Mere months before I met Jay, my friend told me about the ending to his first love relationship. I had never been in love, and I told Andy that it sounded so painful I was certain that I never wanted to be. “Oh, but it was worth it,” was his response. Little did I know…
When I was ten years old, I watched The Godfather series with my Dad. To this day, no other movie has had a deeper or more lasting impression on me. Did I believe that Michael Corleone understood the secrets of the dark side of humanity? Was my perception of the reality I was born into…
It was a dark, wet coastal night, and Michael and I were on our way home from the Bird Cage, his favourite restaurant. That wasn’t its real name, we just called it that because it had forty-foot ceilings. “Lots of headspace,” Michael would say, “so you can get some thinking done.” We walked along the…
I’m excited to share with you a segment that CNN did on me for their “Turning Points” series! If you like it, I’d love it if you could share it with your friends 🙂 You can watch my segment here: CNN Turning Points
When I was eleven years old, I had an old road bike that I found in the back of the garage. There happened to be a fabulous rectangular configuration or roads in our neighbourhood that made for the perfect circuit, complete with hills, curves, and straightaways. All summer long I rode this circuit, over and…
Healing is hard work; to this day it is the single hardest thing I have ever done. To face the rage, pain, abandonment and betrayal was an impossible task that was only navigated with a tenuous combination of hope, faith and desire. The flip side is that healing is the gift that keeps on giving,…
Have you ever felt like you were navigating life without a compass, as though there were no absolute bearings any more, only vague signposts? Well I spent most of my teens and twenties in that state, without really knowing what the problem was. Then one night in my early thirties I was sitting in my…
The symptoms inherent in the mentally ill differ from the general population only in degree or intensity, not in their actual presence. This is why, in times of great turmoil, we would profit from taking a long look at the inner workings of our psyches, as well as that of our broader society. Rather than…
The family is a microcosm of the society in which it finds itself. We currently live in a paradigm that I often refer to as Fabian Socialism, a nanny state where the government interferes in just about every aspect of our lives under the guise of protecting us. But what it is really engendering is…
We are destroying the wilderness of the planet at the exact rate, and to the same extent, that we are suppressing the wildness of our own psyches. The human being and the natural environment are inseparable: what we do to one we also do to the other. There are many things that are optional, even…