Impatience. Anger. Wastefulness. Restlessness. Desire. Haughtiness. Greed. Judgement. Pride.        § I’ve been paying attention, especially the last few days. Now it’s getting serious. It’s the morning of the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.              § Yesterday, just after I walked into the house after ten-and-a-half…

May you have the courage to let go of everything you know about yourselves—everything you have learned about yourselves up to this moment—that you may discover and create, invent and define new selves, a new braided Self. Like Sabbath candles that, at the start of Shabbat, stand side by side, each its own brilliance, its own accomplishment, may you move toward each other until you become like the braided Havdalah candle, its individual wicks joined to create of several a single, strong flame that is lifted into the sky at the end of Sabbath.

It’s the end of summer in the academic South, and I’m working on syllabi for my fall courses: Spiritual Autobiographies and Beginning Poetry Writing Workshop. I’m creating the schedule, weeks 1 through 16. I’m filling in the dates, 8/17, 8/19, 8/24…11/23. I’m sequencing the assigned texts: Darling to Dharma Punx; Incarnadine to Night of the…

The day after I let my wife know that we had enough money to pay for our son’s college education—he was a sophomore at Carolina at the time—, she let me know she had decided to retire in the fall. Our daughter was pregnant. The baby was due in November. After retiring at the end of October, my wife would head to New York to be with our daughter for the final weeks of the pregnancy and the first weeks in the life of our first grandchild.

Summer morning routine: a cup of Awake tea, the Opinion page of The New York Times.

What am I looking for to get my day going? Information to spark the brain? A needle to inject righteous indignation into my sleepy heart?

The flag is coming down. You know which one.

Some days I can’t remember: am I Abel or Cain?

I / We. Mine / Ours. How wide the expanse between these terms. When my wife told me, a couple of days before my first appointment with the urologist, she would be accompanying me, I said no. I had my reasons. As I lay in bed, half-watching an episode of Seinfeld I had seen countless…

Note: Read part 1 of this post here. Five minutes later, I rang the bell again. Students opened their eyes. I asked them to write in their notebooks, reflecting on what they had just experienced. There’s no right or wrong experience, I said. Whatever you experienced is your experience. They wrote. Then we talked. One…

One morning this semester in “The Holocaust and the Arts,” a course I’ve written about several times this year, I asked the students to spend a few minutes repeating internally, with their eyes closed, a phrase I adapted from Ruth Kluger’s book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. The phrase: “my memories, our memories”. Born…

Take care of each other. That was the second of three “pearls of wisdom” my father offered as my wife and I were packing up early on New Year’s morning 2012 to head back from South Jersey to Asheville. I remember one other occasion on which he offered a father’s wisdom. Then, like now, I…