May 23 To Be Awake There is always purpose in being, but not always being in purpose. How easily we get caught up in defining who we are in relation to those around us. I remember walking home from school in fourth grade, when I noticed Roy, a classmate I didn’t really like, walking at [...]

May 16 Not Needing Approval There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground. —Rumi I have a young friend who speaks of the time when he reads stories with his daughter as a time that needs no confirmation. There is wisdom in his phrase: a time that needs no confirmation. We all [...]

Classics of empowerment and motivation by such authors as Florence Scovel Shinn, Lynn Grabhorn, Annie Payson Call, and Ralph Waldo Emerson – curated by Mina Parker (a hard-working mom and inspirational writer) the Create the Life You Want Collection will brighten all of your mother’s days! Thoughts I Met on the Highway: Create the Life You [...]

May 9 The Fear of What Is Different To direct the mind towards the basic unity of all things and to divert it from the seizing of differences—therein lies bliss. —Tejo-bindu Upanishad The eye can see what we have in common or focus on what keeps us apart. And the heart can feel what joins [...]

May 2 Live in Your Hands Live in your hands and your mind will learn to bow like a root. Several years ago, while doing a poetry reading in New York City, I encountered an angry young man who had just seen a woman mugged. He was so enraged he wrote a poem on the [...]

April 25 The Courage to Join The real story comes from a love-source that cannot be understood with intellect, but known only as a person is known. —Coleman Barks Living in modern times has turned us into watchers, placing a sliver of distance between us and everything we meet. It is this watching that disheartens [...]

April 18 The Purpose of Full Attention This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness. A most profound and helpful learning came to me when struggling with the pain of having a rib removed. For weeks I felt a corset of pain girdling each breath. [...]

April 11 Turning Light into Food We still might feed the dark thing in us that grows away from the light until against all sense we mysteriously flower in the other direction. Quietly, each spring, things in the plant world start growing slowly toward the light, while their roots finger their way underground. But once [...]

April 4 Making Amends There is hurt and there is love. They roll us through the days like a turtle down a hill. All we can do when on our back is roll one more time and head for the sea. Stones loosened by storms cover paths, and uprooted trees break newly formed nests, and [...]

March 28 The Gift of Shedding From the beginning, the key to renewal has been the casting off of old skin. It is interesting that the earliest peoples believed in something that we, in our modern hive of manufacturing, have forgotten—that immortality is attainable by shedding. The Dusuns of North Borneo have believed for centuries [...]