My students love learning and talking about colors. Recently, when trying to teach ordinal numbers, I handed out boxes of crayons and copies of a rainbow and instructed the students to color the FIRST line from the top red, the SECOND orange, and so on. But sometimes, what looked like a red crayon, was actually closer to a pink, or the blue turned out to be purplish. One of the most frustrating things I’ve found in teaching English to students from different countries is how black and white I must make the world, for simplicity’s sake.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only 
the colors of these nine crayons.

My students have been through unimaginable trials in their lives. Not just in their homelands but here in America as well. Two recent instances come to mind. The son-in-law of one of my students from Africa was shot and killed in Louisville. Her daughter had been sexually harassed by a man in their apartment complex, and the son-in-law was in the process of trying to move his family to a safer location when he was shot in the parking lot. Another student was recently accosted just outside his home and forced to hand over five hundred dollars he’d just taken out of the bank--probably everything he had to live on for the month, or longer.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Maybe I’ve come back to this poem again because I find myself, like my students, in a time of transition and discovery. The poem, on one level, is about finding yourself, trying to distinguish between what you have been taught, from a young age, to be right and true and what you discover on your own to be right and true, and then, ultimately, what you choose to believe is right and true. I think of Anne Frank, who in the midst of one of the greatest atrocities of humankind, could write these words: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

The poem’s ending reminds me that though we are given many people to help, guide, and nurture us in this life, we come into this world alone and we must leave this world alone. Every trial we encounter along the way, we must also confront and conquer ultimately alone. All we can truly know in this world, if we are brave and honest enough to rise to the task, is ourselves. And it is a relentless, harrowing, often heartbreaking task, taking that inner journey. But what I suspect and hope we’ll find at the end of that journey is a world much vaster, richer and more colorful than anything we’ve ever experienced in the world we think we know.

Listen to Margaret Atwood read 'You Begin,'

“When we began, we knew it could not be understood. As we went along we wanted it to be understandable, and it never was. There is nothing understandable in love: just joy and then sorrow and then if you are lucky, more joy.” 
Thomas Merton, From A Midsummer Diary For M.

In the spring of 1966 a young, pretty, dark-haired nurse-in-training was assigned to the care of the famous Catholic Trappist monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton, who had come to Louisville, Kentucky for back surgery. There was an immediate attraction between the two, and what followed was a whirlwind romance that ultimately transformed Merton and deepened his understanding of solitude and love.

As much as I’d read about Merton, I didn’t learn about the affair until a couple of years ago. I was surprised to discover this “secret” side of Merton’s life, and even more surprised to find out that Merton hadn’t actually kept the affair so secret. He wrote about it candidly in one of his journals, and before he died in 1968, he gave permission for his private journals to be released twenty-five years after his death. “I have always wanted to be completely open, both about my mistakes and about my effort to make sense out of my life. The affair with M. is an important part of it -- and shows my limitations as well as a side of me that is – well, it needs to be known, too, for it is part of me.”

I’m sure there are those who, after learning about the affair, might be appalled, that the man whom some consider one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the twentieth century, the poster boy for Catholic contemplative life, who had even earned the deep respect of the Dalai Lama, had “broken” his vows and explored this type of relationship with a woman—and alas, a woman more than twenty years his junior. But learning about the affair only made me like Merton more. It reminded me that even the most spiritually enlightened have the same fears and desires and internal struggles as the rest of us. They, too, go through periods of darkness and despair, temptation, and profound loneliness.

But what I found most intriguing about the affair was the woman with whom Merton fell in love. The journal in which Merton writes about the affair was published in its entirety in 1997 as Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom. Editor of Learning to Love, Christine Bochen, writes in her introduction, “It seems important to acknowledge that the account that we read here is Merton’s: it reflects his recollection and is shaped by the meaning he finds in and gives to this relationship. Merton shapes the narrative. M. has no voice of her own here. She remains an anonymous figure in this volume, deliberately identified by the editor as M. (though Merton used her name), not to diminish her but to acknowledge the privacy that is her due. “

I think it was those words “M. has no voice of her own here” that first made me think of writing about M.’s story. I wanted to hear her side, give her a voice. How did the affair change her? The trajectory of her life? And what kind of woman was she, to have won the heart of the Thomas Merton? What was it like to have loved and been loved by him? To have caused him to second guess his vocation and consider leaving the monastery altogether?

From what I can gather, M. is still living and would now be in her late sixties or early seventies. For a time, I considered writing a fictional version of the relationship, told from her perspective. However, after consulting lawyers and other sources, I discovered I could run into some legal problems. And I wasn’t compelled to change the characters, to write about any monk or any young woman. The story is special because it is Thomas Merton and it is the M I came to know and admire through his journal. And I wanted to respect not only M.’s privacy but also the mystery of the love she and Merton shared.

Though it isn’t disclosed in the published version of the journal whether the affair was consummated, Merton and M. had an undeniably strong emotional, spiritual, and physical connection. They communicated primarily through letters. Merton wrote love poems as well as an entire diary he gave to M. entitled A Midsummer Diary for M. He sneaked phone calls to her in the Cellarer’s office at the monastery when no one was around. They had dates at the Luau Room at the Louisville Airport and lunched downtown at the old Cunningham’s. M. even came to visit Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani where they shared a picnic lunch and hugged and kissed and kept repeating to each other, “Thank God this at least is real.”

Merton loved the simplicity, child-like innocence, and openness of M.’s love. He writes, “Her love and her heart are a revelation of a most perfectly tuned and fashioned personality, a lovely womanly nature, and an almost unbounded affection, all of which she has given to me. I can only regard this as a kind of miracle in my life.” Perhaps it was his attempt at rationalization, but Merton viewed his love for M. not as a contradiction of his solitude but a mysterious part of it.

Of course the affair brought plenty of angst, fear, and weariness on both sides. Merton and M. tried to resist the craving and passionate attachment in the relationship, to keep their love as pure and chaste as possible. They told themselves and each other that their love was something to appreciate and rejoice in, not to be regretted, even though they knew, realistically, that a long-term relationship was impossible.

