What is gender identity? Is it part of our deepest self? Or is it something created by social expectations? How would we know? How does it work?
Category: Relationships
Eyrie of the Garuda: Meditation on Changing Relationships
Some time ago I was meditating on relationship and boundary-setting — specifically with a friend who threw a bit of a fit at me. She asked me to do her a big favor, trying to downplay the size of the favor in the asking. I refused (reasonably, I thought); and so she got snippy. Alison…
Blood and Bone
In 2009 I almost had to choose between my fiancée and my children. I was recently divorced, and had just met an extraordinary woman; but she lived five hundred miles away. Ali was in Pittsburgh, and I lived in Massachusetts, near my children, my ex-wife, and her fiancé. At first I resigned myself to a…
Winter’s Woods
In the winter woods the world is all black and white, branches and trunks and twigs crosshatching against the sky and snow. Here there are edges and limits: the white polyhedra of sky with hard black wooden frames, the unambiguous snowline between earth and heaven, the icy and unyielding tree bark, the frozen water, even…
Uprooted
Like a silent thunderclap The sun strikes a blade of grass, — A sharp thrusting blade it is, a defiant green punch Out of the soil at the sky — Now struck and smelted with gold leaf, Humming with new life and power, Slow and ruminous the photosynthesis. The Long Hand of Lugh Has painted…
On Emotional Violence
This article is a sequel to On Physical Violence, and carries forward a lot of its themes. However, I think a lot of the issues around emotional violence are less clear cut, and so the intent of this article is much more speculative and investigative. What is Emotional Violence? Some examples of emotional violence are:…
On Thanksgiving
It is a dark day here. I sit with my head in my hands, the cold rough stone under me, the loose leaves clattering and swirling in the wind as it tosses through the bare temple. This temple is Apollo’s, but the sky is gray, the rain is cold, and… Wraiths walk where there was…
The Tao of Leadership
Tao Te Ching: 59 In caring for others and serving heaven, There is nothing like using restraint. Restraint beings with giving up one’s own ideas. This depends on virtue being gathered in the past. If there is a good store of virtue, then nothing is impossible. If nothing is impossible, then there are no limits….
How to Raise Children Spiritually
It’s a thorny issue: how do you raise children up spiritually, helping them see (or continue to see) how everything around them is infused with the Eternal, while at the same time helping them learn to find their own way forward?
