"That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something. - Meredith Monk First a Confession. I've lost my way with this thing. What started as an honest exploration into suffering and, ostensibly, an exit out, [...]

It's been roughly three years since the launch of this blog and if I had to sum up everything I've learned over that stretch of time it would boil down to something like this: 1. Let go Suffering cannot be healed so long as we work so hard to protect the source of that suffering. [...]

“The entire spiritual dilemma, you know, boils down to only one problem — denial. Denial that everything which is born will die. Denial that everything I want to keep — identity, possessions, friends, family, lovers, health, life — will be lost. That denial, that continual avoidance of this simple, basic, undeniable truth, obscures my true [...]

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.” – Marcel Proust One morning not [...]

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence." - Charles Bukowski Anyone with children knows they are famous for taking the words of their friends as gospel. "Susie says that the school janitor's body is still buried under the playground and [...]

“Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes.” – Karl Marx Karl Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses” is based on the idea that we humans, haunted by fears of our own mortality and apparent insignificance, need some kind of drug to get us through life and so we invented [...]

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Jesus At the age of 13 something unimaginably humiliating happened to me in front of my entire military school cadet class. Racing back that night to my empty barrack’s room, certain my life [...]

“There is no such thing as peace of mind.” – David Carse, ‘Perfect, Brilliant, Stillness’ The impetus behind this blog has always been to share, as honestly as possible, my search to understand and overcome this thing called suffering – a subject that can take on a particular poignancy at this time of year. I [...]

I spend a lot of time on this site talking about the meaning of life (or its non-meaning), why we're here, who am I, etc. Of late, however, there's been a shift to dive into life rather than reflect so much on it. Lots of new recipes being explored in the kitchen, showing my 10-year-old [...]

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" - Henry David Thoreau When I was 14 or so, my [...]