Writing and reflections

Valuing friction

Friction as feedback — what's lost when nothing pushes back, and what real contact requires.

On Becoming

What it means to apprentice your becoming rather than direct it. An exchange between an inner knowing and a world that meets you.

Spring growth

Allowing spring to work on us — softness as a practice when the world feels heavy.

Where does time go?

Consciously acknowledging what you’re about to do restores intention and reclaims scattered attention.

What I’m Noticing: Love is (often) a drug

Love as an internal state you practice rather than a dependency you seek in someone else.

What I’m Noticing: The Tension Between Safety and Visibility

The need for safety and the need to be seen can coexist. Alignment emerges when neither is denied.

What I’m Noticing: Connecting with Aliveness

When nothing is missing, change emerges naturally from presence rather than from forcing improvement.

The Self-Improvement Trap

Self-improvement backfires when it starts from deficiency; growth unfolds when you meet what’s actually present.

Noticing Without Identifying

How to sense what’s happening inside without getting swept into it or needing to act.

Listening to Aliveness in Intergenerational Relationships

How to stay in contact with yourself while navigating the intensity of significant age differences.

What Wisdom Traditions Noticed Long Ago

Ancient traditions tracked the felt sense of being alive; modern science is now catching up.

Pleasure as a Portal

Pleasure isn’t something to earn or manage. It’s a signal pointing back toward contact and vitality.

Breath as a Way of Listening

Your breath is already responding to your life. Learning to listen to it changes how you inhabit it.

Staying With Discomfort (Without Forcing Change)

Staying with discomfort, in small and tolerable doses, builds capacity and reveals what lives beneath it.

Why Growth Doesn’t Respond to Pressure

Inner growth follows its own timing. Pressure narrows attention; safety widens it.

Why Inner Relationship Matters

Lasting change comes from developing a relationship with the parts of you that resist, not overriding them.

What If Nothing Is Missing?

What if you began from sufficiency rather than deficiency? Growth unfolds through attention, not correction.

Reconnecting with Aliveness as a Gay Man

For many gay men, aliveness gets quietly dulled through adaptation. Here’s what reconnection can look like.

Just for now

A poem inviting you to set down what you carry, just for a moment, and feel what remains.

Invitation

Mary Oliver watches goldfinches sing for sheer delight. On how serious it is to simply be alive.

Oliver Burkeman — A Cupboard Full of Tools

No single technique works for everything. Effective living draws from many tools, matched to the moment.

The Healing Time

A poem about meeting old wounds along the path, with care rather than urgency.

Love Where You’re At

A song about self-acceptance: wearing your imperfections openly and loving exactly where you are.

A Grateful Day

Brother David Steindl-Rast on finding beauty and gratitude in the gifts of each ordinary day.

Say Yes to Joy

Gratitude doesn’t require perfect conditions. It attunes us to what’s already here.

The Invitation

Oriah Mountain Dreamer asks: can you face life’s depths, both joy and sorrow, with staying power?

The Wisdom of Insecurity

Alan Watts on why clinging to certainty creates suffering, and how insecurity becomes freedom.

What if money were no object?

Alan Watts asks what you’d do with your life if money were no object. A quiet provocation.

The Journey

Mary Oliver on following your own voice despite the noise of others’ expectations.

You Start Dying Slowly

Neruda on the slow death that comes from avoiding passion, risk, and the full range of being alive.

What to Remember When Waking

A David Whyte poem on what is already here before the day’s demands arrive.

Parker Palmer — A Life Lived Whole

Parker Palmer on living undivided: bringing outer life into alignment with inner truth.