As I step off the train into the flow of foot traf­fic, wheel­ing my unwieldy suit­case behind me, I am keenly aware that I look like a tourist. Yet, this is my city; the sounds and smells are as famil­iar to me as ever; the exhaust fumes and warmth gen­er­ated by hun­dreds of bod­ies wel­come me home. I join the herd of com­muters and vis­i­tors climb­ing the stairs from the plat­form to the lower con­course, and I can hear jazz music being played on a key­board: Gabriel Aldort leans for­ward into the micro­phone and his husky voice fills the room. It takes me a few beats to real­ize that he has switched to a Billy Joel song. I pic­ture the album cover in my mind, and lean against the pil­lar to enjoy the melody and the mem­ory. He takes a short break to chat with a tran­sit cop, and I round the pil­lar to get a closer look at his set-up. His key­board cover, open on the floor in front of him, is quickly fill­ing with sin­gles and a few fives. There is a photo of an infant, and next to it a sign indi­cat­ing that he is an MTA Arts Read the Rest…

I sup­pose we all need to escape our present lives at times; the needs of them press so close around us that we for­get how to stride, how to see the world and our place in it anew ― how to real­ize we are not just the sum of our oblig­a­tions and the iden­tify we have forged, but that at any age we are still mov­ing and chang­ing. And so I took the train up the Hud­son River with eight other mem­bers from my church to stay for two days in a monastery. I knew exactly what I wanted from the week­end: peace. I did not take my lap­top or any other means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing on line by e-mail and social media, nor did I intend to work on my new novel. Oddly in a way these things had come to rep­re­sent the real me. (And oddly the great spir­i­tual writer Henry Nouwen had the same prob­lems let­ting go of his iden­tity in the world many years ago when he fled to a monastery for rather a longer time.) I was tired. I felt that the cen­ter of my soul where my nov­els were born was shriv­el­ing, until it would soon Read the Rest…

As a few adults rush by him, my 4-year-old twirls around as he plays with a wind-up matzo ball toy. He gig­gles as he watches the matzo ball hop across the rug. “It’s like in Big,” the sales clerk at Israel Book Shop says. “He just brings such joy into the store. He should come every day.” I cre­ate an unam­bi­tious shop­ping list for this recent Passover shop­ping trip to Brook­line, which has a few blocks of Jew­ish delis and stores. Simon has a day off from preschool. The morn­ing adven­ture reminds me how the sim­plest things can often bring the most joy. In the book shop, a store that sells an array of Judaica, Simon’s eyes imme­di­ately fall upon the matzo ball toy, a goofy kind of thing that I might make fun of if I were writ­ing a piece about the over-commercialization of Jew­ish hol­i­days. Fact is, some­times com­mer­cial­iza­tion works beau­ti­fully. It gets Simon excited about Passover. It amuses a store clerk who is tired of deal­ing with stressed shop­pers. Together, Simon and I dub his new toy the “matzo ball boy” in honor of a char­ac­ter in a book about a matzo ball boy who runs as fast as he Read the Rest…

One of the tasks I set my advanced cre­ative writ­ing stu­dents is to have them, one stu­dent a week, find three poems to read and then unpack from what­ever anthol­ogy I hap­pen to be using. We do this not only for mean­ing but also for craft, the tech­ni­cal and strate­gic ele­ments that cre­ate the psy­cho­log­i­cal atmos­phere of the poem. Poetry, to me, is an act of atten­tion. And I think that the reader’s atten­tion to the poem, his or her engage­ment with the words of the poet, can allow access to the poet’s atten­tion to the Power of Things. The best poems—those that evoke what used to be called the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—can reward this atten­tion with some­thing akin to spir­i­tual com­mu­nion: a direct access to a deeper real­ity. Other poems, unfor­tu­nately, ren­der lit­tle more than access to a poet’s web­site. But that’s another story. This week, my stu­dent Phyli­cia brought this poem to our atten­tion:   The Bat­tle by Abra­ham Abu­lafia When Yaweh spoke to me, when I saw His name spelled out in blood, the pound­ing in my heart sep­a­rated blood from ink and ink from blood, and Yaweh said to me, “Know your soul’s Read the Rest…