And there were plenty of obstacles. The abbot at the monastery, for one, found out about the affair and refused to allow any more correspondence between the lovers, though they still managed to stay in contact, but less frequently as the months progressed. M. told Merton she loved him and would never stop loving him, no matter what happened. Their only solace was that they might be united again in heaven.

Shortly before the affair began, Merton had gotten permission from the abbot to live alone in a hermitage on the property. Once, M. was looking at the Jubilee magazine in which an article about Merton appeared. The hospital librarian looked over her shoulder and commented on what a miserable life Merton must be leading.

Could it have been the solitude and loneliness of the hermetic life that led to the affair? Or was the affair prophetic? M. felt herself providentially drawn to Merton in the hospital, and Merton had had several visions of an archetypal beloved who resembled M. Or maybe it had to do with Merton’s need for female companionship and love, which had been lacking in his life. His mother died when he was a boy and he’d never had a deeply fulfilling and loving relationship with a woman. After receiving the care and attention from the nursing staff after his surgery, Merton writes, “I do feel a deep emotional need for feminine companionship and love, and seeing that I must irrevocably live without it ended by tearing me up more than the operation itself.”

Whatever the reason for the affair, there is no doubt Merton was deeply changed by M. He writes during the beginning of their relationship, “I feel I must fully surrender to it because it will change and heal my life in a way that I fear, but I think it is necessary – in a way that will force me first of all to receive an enormous amount of love (which to tell the truth I have often feared.)” Later he realizes that “the deepest capacities for human love in me have never even been tapped, that I too can love with an awful completeness. Responding to her has opened up the depths of my life in ways I can’t begin to understand or analyze now.”

The sentimentalist in me likes to think that Merton and M. were brought together as part of a divine plan. Merton sometimes referred to M. and her love as a gift. Perhaps he had been given this gift so that his faith could be deepened. (In mystical Islamic Sufism, which Merton studied and appreciated, the experience of human love, with its inherent pains and trials, is critical for the heart to open up and receive Divine love.)

In the end, Merton recommitted his life to God and solitude, following the directive on the sign over an entrance gate at the Abbey of Gethsemani: God Alone. He knew that the monastic life wasn’t perfect, full of illusions and petty politics, just like in the outside world. “Maybe the hermit life is another kind of defeat – but I certainly feel that here I am relatively more honest and more true than anywhere else and that here I am not being ‘had’ – and though I may be in many ways wrong, I am at least able honestly to try and cope with my wrongness here.”

Sometimes I wonder when and how M. found out about Merton’s death, how it might have felt to lose him all over again. How private and profound her grief must have been, since probably few people knew about her relationship with Merton.

Writer Kenny Cook suggests that all good writing should be written as love letters and given as gifts. In an effort to honor M. and the gift she gave Merton in his final years, I composed a song for her. (Lyrics and a link to the song are included below.)
(Special thanks to Paula Matthews, playing viola, and Fred Bogert of Briarpatch Audio Productions for their help in bringing the song to fruition.)

If what they say is true, if a love letter always arrives at its destination, then I hope my song might one day reach M., wherever she may be.

Audio "For M"

Song lyrics, “For M”

She came to him
Like the girl in his dreams
Dark hair, gray eyes 
He knew that she held the key

No more sorrow
No more loneliness

At the airport in the rain 
Drinking brandy and soda
And watching the planes
Poems and letters
Secret phone calls at night
The world called wrong 
What they knew was right

What they knew was right

She saw into his soul
Gave him the love
He’d never known

But he, he was not hers, hers alone

Fighting the fear of it ending
Letting love do its mending
They knew from the start it could never last
Love burns pure
When the flames have passed

When the flames pass

Oh and she saw into his soul
Gave him the love 
He’d never known
But he, he was not hers, hers alone

Fighting the fear of it ending
Letting love do its mending

They took a chance, they risked it all
Just now, just here, no fear, a gift from above
Just now, just here, no fear
A gift from above

Sister Susan wrote to me that I’d be staying in the cabin “Namaste.”

Weeks before, I’d arranged to spend five days at one of the retreat cabins at Cedars of Peace on the Sisters of Loretto Motherhouse grounds in Nerinx, Kentucky. I replied to Sister Susan’s email stating how much meaning that word Namaste held for me. (I work with many Bhutanese, and we greet each other this way.) She remarked how interesting it was that the cabins’ themes always seemed a perfect fit for the retreatant.

But the day before my arrival, in what would be one of the hottest weeks of the summer, she wrote saying there had been a cancellation and that I’d be staying at “Grace”; I’d be more comfortable there because it had an air conditioning unit.

I arrived to another note from Sister Susan. She said she hoped I would find in the quiet solitude of “Grace” all that I was seeking. Funny, I thought. I hadn’t really come to the Cedars seeking anything. My main objective was to spend a few uninterrupted days writing.

After unpacking, I flipped through a binder of information about the retreat center. It mentioned that in every cabin there was a journal in which retreatants were invited to share reflections about their stay. I started to read through the journal entries, and let me tell you, a dam broke inside me. I could feel the pain and love of all the people who had come before me and who were good enough to share their inner journeys and to extend blessings to all those who would walk through the door of “Grace” in the future.

Well, it wasn’t how I’d expected the first few hours of my stay to unfold, but I figured a good emotional purge was probably an excellent way to begin my writing spree. And then I saw it. An almond-shaped head, peeking out from under the bookshelf. When the lizard finally braved the big world, I saw that its tail alone was almost the size of my head! For a while, I chased after it with a garbage can, but of course it was too fast.

I decided to go for a walk. And doggone if that lizard didn’t haunt my thoughts. I imagined it crawling across my body, over my stomach and into my mouth, as I slept at night. (I wasn’t naïve enough to think this lizard was the only creature lurking in the dark corners of my cabin, but at least the others had the decency not to show their faces.) I felt so silly, like such a girl, to let a little ol’ reptile get the better of me.

I finally told myself that the lizard didn’t want me in the cabin anymore than I wanted it there. I pictured how cute it was, really, when I’d stopped chasing it and took the time to observe its amazing body, how it had placed both front legs behind its back and just rested in the sun, like it was pondering some great mystery in life. I told myself I was just going to have to learn to cohabitate with it. And wouldn’t you know, as soon as I made peace with it, I never saw that lizard again.

