The Gift of Presence
How the inestimable gift of one person’s presence made all the difference… There are many behind-the-scenes stories related to the writing of The Tremble of Love: A Novel of the Baal Shem Tov. This is one of the big ones: a turning point moment in which...
Cusp
CUSP September twenty fourth in New England. Dusk. Still so green. So green. Only an occasional leaf—— more rarely an entire tree——given over to change. “Some things change and some stay the same,” I told my son when his father and I separated. “Love stays the same....
Writing as Prayer
The 13th century mystic poet Hafiz defined prayer as knowing the fire by feeling the flame and the water by bathing in the lake. He said you’ll never know a thing if you imagine how it feels, you need to feel it directly…
Add Gold to the Ocean, A Dream
I woke from a dream early this morning in which I had just been told to “add gold to the ocean.” “How one can add anything to the absolute?” I was asking aloud as, still under the influence of my dream, I came to consciousness with no idea who had…
