Awaken Engage

“We’re quite stretchy!” That’s what the tall, spindly, as-if-they-were-on-bendy-stilts fellas in sparkly blue leotards told me last night before they went about their magic in my body while I slept. The last glimpse I had of them before I drifted into dream land was of them gleefully and joyfully and effortlessly and playfully pulling on the tissues and tendons and ligaments in my head and neck an...

Yesterday, while walking Iris in the foothills, I suddenly felt a sharp and piercing pain on my right side. Almost instantly, I felt paralyzed from my right eye to my waist. My right eye shut off, I felt a wave of nausea and dizziness, and I could no longer rotate my head to the right past center. It was wet-your-pants kind of pain and, had I been alone, I would have crumpled to the ground. But th...

“The important work, the work we really want to do, doesn’t come with a recipe. It follows a different pattern. This practice is available to us — not as a quick substitute, a recipe that’s guaranteed to return results, but as a practice. It is a persistent, stepwise approach that we pursue for its own sake and not because we want anything guaranteed in return…This is a path followed by those who...

Last week, my daughter Sophia woke up in the morning not feeling well. We sort of evaluated the options and used the “Do I have what it takes to______?” question to move from one morning task to the other. Do I have what it takes to get out of bed? Yes. Do I have what it takes to walk to the table and eat breakfast? 
 Yes. And so on. This allowed us to get to the big question “Do I have what it ta...

Perhaps I have mentioned before that I wrote extensively during the worst years of the traumatic brain injury recovery. The distance and time of that season is measured not in weeks or in moths, but in years, beginning in October of 2015. Over eight years later, I am now beginning a non-linear and quite random process of reading what I wrote. Much of the writing was done in what could be called th...

In Sand and Foam, Kahlil Gibran writes, “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you” (1994, p. 14). He makes a good point. I might say that three quarters of what I write is meaningless; but I write so that the other quarter may reach my conscious awareness. If anyone else benefits, that is fine, but it’s not the main point at this stage of my journey. I w...

As you may know, night walks are city walks. Tonight is not only a Friday night, it’s one of the first really nice evenings of the year and downtown was bustling with life and energy. I was far from the only person out walking. But I was the only person walking a dog and I was wearing quite the frumpy outfit. It was pretty clear that I wasn’t part of any of the myriad scenes and groups who were ga...

I don’t have much to say today except that I felt unwell enough this morning that I decided to pause for a moment and listen to my body. Now, I didn’t want to listen to my body. What I wanted was to get up and force myself into the ice bath and perform all of the other practices that I have been doing that help me feel better and, as I am finding out, are also things I partly rely on to convince m...

Earlier today, I went upstairs after what felt like a half day of spinning my wheels on tasks that I either couldn’t complete, didn’t complete, or forgot that I was even trying to complete. Walking by my wife, I said, “I feel intensely unproductive.” She said, “Do you need to rest?” I said, “Of course, not. I have too many things to do.” And then I went back downstairs to spin my wheels some more....

“Do your best and let go of the outcome.” This was the advice of my fellow teacher and good friend, Jeff Goldman, as we were navigating what seemed like the impossible demands of our school in Washington, D.C. Jeff was older and wiser and lived a much more balanced life than I did at that time. I was wfinding myself burning out because I couldn’t do everything I was being asked at 100%. No one cou...

“Ultimately, what stands against the storms of extremism, the spread of untruths, and the threat of nihilism, is the awakened individual. Unless we find the inner truths of our own lives, and the underlying sense of unity that is secretly present in each soul, we inadvertently add to the growing darkness, divisions, and confusion that already threaten the world. The uniqueness of each individual l...

As many of you know, I recently decided to give the following universal virtue my full attention and adopt it as a life code: I never speak or act out of anger. I have already unpacked the idea of “universal virtue” in a previous post, so I’ll spare the reader and listener any more description of the phrase except to say that it is a virtue that one commits to, regardless. “I never speak or act ou...