I mention this little story because it seemed to set the theme for my stay at “Grace”--less resistance and more acceptance.

Shortly after my run-in with the lizard, I said a little prayer before sitting down to write. I prayed that I’d write something selfless, something of beauty that would transcend where I was at.

Almost immediately I heard a little voice in my head (why does my little voice sound like John Wayne’s?) say, “How about you start where you’re at and let me worry about the transcending?” (Pilgrim.)

The next day, on an impulse, I went to the common area to peruse the small library for retreatants. My eye locked on a title: Start Where You Are by Pema Chödrön. Coincidence? I started to head for the door—I had brought plenty of books with me—but the book called to me again. I went back and picked it up with an Alright Already sigh.

I think there are books (like people) that come into our lives at just the right time and for a special purpose. This was one of those books for me. Much of it is eastern religious thought, and I had read similar things in the past, but nothing had spoken to me quite like this before or had given such concrete, innovative ways to meditate. (Chödrön is a practitioner of the tonglen method.) There is a sentence in the book that reminds me of my experience with the lizard. “When the resistance is gone, so are the demons.”

I come from a family of overachievers and perfectionists, and what I find most attractive about Chödrön, a Buddhist nun, is her gentle approach. She writes that when we start from a place of honoring where we are and not where we hope to be someday, when we start facing our demons and stop rejecting and repressing our darker sides (i.e. embracing our full selves), then we can begin to see everything that happens to us—even the suffering and sorrows--as opportunities to wake up, to figure out where we’re stuck, and to grow 
in compassion.

Like the peacock that gets its vivid and beautiful tail by eating poison, Chödrön explains that our “poisons,” too, can be a source of great beauty. By accepting the parts of ourselves we find most disagreeable, or even heinous, we grow in self-understanding and compassion. “If you can know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone.” Chödrön’s book reminded me that in order to be kind and gentle toward others, in order to have true compassion for them, we must first be kind and gentle and compassionate 
toward ourselves.

The theologian Paul Tillich, in his wonderful essay on sin and grace, “You Are Accepted,” explains that the experience of grace is like hearing a voice saying, You are accepted. You are accepted. “We cannot force ourselves to accept ourselves. We cannot compel anyone to accept himself. But sometimes it happens that we receive the power to say “yes” to ourselves, that peace enters into us and makes us whole, that self-hate and self-contempt disappear, and that our self is reunited with itself. Then we can say that grace has come upon us.”

On the day of my departure, after contributing my own entry in the cabin journal, I wrote Sister Susan a note explaining that I had come to “Grace” not seeking anything but a place to write. I relayed some of the insights I’d gained during my stay. Later in an email, she wrote this: “It's always gratifying to glimpse the variety of ways the Spirit works here. How often we think we are the ones looking for something only to discover that it's the Spirit seeking us.

Photo by Julie Bohnenkamp. “Padlock Lovers.” Taken on the Milvian Bridge in Rome, Italy. (Urban legend claims that if lovers write their names on a padlock placed on a specific lamppost on the bridge and throw the key into the Tiber, they will spend the rest of their lives together.)

What do we humans and porcupines have in common?
Apparently we both have intimacy issues.

According to the pre-Freudian philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, the behavior of porcupines on a cold winter night represents the ultimate dilemma of modern human intimacy. To keep from freezing, porcupines huddle together, but as soon as they get close enough to receive and provide crucial warmth, they get poked by each other’s quills, so they withdraw, to avoid the pain and annoyance of that excessive closeness, until they’re cold again, and then they huddle together again, and withdraw once more, and on and on it goes.

Elizabeth Gilbert presents this story in her newest book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, to illustrate that much of marriage—or any love relationship—boils down to striking a balance between interdependence and autonomy.

The follow-up book to Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Committed should be required reading if you are contemplating marriage, or if you are already married, or divorced--or heck, if you’ve ever been brave enough to love. You might not agree with everything Gilbert has to say, but I predict you’ll learn something vital you can apply to your own life, or a new way of thinking about love and marriage in general. Not to mention, Gilbert is one of the few writers (David Sedaris being another) who can make me laugh out loud. And few writers today are more original with their metaphors: (Infatuation, for example, is “love’s shady second cousin who’s always borrowing money and can’t hold down a job.”)

Committed begins with Gilbert and her now-husband (who goes under the pseudonym Felipe in the book) being detained by the Department of Homeland Security upon their return from an overseas trip. Felipe (born in Brazil and a citizen of Australia) was informed he would not be allowed back into the country. (He had been using three-month visas for consecutive visits to America, something for which the visas were not intended, unbeknownst to him). Their only option, then, since America was Gilbert’s home and Felipe’s base of business as a gem and jewelry importer, was to get married. This wouldn’t have been so bad for the lovebirds if they hadn’t sworn off marriage, both having gone through painful divorces and having no desire to make their commitment to each other a legally binding one.

Essentially “sentenced to marry,” Gilbert and her beloved, mired in immigration red tape, spend the next frustrating months traveling across Southeast Asia, Gilbert seeking to unravel “the mystery of what in the name of God and human history this befuddling, vexing, contradictory, and yet stubbornly enduring institution of marriage actually is.” She limits her investigation to monogamous marriage in Western history and sets out to discover something about marriage that might comfort her skeptical heart while also trying to discern why people continue to marry despite the fact that half the cards in the deck are stacked against them.

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote of his utter astonishment that marriage is still legally permitted. “If nearly half of anything else ended so disastrously, the government would surely ban it immediately. If half the tacos served in restaurants caused dysentery, if half the people learning karate broke their palms, if only 6 percent of people who went on roller coaster rides damaged their middle ears, the public would be clamoring for action.” Not so with marriage.

But maybe that dispiriting statistic we’ve all heard—that one-out-of-two marriages end in divorce--is a bit misleading. After poring over a twenty-year-study of American marriages by Rutgers University, Gilbert found that eighteen year olds who marry, for example, have a divorce rate closer to seventy-five percent, throwing off the curve for everyone else. And for couples who wait until they are in their fifties to marry, their statistical odds of divorcing are almost nonexistent.

