A Divine Comedy
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by Alicia Ostriker To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God’s love washes right through you like milk through a cow To be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their…
Swimming in rough seas, it can be hard to find the shore. You swim as hard as you can, as long as you can, and there it is, finally – the shore! You’re back. You almost can’t believe it. You…
“It was a couple of springs ago. I was driving into New York City from New Jersey on one of those crowded, fast-moving turnpikes you enter it by,” writes Frederick Buechner. “It was very warm. There was brilliant sunshine, and…
This Sunday finds me in Atlanta helping a daughter move into a new apartment. Unpacking yesterday, she couldn’t find an Important pair of black jeans. Her favorite pair. It’s kind of a disaster! (They’ll turn up, of course; surely they…
What do you yearn for? Here’s a little poem by Louise Glück that made me think twice… Lament Suddenly, after you die, those friends who never agreed about anything agree about your character. they’re like a houseful of singers rehearsing…
I’ve realized, lately, that I live as if suffering is a shocking and insulting surprise. How foolish! How could I be this old and not yet understand, at my core, that suffering is simply part of this journey, part of…
“Think of poetry as fishing. What really pulls is the fascination of touching a deep, unseen world with monofilament line. It’s wonderfully dark down there, so I can’t see what might be coming along that I can possibly hook and…
A friend of mine shared some profound life advice with me yesterday. “You cannot hate yourself into change,” she said. “Wow – that’s deep. The idea that maybe you could love yourself into the changes you want to see. I…
Dear William: A Father’s Memoir of Addiction, Recovery, Love, and Loss, by David Magee, came to me on the wings of a friend’s recommendation. The epigraph reads: “For every child who is lost and every parent who has lost a…