Repost from Elephant Journal. I am. I am a human. I am a strangely cheerful, sometimes sad, and often grateful human. I am. I am blessed with a steady income. Every dollar I've ever earned is a gift, and I am grateful. I deserve these things because the...

I went and saw Jenkins again yesterday. He’s funny, the old man, the way he always seems somewhere else, the way he putters around his tile floored kitchen, the way the wood in his house smells wet even here in Arizona. It’s like a spring...

This is for all my idealists out there. As a seeker, or perhaps just a human, you probably fall into the same trap that I do: I hold my ideals above my reality. Now hold on, before everybody gets crazy about me using the word "reality", I mean...

I found a quote this morning by Nelson Mandela. It read, “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” I wandered around the house after that, a little shocked, a little stupefied, and a little relieved that I’d found the quote. I touched plants and...

There's an unpopular prerogative that every human has, a thing we were all born with the rights to the way a lion is born with a place in a pride. It's magic. There are so many words in the English language that aren't taken seriously. But surely...

We danced together, though not with one another. Bobby was mellow and the band followed his lead. We all did. It tends to happen when you’ve spent more time playing guitar and singing on stage than anyone else alive. More people than can be counted...

Why do we dream? Maybe we need to, the way we have to evacuate our bowels or polish off that last bite of steak even though we're full. It's not (often) a choice, to dream. It just happens. We participate, about as much as we participate...

I've thought about the stars light years away looking down at me, us, and our worried minds, our concerns of who and what and how other people see us and the stars, billions of years old, who watch every life that has ever been or ever will be, they sadly smile with pity.   As I worry...

Some moments of my life are effortless and rewarding, the way it is for a surfer who catches a wave or when a musician is really tight in the pocket. Others seem to be pulled slowly and painfully from me, like unwrapping barbed wire from...

What is hope? Driving home this morning from an underwhelming appointment with a potential publisher, I found myself asking this question. This drive was the absolute opposite of the one I'd made only an hour earlier. Before, I'd been giddy with excitement. The email had plainly...