On the little slab of stone, under the shade of overgrown bushes and weeds and trees, against the cascading putter of the pond in our backyard that regenerates itself constantly, I finally could breathe. When it was all getting to be too much, when so many emails poured in and so many voices, I forgot the admonition to “be like… Read more →
This morning, I stepped into the Dunkin’ Donuts two miles from my home, the one with kosher certification on the corner in the religious neighborhood, and waited in line to order my daughter a bagel breakfast sandwich. The refrigerator is nearly empty. All bread, bagels and other leavened foods are gone from our house, eaten up or thrown away. Tonight… Read more →
Robert de Niro woke every morning to a manually-set alarm clock, jumped out of bed, showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit and tie. He carried his leather briefcase to work, and set up his desk, awaiting the tasks of the day. And when his young boss thought he was of no use to her at the age of 70,… Read more →
The sky was more light than dark at 7:36 this morning, and a feeling of promise overcame me. Even when I walked outside to warm up the car in the cold and near-dark, I saw hues of purple and blue dawning to the east, and I knew we had turned a corner. It’s 40 degrees in Michigan, balmy for winter,… Read more →
Imagine the world in pre-human times, and ask yourself: was there a church? Did anyone speak of, or think about, God? Is the notion of religion, then, a creation of our advanced human minds when, faced with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that gave us too much time to ponder the questions of our origin and our eventual demise, we faced… Read more →
The scent of an early cold morning in stillness is something like a combination of wood chips and ice, peppermint-crisp and dirt, and that’s what I inhaled when I started to walk the trails of Heritage Park. The kids were at school, and my little one was home feeling under the weather – or at least, overtired from two weeks… Read more →
“You are religious,” she said, as she poured water into my cup. She was right. I’d been hedging my comments for so long, wedged into other people’s understanding of what it means to be religious. Not listening to my own inner voice, which has always told me that religious is a personal definition, a valuation of spirituality that no one else… Read more →