Anger and Vengeance from the “JuBuSto” Per­spec­tive Ronald Pies MD   In my last post­ing, I dis­cussed my ongo­ing project, “The Three-Petalled Rose,” and its foun­da­tional premise that Judaism, Bud­dhism, and Sto­icism have many fea­tures, in com­mon. I coined the some­what clunky term, “JuBuSto” as a con­den­sa­tion of these three great tra­di­tions. In the last post­ing, I sug­gested that com­pas­sion is at the core of Judaism, Bud­dhism, and Sto­icism. I’d now like to sug­gest that the elim­i­na­tion of anger and vengeance is also a shared “JuBuSto” value. Bud­dhism under­stands anger (vya­pada) as the result of our nat­ural human ten­dency to “iden­tify” with exter­nal events and their asso­ci­ated emo­tions.  For exam­ple, some­body cuts you off in traf­fic, and you feel your heart pound­ing and your head throb­bing. If some­one were to ask you how you feel at that moment, you would prob­a­bly say, “I am angry!” But Bud­dhism teaches us that, by link­ing “I” and “angry” with a form of the verb “to be,” you are basi­cally say­ing that you and the anger are one.   The Bud­dhist teacher, B. Alan Wal­lace (in Tibetan Bud­dhism from the Ground Up) sug­gests that if you “attend” to the anger rather than iden­ti­fy­ing with it, Read the Rest…

Sleep peace­fully, for every­thing is within My hands. Take your rest in the know­ing that every­thing is com­plete; you are what you were meant to be and so rest in the full­ness of your own heart— that is car­ried on the wings of faith.   Yes, rest know­ing that every­thing is already what it was ever meant to be includ­ing you, in each moment where you are held within Our love.   So rest peace­fully My beloved child Of light.   By Morn­ing Star (Inspired by Divine Spirit)

Tak­ing the First Step We have com­pleted the end of an era and we are begin­ning on a new road of light and awak­en­ing. We all have a part to play in bring­ing a greater spir­i­tual con­scious­ness to our world. The inten­tions of awak­en­ing were laid down long before our births in the illu­mi­nat­ing light of unity and the com­ple­tion will be known by our children’s chil­dren. Breathe in this new dawn and let it fill you with Love, Hope and Courage as we emerge from the dark­ness. Let us begin our walk from the dark­ness with an under­stand­ing of our rhythms and long-term spir­i­tual devel­op­ment. We have within us the most effec­tive mon­i­tor of our rhythms. Our heart­beats reflect our life’s rhythms and cycles. Our first step is to develop an orderly dis­ci­pline and prac­tice in our day to lis­ten to our heart­beat and rhythm, hear­ing the mes­sage of this moment. In that way we bring our being into per­fect and proper order. As we learn how to live in har­mony with the ris­ing and falling ener­gies of our lives, we flow with the ups, downs, ins and outs to progress toward our goal of spir­i­tual matu­rity. Now, care­fully study Read the Rest…

When I was a baby, I knew how to hide in the space between elec­trons. Peo­ple saw me bounc­ing and laugh­ing, but they had no idea where I was hid­ing. Even today when I go there, I can’t find any me. But it’s not an escape, because this infi­nite space is every­where. Didn’t we all dwell in bound­less Sat­sang once, before the tech­ni­cians of the finite, whom we call adults, drove us out of God’s gar­den? Now we mea­sure eter­nity in hours and micro-seconds. We divide our vast­ness into inches. We have become mea­sur­ers, which we call being edu­cated. The truly impor­tant ques­tions, the vast ques­tions, the sim­ple ques­tions, have been edu­cated out of us: “What are we mea­sur­ing? Hours of what? Inches of what? ” We have no idea what the world is actu­ally made of. All day, we stum­ble through our duties with­out know­ing what any­thing really is. Sir Arthur Edding­ton, one of the founders of quan­tum physics, wrote: “All through the phys­i­cal world runs that unknown con­tent which must surely be the stuff of our con­scious­ness.” Ein­stein devel­oped the the­ory of rel­a­tiv­ity after a day­dream: fan­ta­siz­ing what it would feel like to ride on a sun­beam. But in Read the Rest…

TIFERET: A Jour­nal of Spir­i­tual Lit­er­a­ture offers mon­e­tary awards in the cat­e­gories of fic­tion, non-fiction and poetry.

I first met Madeleine L’Engle in a writ­ers’ work­shop she was lead­ing at a New York City con­vent when I was try­ing to sell my first novel. She was very com­pli­men­tary about my writ­ing and in a burst of dar­ing, I asked, “Will you read my unpub­lished novel?” She hes­i­tated a moment and then said, “Yes.” And I think I ran the forty blocks home, my feet not touch­ing the ground. It was a warm Octo­ber night in 1989. She loved the novel and sub­mit­ted it to her own pub­lisher who did not take it, but she endorsed my work, and when Nicholas Cooke: actor, sol­dier, physi­cian, priest was accepted by W.W. Nor­ton two years later, she sent me an enor­mous bunch of flow­ers. She rec­om­mended notable peo­ple to blurb for the novel. But more than that, she became my friend and I adored her. Many small writ­ers’ sup­port groups grew out of that annual work­shop, and once a year we’d all gather for a pot luck din­ner at her house, one of those rare old New York apart­ments with a view of the Hud­son River, posters of her late actor hus­band in the kitchen, and long hall­ways lined with books. Read the Rest…