The Unclad Soul

I was channel surfing yesterday evening looking for anything remotely positive and stumbled on world traveler Rick Steves’ program on PBS.  He was in Nazaré, Portugal and the scenes were magnificent. Calm, blue sea. Families with children playing on the beach. Quiet little villages of happy people walking the streets and working in open markets.  It all seemed so far from the real chaos in the world with the now labeled COVID-19 virus sweeping the globe, political upheaval across Europe, the impossible-to-describe calamity in Syria, the wretched corruption and cruelty of Netanyahu in the Middle East, and of course the alarming disintegration of our own election process and the shameful division and rancor of our people.  I long for summer and a beach getaway. There is something transfixing and transformative about the ocean.  And yet I cannot stop thinking about those who have no way to escape; the oppressed; those tortured by chronic illness and dis...

The Oscar-winning  film, Roma (Best Foreign Language Film), tells the story of an upper-middle-class  Mexican family in Mexico City in the 1970s. There is chaos everywhere. In the streets. In political unrest. And in this family. The father, a businessman who is often away on trips and who eventually leaves, apparently for another woman, causes profound crises within his struggling family. The wife and mother, Sophia, tries to carry on, hiding the truth from her boisterous four children. But as times goes on she craters under the reality of her failing marriage and enveloping loneliness and she tells the children their father is not coming home. Teresa, Sophia’s mother who lives with them, is a matronly sympathetic and caring older woman, but she is helpless in corralling the rowdy children. It is Cleo, played by first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio, who as nanny and housemaid, successfully manages this disordered family. The character is based on a tru...

It is easy to exaggerate our current gloom. Especially when it plays out in front of us each day across the myriad of media outlets. Things are bad, yes. Our culture is fraught with disdain, disregard, and the dismissal of rules, standards, and traditions. We are a spoiled society, for the most part, lost in our feelings of entitlement and selfishness, our stubborn beliefs and our unwillingness to revere all humanity, even our own. That, of course, is not the whole story. We do have our better moments, our acts of heroism, our generosity, our compassion, our love. There are vast places across this bleeding nation that are filled with decency, neighborliness, kind words, and good deeds. Not everyone is a bully or a liar, a manipulator or abuser. The country is populated with, yes, saints and angels, people of spiritual and emotional depth, thinking people, noble people who lift, who inspire, who instruct the rest of us in a way of life that doesn’t dominate but cultivates. ...

“But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: to melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night; to know the pain of too much tenderness.”  ~ Khalil Gibran, Poet/Mystic

The Archipelago of Kisses We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss. The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If you were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile. Rub two smiles, you...