… AND WHEN I SAY “KNOW,” I’m not talking about “faith,” “opinion,” or “reasoned analysis,” but an intimate, visceral, experiential knowing. (Torah has a word for it — דַעַת — “da’at,” which can also refer to intimacy of the sexual…
Category: Living
Each moment is different. Here are some of mine.
A Secret of Life
WHEN YOU’RE TALKING WITH SOMEONE, ask yourself: “How can I meet this person’s needs right now?“
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one.”
— Albert Camus
Confessions of a Sidewalk Astronomer
THERE ARE TWO TELESCOPES IN my living room, a third in a backpack in my bedroom closet, and a pair of astronomical binoculars on the bookcase near the front door. “Why so many?” you may ask. Easy answer: I am…
Why Am I Still Here?
BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, I will celebrate my 62nd birthday tomorrow. Leading me to ask: “How did THAT happen?” As a child of the 1970s and very early ’80s, my gentle nihilism is understandable. It was a period marked by…
I’m Going to Make This Viral If It’s the Last Thing I Do
THAT IS TO SAY, THIS: That Sonoma Valley’s synagogue-centered Jewish community is … “our little Anatevka-among-the-vines.” So there.
I’m not here. I’m an event. I’m an improbable coalescence of stardust enjoying one fleeting, glorious dance through the cosmos before … poof.”
— Adrian Bliss
5 Thoughts: Lifechangers
0. YOU ARE ON A PATH. Suddenly, something knocks you onto another one. Here are five (of my many) “somethings.” 1. 2001: A space odyssey. At the tender age of six, my mind was blown, by what I could not…
5 Thoughts: Make. BELIEVE.
0. READ CAREFULLY — THERE WILL BE a test later on. 1. In the book of Exodus, Moses tells the Children of Israel that G?d wants to enter into a contract with them. With one voice, and without knowing the…
Sales Experience Necessary
IT HAS LONG BEEN PROPOSED in some circles that, in order to build a better class of citizens, we need some sort of national-service program along the lines of an in-house Peace Corps or revamped Works Progress Administration. “Give people…
We’re all just raindrops on a windshield.”
— Jerry Seinfeld, to Michael Richards in “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”
Let’s Get Real
ON THIS DAY EIGHT YEARS ago, I stepped out from under the shadow of a decades-long cannabis addiction. And I haven’t been the same man since. Thank God. What brought me to that point was twofold: I decided that 1)…