The Unclad Soul

I asked Ingrid on the way to school the other morning if she could remember when she stopped believing in Santa Clause. She’s 13 now and I miss those days when she would stand by the tree in her Dora pajamas and chatter about Santa coming. She didn’t hesitate to answer my question. She said, “The year Santa never ate the cookies and milk.” Pilar and I were together then and we all lived in the house—Ingrid, her mom Claudia, and Pilar’s mom, Olivia, and Pilar and me. I remember I had set out the cookies and milk after Ingrid was in bed asleep and I always ate them before I went to bed and then would leave a note saying how good they were, signed by Santa. But that night for some reason, maybe I was just too sleepy, I went off to bed and left them there on a little stool by the tree. I don’t remember Ingrid saying much about it at the time. But apparently when she saw the cookies and milk untouched on Christmas morning, all the doubts she’d had about the whole Santa enterprise, fina...

Domestic gun violence with mass murders of innocent unarmed people. Refusal to pass any meaningful immigration reform. Glaring unjust economic inequality. Unquestionable racial discrimination. Blatant disrespect for the office of president and the function of government. These are vital national issues Republicans perpetuate and will not face. Why do Republican candidates want to be president anyway? Why do Republicans in Congress want to serve? What is it Republican governors, mayors, and elected state officials want? Why are they there? I mean, what possible good do any of them want to do for the country? They refuse to cooperate with president Obama and Democrats. They demagogue. They patronize. They pontificate. They incite discord and often hate. They dismiss the constitution. If they dislike a law they just ignore it. They either distort the truth or outright lie about the economy, about immigration, about abortion, about Planned Parenthood and all the other social and moral i...

I am a liberal Democrat. I am a Christian. I am a humanist. I believe in Choice. I support Gay Marriage. I believe in gay rights. I believe in reasonable gun laws including background checks at Gun Shows before a purchase is made. I believe in children. I believe in grand parenting. I believe in laughter and kissing and hugging and love. I believe in thinking, in using your mind and not just your emotions, which are often accurate, but can be easily manipulated. I believe in books. Books are guides into mystery and morality, into wisdom and insight, into gratitude and generosity, into acceptance and endurance, into risk and living, and we need all of that. I believe in pets because whether it’s a dog or a cat or a bird or a turtle it invites compassion from us and can make us a more decent person if we treat it with care and affection. I believe in the sacred which has the power to move and even transform us. Nature is sacred. Seasons are sacred. So is the ocean. Quiet worship before ...

While the Paris nightmare was going on last weekend I was safe in Los Angeles with my son Caleb and my daughter-in-law Kameron and my little grandchildren Avery and Austin. It was the weekend of Avery’s 6 th birthday and we all had such a nice time together. I caught glimpses of the terrorist attack on my phone and here and there on television. Late at night before I went to sleep I would check the Internet on my phone to see the latest details. My heart was broken by the tragedies in Paris. So many people killed on a lovely Friday evening while sitting in bistros and cafes or attending a concert or the theater. I thought of how precarious life is, and how fragile. I thought of all of those who didn’t get to go home to their loved ones that night. And the many still severely wounded and hospitalized. The agony of it all, the loss, is still with me. In the meantime I was surrounded by love. Caleb and Austin picked me up from the airport Thursday and as I got into the car I hea...

Could we all possibly take a deep breath and not go insane over the terrorist brutality in Paris? Yes, it was horrific, cowardly, and barbaric. Innocent lives were murdered in cold calculating hate. But there needs to be a sense of reasonable thinking now. Not just panicked terror. That is the precise goal of terrorism: to provoke fear, frenzy, paranoia, and chaos. And when all of Europe and the Western world collapses in horror and hysteria, screams threats against Muslims, reaches for the big weapons, stirs up more hate and violence; and the decent and the thinking and the caring people of the world give into the urge for matching ruthlessness, then terrorists have truly hit their target. This is a war of ideas. You can’t kill an idea with bombs. This is a war of beliefs. You can’t annihilate a belief system with deadly arsenal. And let’s not compare this to Nazism thinking we that destroyed that idea with war. Nazism was the mastermind of one brilliantly demented man. The whole...

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting— over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” ~ Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning Poet

The masterminds of 911, whether they intended to be or not, were geniuses. Not because they managed in the most terrifying way to collapse the Twin Towers but because their hideous act successfully severed our nation from its bearings. They didn’t just viciously murder nearly 3,000 Americans and temporarily shut down various financial institutions and disrupt the flow of commerce for a while. That wasn’t their goal. They created an ominous, debilitating, relentless fear among us. A terrorizing fear that still to this day remains in force in the lives of so many Americans. A fear writhing and twisting in hate. An irrational fear. A fear that gallops headstrong through our churches and schools, our Congress, our businesses and our homes. And that fear has made us so distrusting of people, so neurotically detached from reality, so emotionally hardened, bigoted and vengeful, that it is in many ways destroying us. That’s what terror is supposed to do. Weaken. Cripple. Confound. Torment. Di...