Still, there is no question that divorce is rampant in our society and marriage is on the decline. Perhaps one of the greatest contributing causes of this is what Gilbert calls the “marital freedom movement,” which began around the mideighteenth century and involved a social push for more personal freedom, privacy, and pursuit of happiness. This movement really picked up steam in 1849 when a Connecticut court ruled that people could leave their marriages because of unhappiness, implying for the first time that at least one of the purposes of marriage is to create a state of happiness for the partners involved. Marriage, then, gradually shifted from what had previously been a business deal (a clan- or asset- or convenience-based marriage) to, truly, an affair of the heart—or, as the Victorian scientist Sir Henry Finck called that fickle organ, “such a tissue of paradox.”

One of the most interesting things Gilbert found during her research is that everywhere, throughout history and across cultures, whenever a conservative culture of arranged marriage is replaced by a culture where individual choice reigns supreme and love-based marriages are the norm, divorce rates increase dramatically.

This point really hit home when Gilbert interviewed a group of women in a Hmong village in Vietnam about marriage. When she began firing away questions to one of the elders--How did you and your husband meet? How did you know he was the one? What is the secret to a happy marriage?--the woman looked at Gilbert as if she were crazy. Gilbert soon realized that Hmong women are more interested in the role they play within their family and community than their individual happiness. What’s more, they receive a lot of their emotional support from other women, taking the brunt of that delicate business off the males. They aren’t raised with the expectation that the man or marriage or their children should, or will, make them happy, or that they should even be happy in the first place. But in America, as Gilbert points out, happiness is not only considered a natural birthright, but also a national one.

Besides marrying for love and happiness, we Americans seem to have added another expectation to marriage. A recent survey of young American women found that what women want more than anything in a husband is for him to inspire them. In the 1920s, women of the same age, responding to that same question, wanted their husbands to be decent, honest, and good providers. Today, we tend to want our spouses to be our everything, to support us on every conceivable level. In essence, we are looking for our missing piece, someone who will miraculously make us whole. Gilbert writes, “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one.” Looking to another to make us happy, to fulfill us, to complete us, nay, to inspire us, will always spell trouble. As the old adage goes, Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.

(Speaking of wanting it all, the other day I was listening to the radio, and the question posed to female listeners was, “Do you want something flashy for Valentine’s Day or something meaningful?” Almost every listener who called in replied, “Both!” And those who didn’t said they wanted the bling. I have to say, it made me a bit embarrassed for my gender.)

So do we Americans ask too much of marriage, of love? Gilbert wonders. The poet Jack Gilbert wrote that marriage is what happens “between the memorable.” Looking back on our marriages, we tend to remember the high and low points but not what often comes between: the mundane, day-to-day sameness.

Just to make sure her sweetheart knew what he was getting himself into, Gilbert composed a list of her worst character flaws and shared it with him. I love Felipe’s response to this. After telling her that he loved her regardless (and that she wasn’t giving him information he didn’t already know), he tells her a story about when he used to buy gemstones in Brazil. Stones are sold in parcels, a random collection of gems, which are supposed to be cheaper for the buyer. But buyer beware. The gemstone seller is trying to pass off his bad gemstones with a few beautiful ones. Felipe learned quickly that he had to completely ignore the near-perfect stones, because those are easy to fall in love with, and instead carefully examine the bad ones, asking himself honestly, “Can I work with these? Can I make something out of this?” Same with relationships. The true trick is being able to ascertain if you can accept the whole package.

Real love is based on deep and genuine affection and respect. It is about really seeing the other person and not just an illusion or fantasy of that person (as in the case of infatuation). The word respect, Gilbert notes, comes from the Latinrespicere (to gaze at). “To be fully seen by somebody, then, and to be loved anyhow—this is a human offering that can border on the miraculous,” writes Gilbert. The movie Avatar conveys a similar message, the Na’Vi greeting each other with, “I see you.” I teach English to elderly refugees. My Bhutanese students always greet me at my classroom door with their palms pressed together in prayer fashion, bowing, and saying, “Namaste,” which is derived from the Sanskritnamas, to bow, and te, to you, as in, “I bow to you,” a form of reverence. It can also be interpreted as the light (the spirit, the divine) in me honors (sees, bows to) the light (spirit, divine) in you.

The Buddhists and mystics teach that the path to enlightenment comes through nonattachment and self-denial. Even the early Christians, like John of Damascus, preached that people should “Renounce marriage and imitate the angels.” But Gilbert sees some limitations in the teachings of nonattachment and monastic solitude: “Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness.” This reminds me of Barbara Wood’s gracious take on forgiveness: “Forgiveness is not simply the absolving of an enemy, or one who has done us wrong. Forgiveness must encompass all those things which disturb the tranquility of our soul: the barking dog that robs you of sleep, the heat of summer, the cold of winter. Forgive the ingrown toenail, the flea that bites; forgive the cranky child, wrinkles, a forgotten birthday.” Gilbert believes that when all is said and done, forgiveness might be the only practical antidote we are given in love, “to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.”

So why does the institution of marriage persist? Gilbert believes marriage endures chiefly because it evolves. (Think interracial marriages and the present debate over same-sex marriages). Marriage has changed with every century in the Western world, adjusting to new standards and ideas of fairness. Gilbert began to see marriage not as an arcane institution thrust upon the masses by those in power, but rather a malleable institution that we, the people, can and do mold and define (for better or for worse, some might say).

Gilbert was also surprised to find that marriage, in some respects, is a revolutionary act--and maybe this is part of its ultimate appeal. The one thing that has threatened the powers-that-be across the course of human history is the human bond. Early Christianity wanted its followers to lead celibate lives. The communists and fascists tried to undercut the family unit. American slaves weren’t allowed to legally wed. “What passes between a couple alone in the dark is the very definition of the word ‘privacy,’” Gilbert explains, “And I’m talking not just about sex here but about its far more subversive aspect: intimacy. Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two—creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which nobody else can be privy.” Yet despite the many efforts throughout the centuries to thwart two people in love from getting married, people still keep finding ways to do it, keep wanting to do it.

