I was thinking tonight about Chaim Potok’s “The Chosen”, and “My Name is Asher Lev”, and about a few others of his books really. I was thinking about them because it is no secret that I’ve loved his books, and return to them every decade, it seems, in waves. They contain something deeply inward,...
Read more →I was sitting out at dinner tonight, alone, as is my usual deal, thinking about that circumstance, when the words went through my head. “It’s your own fault.” If you sit at dinner alone, it’s your own fault. If you live alone, it’s your own fault. If you spend too much time alone, it’s...
Read more →I live my life in a fairly large sphere of silence, and I guess I make it that way. It’s not that I am not without noise and distraction around me, because I am usually busy doing something with the TV or a radio on nearby, feeding me music and talk. I just don’t...
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Then, it was midday, and the sky was a light shade of blue. I sat on a metal bench in front of the long gray brick hall, the light hurting my eyes. People trickled in and out of the gray building. Behind me were rectangles of gardens where, again, a few people walked here...
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In some seasons of my life, it can feel like being is divided into three layers. On the surface is the layer of action, where the day to day bustle of life happens. In the innermost one, people meet and share their souls, and find camaraderie and sympathy and compassion, and it’s there they...
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It’s funny- we think because we are tied into social networks, we would feel ourselves more intimately connected with others in our life and in our world. Not the case, creator Shimi Cohen argues in this remarkable short video. Shimi makes some poignant observations about the human heart in modern times. Loneliness remains...
Read more →I think I’ve started six blog posts in the last month, and all of them with great seed ideas, but as I’ve tried to work through them, tapping ideas out onto the screen, the ideas have just wilted and died. I don’t know if this is writer’s block, or more broadly, just an alive-r’s...
Read more →About a half-a-year after my relationsihp with G. failed, I realized I wasn’t faring very well trying to get past her, and so at my sister’s suggestion, I decided to go see a counselor. In one of my sessions with this man, the topic came up that perhaps my issue was not merely all...
Read more →When I was in college, I read a handful of books that stuck with me as personally significant. One of them stuck with me simply because of its title. In a literature survey course one semester, we read the biography of Catholic social activist Dorothy Day, entitled “The Long Loneliness”. I don’t remember much...
Read more →I was digging around in a few boxes in the garage tonight when I came across a thin hard-covered little book I hadn’t seen in a while. The little book was a journal from the summer of 1994. A travel notebook. Decorating the front cover of the notebook is an old map with hand-drawn...
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