Stillness

We Men Must Learn How to Grieve (Everything)

♦◊♦ In 2010, I spent 12 months in a purple SUV Dodge Durango crisscrossing North America on the most wondrous adventure with five other men, five brilliant musical shamans forever my brothers. That purple Durango – which anyone not color blind (like me) would always insist was blue – held us safe as we made … Read more

Embracing The Ache of Loneliness

heart

♦◊♦ This blog is dedicated to the lonely. Even the lonely who have partners. Have you ever felt really lonely? I mean that kind of loneliness where you lie awake at night and your chest pulses with soft ache and your heart slowly burns as some persistent thought insists you’re destined to go through this

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Give The Gift of Letting Others Think Whatever They Want

♦◊♦ I propose a powerful, simple experiment for you this holiday season: Don’t try to convince anyone of anything. This experiment will be especially useful if you are going to visit family and stressful interactions are routine in that odd tribe. I went to visit my mom in Maryland for Thanksgiving last year. My mom’s

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8-Step Guide to a Great Hug

A truly great hug is a rich experience that has you pull another human body deliciously tight into yours as a way of saying, “I so deeply value your presence that I’m taking this exact moment to feel you, smell you, breathe with you – essentially stamp your being into my cellular memory so that

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Connect To The Wild Within

When you step outside today … when you emerge from whatever concrete, brick, plastic, glass, steel structure you spend most of your time inside each day, take a moment to listen for the silence that lay just beneath the pavement … just beneath the frenetic rushhhhhh of engines moving in every direction whisking us impatient from

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Stop trying to convince anyone of anything

The most significant intimate relationship in my life so far has also been the craziest. By “crazy” I simply mean that we were both surely insane together.   We took each other into the darkest, most absurd realms of insecure, aggressive and offensive conversation that neither of us could have imagined we’d ever encounter in

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Healing Sometimes Means Learning to Live in Peace with The Pain

♦◊♦ I’m pretty sure that sometimes “healing” just means learning to live in peace with the pain. I’ve been to countless workshops. I’ve questioned my stressful thoughts for days on end and accumulated countless hours of stranger eye-gazing to weepy Whitney Houston songs; I’ve sat still and starving on desolate mountainsides, determinedly reframed disappointments and

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Slow Down. Productivity is Overrated.

I just returned from a 30 day solo retreat in the mountains. My time there was deliciously tranquil. I removed batteries from ticking clocks. Refused internet service. Kept my phone in a drawer. I woke up twice to deep snowfall slathered across the entire landscape, fresh, romping coyote tracks circling my cabin. I went hiking

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You Can't Push The River

♦◊♦ I’ve never tried to pull a caterpillar out of its cocoon, hoping to catch an early glimpse of the butterfly. I don’t recall ever ripping open the closed bud of a spring flower, desperate to experience its full bloom glory. I do, however, sometimes eat raw cookie dough before I bake the cookie. But

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