire social […]

The first time I heard this spoken-word passage, I was so moved I had to pull off the road and cry. It was a few months after 9/11. It resonates with me still. If you have a few minutes, maybe if you listen it will speak to you too. If the embed isn’t working you […]

At least ten years ago my mother gave me a magnetic notepaper holder to hang on my refrigerator. It had a delicate angel and rainbow picture, with a saying about love on it. For a long time I’ve realized it doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Lately my hands have been feeling restless and unsettled. Tonight […]

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of […]

I happened across a post on Deepak Chopra’s website where someone asked why we are given the parents we have. Putting aside the knowledge that the question “why” is a sticky, tangly, distracting web, (it doesn’t really free a person, it simply looks for a place to park blame — on oneself or another — […]

Now the same acts drew up the ties between them, put them back together, as though shaping the world from scratch. As they worked, they put the sky in place above, the trees in the ground. They invented color and air and scent and gravity. Laughter and sadness. They discovered truth and lies and mock-lies […]

When we’re young we have faith in what is seen, but when we’re old we know that what is seen is traced in air and built on water. –Maxwell Anderson, Winterset

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. –William Penn Dawn on Kala Point, Washington