Gilbert insists that the human heart, for whatever its mysterious reasons, craves private intimacy, intimacy with one special someone. And, if we are honest, doesn’t part of us relish the idea of being chosen by that one special someone out of all the other someones in the world? Or perhaps it’s as simple as one of Gilbert’s friend’s grandfather suggested: “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”

Most people will say yes, but advocates of biocentrism, like world-renowned astronomer Bob Berman, a presenter at the 2009 Idea Festival in Louisville, say no. When a tree falls, Berman explained, it creates rapid air pressure variations. No sound is attached to it. It takes a specific range of pulses—and an observer with an ear and a brain—for the experience of sound to occur.

Or take a rainbow. Does a rainbow still exist if no one is around to observe it? No, if we consider that a rainbow requires three components: sun, raindrops, and a conscious eye at the correct geometric location. If two people are observing a rainbow, each person’s position will complete a different geometry. They might see a different set of rain droplets (larger droplets make the colors in a rainbow more vivid and rob it of the color blue). Put another way, whenever we see a rainbow, it is truly ours and ours alone.

Even if we accept that it takes an observer for a rainbow to exist or a falling tree to make a sound in the forest, things get trickier when we are asked to consider that the moon and the stars, the plate on the table, or anything seemingly outside ourselves exist only in our brains—the only location in which visual images are perceived and processed. What about someone born blind? What about touch? If something isn’t out there, how can we feel it? Touch, Berman argues, also occurs within consciousness. For thinkers like Berman, notions of space and time are not absolute realities but rather ordering processes of the mind, tools of human and animal perception.

As I was leaving Berman’s seminar, one woman next to me said, “I don’t know. I’m skeptical about all this stuff.” But if some of these concepts seem too bizarre to believe, it’s partly because biocentrism contradicts a worldview that has been around basically since Biblical times: that is, that there is an objective, independent reality separate from ourselves. Biocentrism proponents aren’t saying, however, that there is no external world. In the book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, Dr. Robert Lanza and Berman maintain that “nature or the so-called external world must be correlative with consciousness. One doesn’t exist without the other.”

The greatest unsolved mystery in science is the conscious experience, specifically the first-person or subjective experience. Nothing in science has explained how consciousness arose from matter, or, as Berman put it, how random bits of matter develop a taste for hot dogs. The issue of consciousness poses problems for the field of physics. In Biocentrism, Lanza and Berman assert that attempts to explain the nature of the universe, including string theory, are lacking. Not even the Big Bang theory can explain why the universe is so perfectly fine-tuned to support life. Lanza and Berman also point out, “It is well known that quantum theory, while working incredibly well mathematically, makes no logical sense . . . particles seem to behave as if they respond to a conscious observer.”

Biocentrism is a worldview suggesting that life and consciousness are central to understanding the universe and that life creates the universe rather than the other way around. Though some of its concepts contain shades of Eastern religious thought, biocentrism, according to Lanza and Berman, is based on established science and is not just a matter for biologists. In fact, they insist, until the different sciences begin to collaborate and factor in consciousness, there can be no grand unified theory about the universe.

My intent here isn’t to outline all the principles of biocentrism or to attempt to explain the quantum mechanics that seem to support it (the double-slit experiment being one of the most compelling) or to even defend it, but to simply say that in a universe comprised of ninety-six percent dark energy and dark matter (stuff we virtually have no clue about), I feel I have no choice but to keep an open mind.

In Biocentrism, Lanza and Berman write that the deep, unanswerable questions about the universe have typically fallen under the domain of religion. However, “[e]very thinking person always [knows] that an insuperable mystery lay at the final square of the game board, and that there [is] no possible way of avoiding it.” This is precisely why my faith has evolved over the years, and why I hope it continues to evolve. I never want to be so settled on a fixed doctrine or philosophy or creed or belief system that I stop asking those deep, unanswerable questions. The one thing I’ve always appreciated about the Catholic faith in which I was raised is its reverence for that insuperable mystery about which Lanza and Berman write. No words ring truer to me in the Mass than these: “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”

I once listened to an interview on NPR’s “Speaking of Faith” featuring Mary Doria Russell, a paleoanthropologist turned novelist. She converted to Judaism as an adult, yet still considers herself an agnostic. She was drawn to Judaism because of its emphasis on reasoning and its rejection that there is only one way to interpret things. (In fact, the Torah is supposed to be studied with a partner, so an alternative perspective may be considered.) For Russell, “God is the largest, most complex, most inclusive, most explanatory idea that human beings are capable of imagining” for how the universe really is. But she also concedes, “. . . that’s the best we can do and it’s kind of good. It has a lot of truly satisfying elements to it. But whether it bears any resemblance to what’s really out there, I don’t know.”

The following passage from Russell’s science-fiction novel, The Sparrow, seems to encapsulate much of what I’ve tried to articulate above:

It is the human condition to ask questions . . . and to receive no plain answers. Perhaps this is because we can't understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God's ways and God's thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable. . . . The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when his children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions . . . are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of animal behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps someday we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

I just watched the best movie I’ve seen in a mighty long time. I’m trying to figure out how this little gem, a Walt Disney film released in 1999, slipped under my radar, and just about everyone else’s I know. Maybe it wasn’t a big hit at the box office because it lacks all those things commercially successful movies seem to require these days: graphic violence, nudity, and profanity.

But I’m willing to guarantee that this movie will renew your faith in the kindness of strangers and the general goodness of people. It will remind you what a breathtakingly gorgeous country we live in, especially our heartland at harvest time. But don’t be misled. This movie is not Pollyannaish, nor is it as straightforward as its title, The Straight Story, suggests. Like most David Lynch productions (that’s right—David Lynch and Walt Disney!), underneath the placid surface waters a tidal wave brews.

The movie is based on the true story of a seventy-three-year-old Iowa man who traveled two-hundred-and-forty miles on an old John Deere lawn mower to see his ill eighty-year-old estranged brother in Wisconsin. Richard Farnsworth (The Grey Fox, Misery) plays the lead character, Alvin Straight. Farnsworth, who got his start in the movie industry as a stuntman and extra, came out of semi-retirement to play this role, and thank God he did. I can’t imagine anyone else playing the character of Straight, which earned Farnsworth an Oscar nomination.