Editor’s Note: Our family plays a version of Uno that came to be called “White Chocolate Badger.” Here is the story behind the name, a story that was first told on an Idaho mountain summer morning to a young boy asking for a tall tale while waiting for the sun to rise. Once upon a time, there was a lonely albino badger. He lived in a badger community with a badger family, but never seemed to fit i...

I’ll begin with the disclaimer that this piece should probably begin where it is ending, but it doesn’t, so here we go. Let’s see what happens. Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “I’m simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m si...

“A strong community helps people develop a sense of self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being and doing. But when community unravels and we lose touch with one another, the self atrophies and we lose touch with ourselves as well. Lacking opportunities to be ourselves in a web of relationships, our sense of self disapp...

Holy buckets!!! This universal virtue business of “I never speak or act out of anger” is a doozy!! From the outside looking in, I’m not a person who displays anger very often. Many people I know haven’t seen me exhibit anger in an outward way. But. Wow. On a micro-level, I am noticing how my blood pressure rises during the day and how my mouth and body are reacting in ways that, while indiscernibl...

In my Peace and Well-Being in an Age of Anxiety course at Boise State University, students and I are using Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson and recently came across the compelling phrase “unilateral virtue.” Hanson says, “Virtue sounds lofty, but it’s actually down to earth. It simply means living from your innate goodness, guided by principle. When you are virtuous no matter what other people do, th...

February 13, 2016 St. Gertrude’s Spirit Center On Retreat with Emily “Each scene is beautiful, no matter what.” Sister Jerri as she was looking out over the Camas Prairie on a cloudy morning in which the sunrise was hidden from view. “Let it Rise” Watch the sun rise this morning. Breath Taking Life Giving Gratitude Inducing Vision Inspiring Peace Bringing Let it rise. Let the dream rise within you...

In the middle of the night, I awoke with a full-blown migraine - one of the kinds of migraines that used to stick around for weeks, even months. When I used to get these kinds of migraines, I would almost panic because of my history with them after the last brain injury. They were excruciating, debilitating, and effectively shut down my normal day-to-day functioning to the point where our entire f...

This Saturday in March is a special day for Noah (my son), Austin (my brother-in-law), and me. It signifies a full day of watching Idaho High School Basketball Championships. We meet early for breakfast and then head to the Idaho Center where we watch 6 different divisions play for a championship. That means over 12 hours of spending time together watching basketball, eating over-priced food, and...

49 - 49 at the end of regulation. That was the score of tonight’s Idaho 5A Boys Basketball state semi-final game between the Timberline Wolves and the Couer d’Alene Vikings. Obviously, it wasn’t the final score, because someone has to win and someone has to lose. Not being tied to either one of these schools, I didn’t want either team to have to lose. It was one of those games where the players ma...

I awoke this morning and felt something in the air. A primal sort of energy that I know to be the energy of spring, of new life, of beginnings, of growth - an electrical buzz inside that is industrious, mischievous, and adventurous. As I dropped the kids off at school, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one feeling it. You could just feel that other people were feeling it. And you could see it. In f...

Let’s see how this goes and whether or not I like it enough to stick with the idea that was implanted into my beautiful brain when I was at University studying linguistics and writing and found out about things like the density of prose and writing styles where writers create circuitous and hypnotic effects on their readers’ brains by unpacking and unveiling and uncovering one idea after another,...

My temporary crown came out a second time today. Most of the day, my head was throbbing. After finishing teaching at BSU, I drove to the dentist to have the crown re-inserted. They poked and prodded a bunch and the throbbing increased. They offered ibuprofen, but I figured I would just take some when I got home. 
On the drive home, while thinking about something else, in the background I could hea...

Today, I went to the dentist and found out that I had a tooth that needed to be drilled out for a crown. It’s my first crown - of any kind :-). After the x-rays and all the prep work, it was time for all of the local anesthetics. The doctor poked me in just the right spot inside the left side of my mouth and said to wait a bit and I’d feel the tingling and numbing. 10 minutes went by and I could s...