I was 46 when I called Mom to tell her I wanted to pursue my purpose in life. At the time, I had a beautiful townhouse in Baltimore and a well-paying job that required me to work, on average, no more than twenty hours a week. More importantly, I spent a lot of my free […]

In his wonderful book of meditations entitled, “The Book of Awakening,” Mark Nepo quotes poet Kurtis Lamkin: “Believing is all a child does for a living” I’ve been thinking about that quote for the past couple of days as I move my life in a new direction. And it occurs to me that as adults […]

Consider these words from Patanjali: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds. Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to […]

Not long ago I watched a Charlie Rose retrospective on some of the famous people we lost in 2016. It’s one of my favorite shows of the year because it fills me with a wide range of emotions. Saddened by the loss, my heart also swells with the beauty and love of a well-lived life. […]

I’m sitting at a table at one of my favorite Italian restaurants. Mary’s my waitress. At the end of the meal she brings me the check and we engage in some small talk about her major and what she wants to do after college. I sense the lack of enthusiasm in both her voice and […]

It seems natural to want to go back to the person you were after you’ve lived through a tragedy. After all, that’s a comfortable choice. It feels safe. But it’s unrealistic. Because we can never go back to who we were after our Universe collapses. The alignment of who we were in the world has […]

When Mom left this world not long ago, the emotional upheaval and profound sense of loss and loneliness was something I had never experienced before. Five months later, I still find myself expecting her to round the corner or ask me to check out one of her new artistic creations. Both of those are cherished […]

I spent fifteen years in a self induced relational coma, convinced that a former lover’s painful words were my truth, rather than her reality. That’s roughly 5500 days of consciously avoiding intimacy with women. And even though it would be easy to view those days as lost time, it would be a mistake because everything […]

Lately I’ve been thinking alot about the two primordial emotions of life, Love and Pain, and all of the sub-emotions that arise from them. And what’s interesting to me is that, even though love is our nature and pain is learned, we tend to live in pain and long for love. At first you might […]

The pitch-black sky matched my mood as I stepped out the back door of the hotel to stare at the ocean. This trip to Cotonou had been a last-ditch effort to make sense of my life. But after being swindled out of my last ten thousand dollars, the only good thing about being in West […]