Tag: spiral trail

I appreciate the advice-giver-dudes who are so goal-oriented and single-minded that they strip all the imperfect out of their lives and go far. But my life does not look like that. You can’t always resolve the tension. You can’t quit the job right now. You can’t stop parenting the children. You can’t surmount the chronic…

In Irish, when you have an emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad”. You say “saddness is on me”. It’s just a visitor; not who you are. I have “empathy on me”. I don’t like to say “I’m an empath”, cause that sounds a little too dramatic, too identity-crusting, too ridiculous. But I pick up…

One of the most important jobs of religion is to hold us when shit hits the fan. To provide us with reference points, community, and skills for sustaining ourselves – through hardship, through suffering, through the confusion that springs out of all our lives. But religion isn’t up to that task for most of us…

The first tools we think of for survival are knives and pointy sticks. If you are trying to survive in the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on your back, of course, you’ll want to chop down trees, hunt game, build a fire. But the second tool you will need is a container. Something to…

A wasp strolled leisurely across my cheek as I sat on my porch meditating this morning. There’s a whole nest under there. And eventually, I’m going to have to crawl down there past the dog poo and the spiders and shoot it out with the hose. But in the meantime, the wasps and I coexist.…