TUCKED INTO MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S BIBLE is a yellowed sheet of paper containing the flavor of living tradition. In short, it’s my mom’s recipe for knubel borscht (pronounced “k’nubble”): beef simmered in beet soup and garlic. That’s it: three ingredients, plus…
Tag: arm’s length
Because the word “community” is over-used.
Yuri’s Night Out
A REMEMBRANCE OF FEATS PAST is a great excuse for a party — that’s the idea behind “Yuri’s Night,” which celebrates the cracking of the final frontier. “Human Spaceflight became a reality 50 years ago with the launch of a…
April is National Words Month
(PASS IT ON.) AND USE yours with care — they’re a non-renewable resource.
Unplug: Can You Do It?
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I was drunk, belligerent and enjoying myself — not a good combination, nor one which I experience (or wish to experience) in real life. The subject of my tirade seems to have been the apologetic and…
Compassionings
IT IS PRECISELY AT THAT moment when compassion seems most remote that it is most greatly needed. This principle is easier spoken than implemented — what isn’t? — but holds true not only for the individual, who is buffeted by…
Free Metaphor: “Don’t Poke The Squid”
STUCK FOR AN ANALOGY WHEN your well-intendeds provoke a horrible mess that you should have known better than to bother with? Then “Don’t Poke The Squid.” Squid are lovely, largely inoffensive creatures who flash and lurk throughout the ocean’s vasty…
Something Else About Archetypes and Inevitability
ANOTHER THOUGHT ABOUT STEVE’S DEATH: A social molecule is a group of co-creators of a private but shared reality — a sort of living group-mythos inexplicable to those outside its specific bounds but real as air to those within. When…
Of Archetypes and Inevitability
IF YOU BELIEVE IN AN afterlife, then one reason my friend Steve Territo died yesterday is to hold the good tables for the rest of us. And if you knew Steve, you know why that’s apt: I don’t have one…
Refining Maslow
THE GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST ABRAHAM MASLOW proposed a pyramid paradigm of human needs, ranking their vitality and importance as physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. One must satisfy the first in order to be able to secure the second,…
5 Thoughts: Alternative Pleasantries
1. REGRET IS LIKE THE PROVERBIAL potato chip, which is why I am reluctant to taste even one. Living a reasonably full life keeps any real regret firmly in its place; i.e., away. Yet while I regret nothing, there are…
First-Step Messiah
CONSIDERING THE GREAT POTENTIAL CONTAINED in most human beings, and the difficulty we have getting started on projects, perhaps we might accordingly revise our notions of messianism. The Re-(or Un-)born King may not set things right so much as give…
“What A Time We Might Have Had”
THE TITLE IS TAKEN FROM a line in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, and it always comes to mind when I hear someone (or myself) voice a semiserious regret. I don’t carry many of these — not out of “holiness;” it…