awakening
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There is something almost offensively beautiful about the way children demand repetition. “Again.” Read the same book. Sing the same song. Push the swing. Build the tower. Knock it down. Again. And again. And again. We call it exhausting because we have forgotten how to be alive. Chesterton noticed something profound about children: their appetite…
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I have noticed that children and scientists have one thing in common. They both stare. The difference is that the child stares because he is astonished. The scientist often stares because he is trying to understand what he sees. The tragedy is when we understand so much that we forget to marvel. A child finds…
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Childhood wounds possess a strange talent. They convince a person that pain is the truest thing about them. Years pass. Faces change. Homes change. Even the body becomes unfamiliar. Yet the frightened child keeps whispering beneath the ribs, certain the world is still what it was. Time appears to agree. It stacks memory upon memory…
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I used to believe growth arrived with companionship. A friend. A mentor. A wise voice pointing the way. Instead, some of the greatest growth in my life arrived through isolation. Not the isolation I chose, but the kind handed to me without my consent. The unanswered prayers. The empty spaces. The seasons when heaven seemed…
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I see it everywhere—in my own life and out in the world….men in collapse. Not just tired, not just distracted, but completely surrendered. No fire. No vitality. It breaks my heart… I want to fix it but I’m not even sure how to diagnose it. I think about it a lot as I’m raising my…
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I have lived on the margins twice in my life, and from the outside I know it looks the same. That’s the strange part. Same distance from the center, same refusal to live the way everyone tells you to live, same sense of standing slightly outside the flow of things, watching instead of participating. But…
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Heroin was the obvious lie. Perfectionism was the respectable one. Same mechanism. Different costume. One numbed the pain. The other anesthetized it with achievement, productivity, and praise. Both promised relief. Both demanded everything. The needle and the calendar were never enemies. They were accomplices. People like to call that growth. It isn’t. It’s substitution. Perfectionism…
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What better way to start a week then introspection. Ask yourself, “Am I in collusion with the person who abused me?” I think we all would like to believe we are no longer in collusion with our abusers. That can only be true when we’ve stopped the secretive cooperation with them. This deceitful agreement we…
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All the years I’ve spent in a counselor’s office trying to sift through the rubble of my childhood and heal, I never encountered the priceless, cherished moments that populate the early years of most. They just weren’t a commodity I was raised with. I’m not being a victim by sharing this, it’s just factual. As…
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet As a very small child, my body and…