Category: meditation

• May 19, 2011

  On having your life in order and on not having your life in order

  I’ve begun sorting people according to 3 categories. (Get ready to cringe.) The first are those who have their lives in order.* With a handful of these people, I’ve become friends. I respect them, and I seek to emulate them. They are beautiful people. The second are those who don’t have their lives in order…
• May 16, 2011

  On Ulysses’s homecoming: Crying and shivering

  And after his return to Ithaca, what there does Ulysses find? That his home is filled with suitors, truculent and obnoxious. And after they’ve been dispatched and the floors cleaned? That there abides a reticent wife, filled with distrust. They shall sleep in separate beds in separate rooms that night. This until, filled with anger,…
• May 14, 2011

  Go down, sweet Moses… On the spiritual exercise of letting go

  Go down, sweet Moses, / Your burdens are weighing you down. You’ve borne enmity like a slave: / your past days suppliant, your diurnal turns craven, your Amens bleating, / stern, and uncowed. For how now, gentle Moses? / You, who were offered one sturdy plank, / yet held fast to the rotten. / You, to whom love flowed like spring,…
• May 13, 2011

  Examination of conscience: On humility and compassion: Second day of spiritual exercise (2)

  There are times when a problem stops you in your tracks. Mine has been determining how much reality to let in. 1 To live well, we must be grounded in a lived reality. By “a lived reality,” I mean a net of ownmost desires and values that are connected to an external world. Take one…
• May 11, 2011

  Childhood as spiritual exercise: Peter in The Snowy Day

  I don’t know what led me to the local library to stand in the middle of the kids’ section, to look down at my running shoes and around me at the little tables, and, standing there not unself-consciously to  read Ezra Jack Keat’s The Snowy Day. It may be that the idea of home has…