​I have come to consider most of what passes for “self help” literature today as obscene because it ignores the complexities of life,...

…we all have to grow up, become wholly responsible for our lives,, relinquish the search for the good parent in others, and stop whining....

Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time or seeing them properly for the first...

...it's useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life...

To be interesting just tell your story with uncommon honesty. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine

​Look outside. Dirty snow in random patches.  How do you expect me to be happy? I don’t smell spring. ​My journals

​"The surliness with which the woodchopper speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is better than the...

“The sentimentality of my furniture destroys the perfection of my floor.” ​ Painter Agnes Martin

The best, most useful advice I ever got was from Jim Watson, [the scientist who discovered DNA] over tea at his New York apartment: ...

...One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every...

Evolutionary psychology, sociology, economics, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, physics, chemistry, history, theology - none of these...

“Resilience and the ability to keep going comes when you’re kinder to yourself, when you take the pressure off and…when you make whatever...

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger,...

Getting Stuck When I was fifteen, I got a tractor monumentally stuck. The summer of ’57 we moved from Elko to Deeth, the...

Falling Off the Wagon: A Parable You are the driver of a wagon, looking ahead, going down a road. You are also riding in the wagon,...

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”                         F. Scott Fitzgerald,   The Crack-Up...

This morning I considered, for about sixty seconds, letting my hair go gray.  Let's call it a Dorian Gray moment.  If I were to go gray,...

Second Runner-Up When I tell about being second runner up to the Wells Rodeo queen the summer of 1958, I  make sure the listener knows...

Another Tuscarora Tale June 21, 2011 The phone rang.  "Go look out your window."  I recognized Linda's voice. "What time is it?" I said,...

​I (Heart) Fernet I asked the bartender, “What’s the name of that aperitif made from artichokes?” My husband and I had walked down past...