Tag: being present

The Fragility of Freshness

“If you can’t smell the fragrance, don’t come into the garden of love.”  –Rumi “Let me not die while I am still alive.” –Hasidic prayer   Knowing when to cut your avocado is a tricky task. One day too early and the fruit inside is too hard. One day too late, and it turns brown and mushy. Finding optimal freshness is a challenge with fruit and with life. I hate it when my strawberries get Read More

Title: trust issues | Credit: Yumi Krum

Presence and Presents

“We convince by our presence.” —Walt Whitman

You can’t fake being present in the long term…and other thoughts on how presents can’t stack up to the gift of presence.

Sagrada Família nave roof detail by Flickr user SBA73 https://www.flickr.com/people/7455207@N05

Endings and Beginnings

In 1984, we formed a book group in Basking Ridge, NJ with 6 other couples. Our first book was George Orwell’s 1984. We met monthly (with few exceptions) for the next 32 years discussing a diverse mixture of books: fiction and non-fiction, simple and complex, light and heavy, funny and sad, uplifting and depressing. Each book gave us an opportunity to share our thoughts and feelings and to get to know each other on a Read More

“Modernism 2.0,” by Nick Stathopoulos http://www.nickstath.com

Timelessness and Transcendence

“This trip had dimension and tone. It was a thing whose boundaries seeped through itself and beyond into some time and space that was more than all the Gulf and more than all our lives.” -John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez We just returned from the Sea of Cortez on a trip with National Geographic to watch the whales migrate from the tip of Mexico to the Bering Strait. The beauty of Read More

Title: NYC0812 034 Sol LeWitt at MoMA | Author: watz | Source: Flickr | License: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Slow Dancing

Remember being back in high school and waiting for the slow dances to play so you could cuddle closely with your friend and enjoy the sweetness of the connection? And how sweet it was. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to create that magical moment without going back to the teenage angst that overwhelmed those tingling feelings? An ever-increasing percentage of people are finding that meditation is one way to capture that feeling of Read More