“What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had.” So ends Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl, an ode to fatherhood that introduced me to one of my first childhood heros, Danny’s father William. He was the father I always wanted, the father I have always aspired to be. Danny and William live together…
As a child in the mid-70’s, I owned a record player. You know, one of those ancient machines that amplifies the vibrations of a diamond-tipped needle wobbling through grooves etched in a spinning piece of vinyl. The record I played most was Free to Be … You and Me, a collection of songs and stories that distilled the best messages of feminism, peace, love, and understanding from the 1960’s and delivered them to my open and eager heart. In “Boy…
A Marriage is an agreement and public recognition that a particular partnership between two people is different from all others. Across cultures and time, the formalization of that agreement often comes with a set of vows outlining the guidelines by which the partners agree to live and commit themselves “for better or for worse.” We have all seen weddings where those vows create a powerful bond and truly lay the groundwork for future interaction between two people, and we have…
Candlelight dinners. Hawaiian sunsets. Moonlight serenades. Hearts flutter, emotions surge. The love bomb burns intensely, and the hormone rush makes us giddy. We call this “romance,” and our novels, our songs, our poetry, our movies, and even our families and friends encourage us to chase it, to be satisfied with nothing less. But after the fireworks flash and bang, we go home afterward to our homes. We cuddle up by the slower burn of a cozy fire, and we find…
As human beings, we hold secrets and thoughts deep within our selves that feel dangerous. Their potential revelation seems to threaten our self-esteem, our jobs, our families, our communities, our self-image, or the sometimes delicate balance of our lives. We hide these thoughts behind various masks, buried in the roles we have accepted or the stories we tell about ourselves, and we despair that we may never be completely free to express the fullness and depth of the selves we…