Perfectly complemented by fiddle and guitar solos composed by Angelo Badalamenti (who also scored for Lynch on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks), the story begins with Straight falling and needing help back up. It’s a symbolic opening, because we slowly learn that this old man, despite his seeming innocence and vulnerability (he has bad hips, bad vision, and is in overall poor health), is a fallen man who wants to set things right. The long, arduous trip to Mount Zion, WI becomes not only a trip to receive his brother’s forgiveness but also a means of atonement.


Farnsworth seems to capture every emotion ever experienced by humankind on his weather-worn face. His watery blue eyes, which are often gazing at the stars or into the flames of a campfire, seem to search for answers he knows will never come. We learn through Straight’s conversations with people he meets on his six-week odyssey that he’s been harboring a painful secret from WWII, that he has a problem with liquor, and that he might even be the “somebody else” who was watching his daughter’s four children one day when a fire erupted, severely burning one of the children. The state took away the children from their mother, Rose, played by Sissy Spacek (another great performance), because of her slight mental disability.

We never learn exactly what happened between the two brothers. “It is a story as old as the Bible; Cain and Abel,” Straight tells a priest he meets, referring to how he and his brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), became estranged. Speaking of Harry Dean Stanton (The Green Mile, Big Love),he’s on screen less than five minutes, but what he does in those five minutes, and with only a few lines of dialogue, could have stolen the show if Farnsworth hadn’t been so darn exceptional.

Straight almost always uses a story to reveal things about his past, or to help a stranger work through an apparent source of pain. This reminds me of an interesting bit of advice I read in John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara. He writes that when there has been a deep hurt in one person it is best not to directly address the hurt and make an issue of it. “A strange dynamic comes alive in the soul if you make something into an issue. It becomes a habit and keeps recurring in a pattern. Frequently, it is better simply to acknowledge that there is a wound there, but then stay away from it.” Alvin did this when talking to a pregnant teenage runaway he met on the road. Instead of asking the girl a million questions or preaching to her to go on back home, he used a simple story that he told his children when they were growing up. He would give them a single stick and ask them to break it. And of course they could. Then he would tie a bundle of sticks together and ask them to break that. And of course they couldn’t. “That,” he told them, “is family.”

Stories and myth help us cope with, and make sense of, the inexplicable and inexpressible. John Gardner said of all art: it “begins in a wound and is an attempt to live with the wound or heal it.” Emily Dickinson refers to this indirect revelation of truth as telling it “slant”:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---


Despite the wrongs Straight committed in his past, it seemed to me he came out of it not less of a man but more. A better man. Humbler. One of the curious and surprising things I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that a “moral” person isn’t necessarily one who follows a rigid orthodoxy or who obeys all the rules. The times in my life when I’ve deviated from the straight and narrow, I’ve gained a fuller humanity and more compassion and gentleness of spirit—toward myself, toward others. I love this definition of morality posed by American philosopher Richard Rorty, quoted in Erik Reece’s American Gospel: “Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy.”

Rick Pitino, the men’s head basketball coach for the University of Louisville, has been in the local and national news of late for an “indiscretion.” It has me thinking a lot about this idea of moral progress, because so many people, when someone else’s dirty laundry is aired, like to sit back and cluck tongues and throw around the word hypocrite. I reread Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Taken” the other day. I used to interpret the road “less traveled by” as the “good” and proper path, the one less traveled because few can follow its strict moral code. But the speaker of the poem tells us that the path he thought was less traveled by turns out to be just about as worn as the other. When Frost writes at the end, “I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference,” we are still left to ponder the outcome of that chosen path. Maybe the road less traveled by is not necessarily the morally superior path but the path we must take alone and make our own, traveling at our own pace, just as Straight uses an unconventional mode of transport (at a top speed of five miles per hour) to lead him toward his own spiritual healing.

After watching the film, I learned that Farnsworth, at the time of shooting, was suffering from bone cancer. A year later the excruciating pain was too much, and he took his life. But who among us could pass judgment? Who, really, under the circumstances, could blame him? As one good friend reminded me, each of us must work out our own salvation.


The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally la
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

                                  --Robert Frost

Sometimes people, after finding out I’m a writer, will say, “I wish I could do something like that. I don’t have a creative bone in my body.” But everyone is creative, in my opinion, because we are made in the likeness of our Creator. Sure, none of us probably taps into our creative potential enough, but I also think many of us have a limited idea of creativity.

A few weeks ago I went to see my buddy Silas House’s new play, A Long Time Traveling. One of my favorite lines from the play is “There’s plenty of ways to make a poem.” This is after one of the characters has just recited Edna Vincent Millay’s “God’s World”* and maintains that for her, the poem is a prayer. She goes on to tell her daughter that she might not be able to write a poem but she can make a melt-in-your-mouth pie. Her son-in-law, Adam, is a mechanic but has the heart of a dreamer and aspires to be a writer. Adam tells his wife of the time he was driving down the road one day and saw laundry hanging out to dry in someone’s yard, one white towel after another, and how it looked like a work of art to him. Everywhere, he says, are these little acts of beauty, but we fail to see them.

I had a similar experience one day in my car, waiting for the traffic light to turn green. I happened to turn my head and saw a gas station attendant sweeping up cigarette butts in the parking lot, and the way he performed this act--with complete concentration and immersion--struck me as a thing of beauty. Maybe his mind was someplace else, but nevertheless, he seemed at peace with where he was and what he was doing.

Another small incident: one morning I’d gotten up early and happened to see the recycling truck at the curb. The garbage truck had come just prior, and our garbage bin had been tossed aside and turned over. The worker for the recycling company, after performing his own job, was about to jump back on his truck, but suddenly turned back and took the extra time to set my garbage bin upright. It was the smallest of acts, but it was spontaneous and all the more special because it was done without the knowledge that anyone was watching, without any expectation of reward. Someone who took care and pride in his work, and who, at least in that moment, didn’t divide the world into mine and yours, but ours.

No doubt everyone reading this has had such experiences. My happiest moments are when I’m open and receptive and attentive and curious, experiencing life through the eyes of a poet. Thomas Merton wrote, “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time.” Or as Erik Reece argues in his new book, An American Gospel, the kingdom of God is not something we have to wait for, but is right in our midst, here and now.

