Browse Topics

Sunbeams

I did not go to the Maggid of Mezeritch to learn Torah from him, but to watch him tie his boot laces.

A Hasidic rabbi

Their Turn

To the melancholy wailing of a Turkish flute, the dervishes enter the stage dressed in long black coats and tall woolen hats. It’s a dramatic moment even if you haven’t done your homework.

Breakfast At The Victory

In the Victory there was no such thing as The Last Word. Truths, conclusions, absolutes — all had about the same permanence as the steamy smells that circulated in the Victory and drifted out onto the street.

I Read The News Today

I’m wary of men and women whose speeches are impassioned but who rarely listen; who know how to save the world but not their own neglected marriages. Rather than face the dark side of their consciousness, they exhort us to march behind them in the lengthening shadows, to live (and die) for their truth (or re-election).

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

Whatever you say about God you should be able to say standing over a pit full of burning babies.

Elie Wiesel

Holding Our Power

An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé

The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.

Why We Are All Addicted

I maintain that the essence of addiction is craving for an experience or object to make you feel all right. It’s the craving for something other than the self, even if that something is within the realm of the mind. Addiction is fundamentally human; it affects everybody.

An Inventory Of Timelessness

What I’m saying is that we in the late twentieth century live not in a city or country, not on a planet, but in a collective dream. Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex, and a threatening sense of multiple meaning.

Selected Poems