cape may sunrise So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance. The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it. from The Weighing by Jane Hirshfield In these lines from  Jane Hirshfield’s beautiful and provocative poem, I cannot help but wonder: does happiness “weigh” more than darkness? Perhaps that is the wrong question, the physics question instead of the mystics’ one. John O’Donohue relates dawn’s breaking and darkness as friends which coax one another. Certainly there is something wondrously “balanced” in the rhythms of day and night, rising and setting, which belies any measurement of quantity. And so I am led to think of equanimity, that word of balance which is less about equal parts than balanced wholeness, integri...

  Bible Study BY  TONY HOAGLAND Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find people who would love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people? In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine; if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist. You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said. Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray sea. Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer. My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper. Hard to believe that death is just around the corner. What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny? I was on the road for so long by myself, I took ...

  Dissonance is not always a bad thing. Like "good trouble" there can be good dissonance. It can be imaginative and improvisational. It can be a harmony of another kind. I remember learning something about dissonance in modern music classes. I learned to respect it and to allow myself to feel perhaps an intended tension which in turn created an awareness of some kind of wound or vulnerable part. I learned that harmony and dissonance are not always mutually exclusive. We too often think of harmony as sweet and melodic. But harmony can be the reconciliation of very disparate aspects. It can be the alliance of notes which alone seem harsh or “off”. Together something new is created. Something alive.  As I scan the now browning leaves and exposed branches of late fall in New England, I am reminded that the colorful quilt-like harmony of a few weeks ago has been transposed into a more dissonant, jagged, tune which derives its beauty from an underlying vulnerability and eternal rhy...

  This will be the quote at the beginning of the book I may or may not write on identity: By Rabbi Zusha: When I get to Heaven, I will not be asked Why weren't you like Moses, or Why weren't you like Abraham. They will ask, Why weren't you like Zusha?"  I am fascinated with identity and finding our true selves. I am fascinated with the obstacles to this search. And I am amazed by Rabbi Zusha! May we live into the knowledge that we are enough and beloved whomever we are, however we are. May we live into our authenticity.  It takes courage and it leads to freedom.