Madeleine L’Engle writes in Walking on Water that all children are artists. They have unfettered imaginations and lack self-consciousness. All of their senses are awake and alive to the world around them. But then, slowly over time, they are corrupted by this world and its “dirty devices.” Part of being creative, as we grow older, is unlearning those “dirty devices” and becoming like children again.

The janitor sweeping up the cigarette butts, the worker for the recycling company, the person who strung the white towels lovingly on the line—they all performed their work with reverence, intention, and a type of devotion, but also, and perhaps more importantly, with no thought to who was watching, what people would think, or where the work was going. The work itself was its own reward and was therefore transformed into a thing of beauty, a work of art.


*God's World

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
    Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
    Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
    But never knew I this;
    Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,--Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,--let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

I’ve been passing along a Tobias Wolfe essay to some of my friends, those with whom I like to discuss faith and doubt issues. In the essay “Winter Light” (New Yorker, June 9 & 16, 2008), Wolfe puts into words an idea my brain had long been struggling to identify and express.

Wolfe writes of a night in his young adulthood when he and a friend, having nothing better to do, went to a local church to see a free screening of an Ingmar Bergman film, Winter Light (1963).* Neither of the intellectuals was religious at the time and when the minister of the church opened the movie with prayer the two friends exchanged glances, as if to say, so this movie isn’t entirely free.

The film, which I’ve viewed since reading Wolfe’s essay, is about a minister, Tomas, who is having a crisis of faith and is unable to give solace to one of his parishioners, who is in a state of spiritual despair, afraid of nuclear annihilation. But it is the steadfast love of the minister’s girlfriend, a nonbeliever, and the gentle prompting of a hunchbacked, faithful church servant that truly reflect the light of Christ in this film.

After Wolfe viewed the movie that night, an image of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World appeared on the screen. Up until this point, Wolfe, who’d been moved by the film, had felt the first stirrings of “grudging assent” toward belief, but when that image popped up on the screen, it was gone. His friend, on the other hand, couldn’t move from his seat, mesmerized by the same image that Wolfe had found “garish, melodramatic, cloying in its technique and sentimentality.” And here are the words that have stuck with me since reading Wolfe’s essay: “We like to think of our beliefs, and disbeliefs, as founded on reason and close, thoughtful observation. Only in theory do we begin to suspect the power of aesthetics to shape our lives.”

Prior to reading Wolfe’s essay, I had of course considered how our personal tastes (what Hume described as a peculiar kind of “emotionally inspired discrimination”) can greatly affect our lives--from the home in which we live to the spouse we choose—but I had never really thought about the role aesthetics can play in our religious convictions. But it makes sense. Art is one of the primary vehicles through which religious and theistic ideas are communicated. When I look back on my faith journey so far, it has been art (books, movies, plays, paintings, etc.) that has either helped establish, confirm, challenge, or change my spiritual beliefs.

Wolfe’s words helped me understand how, as my faith has evolved over the years, 
certain things I once found emotionally and spiritually evocative, for example a religious image or ritual or worship style, could lose its potency and appeal. Or why I’ve never had a particular affinity for Christian genre music, fiction, or films. (On the recommendation of 
several friends, I watched the blockbuster movieFireproof, but I found its message too 
heavy-handed.)

Wolfe states in his essay that it was poetry--the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and George Herbert--that moved him back toward the possibility of faith. C. S. Lewis, once an atheist, was partly led to faith through pagan mythological literature. Anne Lamott experienced a “lurch of faith” after reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.

I’ve read that our aesthetic tastes are believed to be driven by reward centers in the brain, that sensory stimuli we find particularly pleasant activate our “feel good” hormones. Neuroscientists have also learned that emotionally charged experiences translate into stronger, more vivid memories than do mundane and routine events. The amygdala (a limbic system structure) embeds this emotional event firmly into memory, so that whenever we re-encounter that stimulus (say a religious icon or an object associated with a spiritual epiphany), we associate it with the pleasure (or distaste) we first experienced.

Could our taste preferences, and ultimately our spiritual beliefs, boil down to brain chemistry and hormones? To think, all of our fights and wars in the name of our gods, everyone convinced that their Truth is THE Truth, and maybe, in the end, it might just come down to You say tomato, I say tomahto.

*Winter Light is part of Bergman’s trilogy of faith movies. The others include
Through a Glass Darkly and The Silence.

I started taking piano lessons in 2008. When I first met with my instructor, Paula Matthews, with whom I’d taken a drawing class, I gave her only one directive: You are not allowed to let me take this too seriously. After a rough year working on my writing, I had decided to take a much-needed respite and find different ways of feeding my creative spirit. I wanted to break myself of my perfectionist tendencies and just let loose and have some fun. I didn’t want to learn how to read music either (at least not right away) or learn the same ol’ songs found in every beginning player’s repertoire. (To this day, I still cringe when I hear “Music Box Dancer,” which one of my sisters played over and over when she took piano lessons as a child.)

Fortunately, I had come to the right person. Paula is as unique as they come and knows how to have fun. She is one of the most joy-filled people I know. She exudes soul and grace. She’s also a hoot. We probably spend at least fifteen minutes of my weekly lesson just making each other laugh. She also inspires me to try different things and to stay attentive, to keep my eyes open to the beauty all around me. Her own creativity is boundless.

As my piano lessons progressed, I told Paula that I liked to sing. Not that I thought I could sing well, but that I simply liked to, and so we worked on songs that I could sing along with. After Thanksgiving, we decided it was time to learn a few Christmas carols. (I had visions of throwing holiday parties, my good-natured guests gathered around the piano with mugs of spiked egg nog, eyes misting, as I treated them to a soul-wrenching version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Nevermind that mere months ago, I couldn’t even find middle C.)

As I was practicing at home on “Silent Night” one day, I landed on two wrong notes. But I liked the way they sounded together. Then I added some more notes and I liked how they sounded. I wondered if I could put the words to “Silent Night” to the new melody. Turns out I could. I shared what I had come up with the next week with Paula, and she was delighted. (She also teased me a little because of all the black notes I was using. Seems my piano composing is like my writing—a little on the darker, brooding side.) We worked on it some more, she recommending an occasional different key or two and providing back-up harmony, and in just a few lessons, we had it. Paula liked it so well, in fact, she thought I should record it.

