There are two types of people in this world:  those who focus most of their energies upon “adapting” to the circumstances around them, trying to get ahead in the world, meeting deadlines and goals, showing up the competition, and making it in the big world.  These are the ”adapters.” On the other hand, there are...Read More

Most of us have taken interesting journeys in our lives (and we have photos to prove it!).  But there was one journey we took that was more incredible than all the others combined:  Our journey from the moment of conception to implantation within our mother’s womb.  You might think:  ”Well, I really wasn’t around to...Read More

There’s an old Medieval rabbinical tale that says that before we were born, we each had a light that shined above us.  This light looked backwards into our origins and forwards into our destiny.  But just before we took birth, an angel named Lailah, who had been looking after us during our pre-birth development, came...Read More

In the movie Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, an aging bureaucrat discovers he has stomach cancer and is propelled into an existential crisis by the realization that he has wasted his life engaged in a meaningless job.  This revelation opens him up, however, to a constructive act:  he sets to work transforming a stagnant pond...Read More

During the Middle Ages, a popular image of the stages of life in Roman Catholicism was of a mandala with Christ in the center and the different ages of man represented as spokes around that hub (see my post on The Stages of Life and the Liturgy of the Hours).  With the dawning of the...Read More