The Unclad Soul

Parenting is one of the fantastic experiences of life. Of course, it comes with some of the most exasperating experiences as well. Jerry Seinfeld has said, “Having a two-year-old is like owning a blender you don’t have the top for.” So true. Not everyone can be a parent, and some people simply choose not to have children. I have friends like that and they are perfectly wonderful people and have fulfilling lives. Most of them do have pets, though! I always wanted children. Maybe it had something to do with how I was loved as a child. I’m not sure. But thankfully, I have two beautiful sons, both grown now with their own families. I adore all of them—my sons, their wives, and their children. They also have pets, too, which I also love. I suppose like many people, when my wife and I divorced, our home was deeply disrupted. My divorce affected my career, my friends, but worst of all, it caused a lot of sorrow and confusion for my sons. My oldest was 15. My youngest 13. Crit...

And what is it that stirs your soul in these maddening days? What melts your heart? What enlivens you? What makes you want to run flat out full speed until out of breath you stop and hold your arms out to the sky? What motivates you to smile, to laugh out loud, to relish the moment with delight? What creates deep inside you, feelings of warmth, of affection, of love? Is it music? Listening to a beautiful song, being moved by the music and the lyrics? Is it reading a captivating book, following some story whether in a novel or some historical setting, that keeps you turning the page? Is it a movie, whether sitting in a theater or watching at home on live streaming TV, a movie that holds you in its spell until the credits run at the end? Is it attending a play, perhaps a musical, like Hamilton, Les Miserables, the Lion King, or some other fantastic performance that soars and enlightens and sends you home emotionally spent, or tingling inside, or singing all t...

The Sundance Now, BBC series, The Split, brilliantly captures the emotions, heartache, messiness, and collapse of relationships both in marriage and divorce. I recently subscribed to Sundance Now and while browsing the program selections found this gem. Marriage has got to be one of the most complicated of human relationships we will ever enter. Society, Church, and Hollywood, have too often created an illusion surrounding marriage that simply does not exist in reality. Marriage is hard work. Most relationships are. But marriage requires a stubborn love, a willingness to change and grow, an unconditional acceptance of the other in all of their character flaws, irritating habits, stubbornness, sensitivity to criticism, and well, just being a human being. The idea that we can be married a lifetime is a lovely concept, but life has a way of interrupting things, and staying together to the end is not for everyone. I have often suggested to friends there ought to be ter...

I want to run along the ocean and feel the waves wash over my feet erasing my footprints in the sand I want to skydive and sense myself falling watching the landscape below me seeing everything so clearly so cleanly until I love it all more than ever before I want to play guitar in an old bar and sing on a wooden stage with a drink at my feet making music that turns the crowd toward their dreams until all the hurts in the room melt in tears I want to write beautiful lines and put them in a book where the pages burn with longing and the reader sighs and blinks and walks toward a lost love until all of self is whole again I want to stand on a mountain ridge where the sun spreads light on slow moving cattle below where the Alfalfa smells sweet and the sky is a cloudless blue I want to ride a galloping horse in an open field until the air stings my eyes and I hear the pounding of the horse’s hooves and feel that floating that comes when you’re carried by forces beyond y...

The New Year begins with some startling statistics. In a recent article on Counterpunch, Dr. Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus at the State University of New York, offered a shocking list of dismal statistics regarding the state of America. We are first in the world’s military spending. In August of 2018, the president and Congress passed a gargantuan military budget of $717 billion. Can you imagine what that amount of money could do for American infrastructure, public education, health care, social services, and immigration reform? According to Demos, a public policy organization out of New York City, it would take approximately $175 billion to eliminate poverty in America. Eliminate it! Think about that. And yet, our war spending continues to climb. The Program for International Student Assessment of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently gave its latest report. In testing 540,000 students from 72 nations, American studen...

The rare and provocative poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski, once wrote, “If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life.” That is a challenge I take for the New Year. I want my soul burning with purpose and desire. I want to be to be crispy by the end of 2019. I want to be the ashes of my longings fulfilled, my passions spent. I want to know my efforts were all out, that I left nothing in the pursuit of what I love that was not exhausted. I want to find ways to love new people and I want to find ways to better love the people I already know and cherish. I want my horizons expanded, stretched to new sights, beyond old borders of comfort and ease. Let there be places in my journey, where, like the ocean, on a clear day you can see forever, and the end of the water’s edge disappears in the blue sky of wonder. I want that. Let there be ...

In this Season of Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, candles, food and festivities, giving and cheer, I keep thinking of Bob Marley’s beautiful music, especially his, “Redemption Song.” “Old pirates, yes, they rob me Sold me to the merchant ships Minutes after they took me From the bottomless pit But my hand was made strong By the hand of the Almighty We forward in this generation Triumphantly Won't you help to sing These songs of freedom? Redemption songs …” That is the message of this Season, whatever tradition you follow. Pirates still exist. People are still being sold in sex trafficking and sold out in politics. There are minorities and the elderly, the homeless and the disabled, who remain in the bottomless pit. Won’t you help to sing the songs of freedom? The Statue of Liberty is firmly anchored in New York Harbor, her light still beaming. But freedom escapes many beneath her lamp. People caught in poverty, in opioid addiction, in low w...