Long story short, we did. And what fun that was! The studio we went to was Briarpatch in Louisville, KY, run by Fred Bogert, musician and producer extraordinaire. I’m so glad I got on his website after our little recording session. If I’d known Fred had run the famous Studio B and C in Nashville on Music Row, and had worked with the likes of LeeAnn Rhimes, Dolly Parton, and Conway Twitty, my knees would’ve been knocking in that sound booth more than they already were.

I’m including my rendition of “Silent Night” below. I hope you’ll take a listen, and I hope it’ll inspire you to do something daring, and I hope you’ll do it with your heart wide open and your eyes closed. And may your daring inspire someone else.

Listen to “Silent Night” (dedicated to Paula, with special thanks to Fred Bogert/Briarpatch Studio and all my friends who’ve inspired me with their creativity):

Paula Matthew’s website: http://paulacoopermatthews.com

Fred Bogert’s website (Briarpatch Studio): www.fredbogert.com

I visited my oldest sister in Maine a few weeks ago. You know those calendars featuring scenes of New England, the little white chapel with its bell tower set against a hillside of bedazzling fall foliage? The pictures lie; the reality was evenmore drop-dead gorgeous.

Maine. With ninety percent of its land covered in forest, the state strikes me as dark and deeply mysterious, like the ocean which surrounds it to the south and east. And what an intrepid, enduring people, those Mainers. They remind me of how much we are shaped by the climate in which we live.

My sister and I were eating lunch inside a restaurant overlooking Penobscot Bay one afternoon. It was the only overcast day during my visit, winds gusting up to thirty miles per hour. We watched a woman in the distance walking briskly along the boardwalk, her hood cinched tight around her head. Her arms were folded across her chest, fists tucked under her armpits, and she had this fierce, defiant look on her face. I imagined her having rough, dry skin, bright blue eyes, wrinkles fanning out from the corners of her eyes, and not a speck of make-up on. A no-nonsense woman who had weathered, and been weathered by, the elements. Yet beautiful--intimidatingly so. She seemed to me Maine personified.


One of the things I found most refreshing during my two-hour drive from the airport along Route 1 was this: I didn’t see a single chain restaurant or strip mall. Instead, I passed quaint gift shops, fresh produce stands, and down-home diners. I sensed an originality and playfulness lacking in most suburban areas. It was only a hint of what was to come.

About a year ago, my sister and three dear friends moved into a three-story Victorian in Rockland. When they first moved, the house was in terrible condition, long neglected and unloved. Lifeless. My sister and her extended family worked for months making repairs, painting the home’s exterior and interior in bold, primary colors, and planting an extensive garden. When they were done, my sister said someone stopped in front of their house on their busy street, rolled down her window, and thanked them for fixing up the place. Other locals, upon seeing their inviting garden--complete with tables for al fresco dining, fountains, and trellises strung with lights--asked if they were a restaurant.

Inside the house, the rooms are filled with artwork, books, games, toys, crafts, stuffed animals—you name it. Many of these things have come from thrift stores and yard sales or from people who know that my sister and her friends will take in just about anything broken, discarded, or forsaken. Surprisingly, the house doesn’t feel cluttered. In fact, the total effect is nothing short of magical. When people enter the home, the hope is that they might see an item or a piece of art that will transport them to an earlier time, when they viewed the world through the open, imaginative eyes of a child.

Being there, in that house, hearing stories of the townspeople’s reactions to it, and the creativity it inspired in me, reminded me of Joanne Harris’ Chocolat, how one woman, using her unique gifts, transformed her sleepy small town into a place filled with wonder and magic.

Two of my sister’s friends, a husband and wife, are full-time artists. One of the things I find most extraordinary about Robert and Su.Sane’s work is their approach to painting. They paint simultaneously on the same canvas, their work entirely driven by intuition. One makes a mark here, the other a mark there, and back and forth they go. In this way, or so it seems to me, the ego and the notion of “masculine” and “feminine” are transfigured in and through their art. They were a great source of inspiration for me. Due in part to the heartfelt conversations we had about the artist’s life and the importance of persevering regardless of commercial success, I resolved to write more and care less where it goes. I have to trust the voices that come to me and believe that what I am writing is serving a purpose, even if it is only to feed and enlighten and transform my own soul.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and my Maine trip reminded me of what a gift it is to be fed, to feed others. I stayed in a B & B a couple of blocks from my sister’s house. Each morning, I’d wake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee, fried bacon, maple syrup, homemade breads and scones. In the evenings, my sister and her friends, who all love to cook, insisted on feeding me dinner. When I walked through the door, after a day of writing and sightseeing, I was greeted by mouth-watering aromas--roasted vegetables, stewed cinnamon apples, or some other comfort food.

We always ate by candlelight, a bottle of red wine and mismatched bowls and platters set on a creatively appointed table, soft music playing in the background. This wasn’t a staged production, something they did just for company. In fact, nothing about it felt forced. They told me they dine like this all the time. It made me want to put a little more effort, inventiveness, and fun into my own weekly menus and routine. Their hospitality inspired me to pay their kindness forward, so that others might feel as pampered and loved in my house as I had felt in theirs.

When I was in Maine, my sister and I went walking through the woods, gazed at the water and mountains, observed wildlife, had meaningful conversations, laughed our asses off, and simply sat in silence. We visited one of my sister’s favorite bookstores, the very cool Meetingbrook Bookshop and Bakery located on Camden’s harbor. I was elated when I ran across a book by John O’Donohue. I read his book Beauty last year, and now, after reading Anam Cara (soul friend), O’Donohue has quickly become one of my favorite spiritual writers. There is one passage fromAnam Cara that seems to capture the sense of awe and gratitude I felt on my Maine trip: “It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. . . . It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”

This is what Maine and my visit with my sister and her friends reminded me of. It is a miracle to be here, to be alive, that our souls have been given (or have chosen) the vehicle of a body in which to experience this mysterious and magnificent world. If that alone isn’t reason enough for thanks, I don’t know what is.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

Recommendations:
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. John O’Donohue. For those of you who have a mystical sensibility like me, you’ll love this author. Every time I read his writing, I feel a centering in my soul. The last chapter in this book focuses on death—both spiritual and physical. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of death in quite the same way. Would make a nice gift for the soul friend in your life.