What Have You Been Learning Lately?

Every time someone publicly dies of a drug overdose now, two things happen for me. First, my heart tears in two and I feel sick to my stomach. Next, comes the flood of relief and the selfish thought, "Thank God it wasn't anyone I know this time." A very dear friend of mine is a brilliant, creative musician. In line with the terrible stereotype, he also has a very serious drug problem. Today my friend sold his guitar, the center of his musical life and heart, to a stranger on Craigslist. Were he not an addict and had this not happened before, I would've believed him when he told me that he just wanted to buy a new one. I asked him once, in a moment of clarity, how much money he'd squandered on drugs in all his many years of using. He told me that it was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $100,000. I wonder how much time and money and health and brilliance has to be wasted before he returns to the land of the living. I wonder how many times he has to al...

True to form, the faithfulness of my  tithing  (and let's be honest, my sheer awesomeness) led to an uptick of work over the last two weeks. What can I say? People like to have me around and sometimes I even get paid for it. Mo' money means mo' to give, so this week's tithe was split between three projects which spoke to my heart. Sleep, yoga and light- all personally important to and well loved by me. Please learn a bit about these awesome projects and consider giving what you can. Give good, do good, feel good! Sacred sleep at St. Boniface. Photo by Brent Ward. The Gubbio Project In my early 20s I decided that it was important for me to live alone but the only place I could afford to do that was in San Francisco's infamous  Tenderloin . The  Tenderloin  is a tiny neighborhood known for its abnormally, disproportionately high amount of bars and liquor stores, pimps and hos, dealers and addicts, and public urination. It is also the home for people who con...

Open to give, open to receive Growing up in Catholic church, I never heard the word "tithe." The wicker collection basket would weave its way around the pews every Sunday, and my brother and I would fight over who got to put the money in, but I had no idea what we were doing. It wasn't until my adult life when I made a friend who grew up very Christian in the Midwest that I became aware of the practice of tithing, but it bore a very negative connotation. In her church, the pastor made tithing mandatory for anyone who worked, including young people, and would demand their checks to ensure they were giving the church their proper share. I've never liked being told what to do and this disturbed me deeply. For those unfamiliar, a tithe is one-tenth of something, paid to either a religious organization or a government. Tithing is an ancient practice present in slightly varied forms in Judaism (ma'aser kesafim), Christianity (tithe) and Islam (zakat). While the de...

Roundabout or straight through? As a noun, a bypass is a road that passes around, rather than through, a city. You can also receive a coronary bypass, wherein a vein or an artery from elsewhere in your body is grafted to your heart to create an open channel for blood flow when one of your coronary arteries becomes blocked. As a verb, to bypass describes personal behavioral decisions: go past or around, avoid, evade, dodge, escape, elude, sidestep, shortcut. Choosing to circumnavigate something rather than go straight through the center of it can be pragmatic (i.e. The Fire Swamp with its quick sand and R.O.U.S.). It can also indicate fearful avoidance. Are you being intelligent or cowardly? Thoughtful or weak? What motivation lies beneath your course of action? There are places we may never want to go, towns to which we may never want to return. We would drive 100 miles out of our way to avoid catching so much as a glimpse of the skyline. No matter how far, deep and wild our trav...

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself. When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet...

When you tell someone that you're taking pole dancing classes, there are a few, almost guaranteed reactions: a raised eyebrow, a wry, judgey smile and the question, "That's a really good workout, right?" It is. I could barely raise my arms after my first two classes. After the next two, my abs and legs and...well, everything...were sore in a profound way for days. I hadn't worked like that in a long time. It made me feel strong and healthy. It's interesting to me that the only permissible reason to take a pole class seems to be for the exercise. When I approached this experiment it was because I had taken some turns around the pole at my friend's studio,  Evolve , and it stirred something deep within me. I spent a lot of my life feeling awkward in my skin, only feeling sexy in the presence of someone mirroring that back to me. And even then, it always came as a surprise that anyone saw me that way. Alone with the pole at Evolve, I watched myself move...

Polyamory is not for me. This became apparent when I read The Ethical Slut  a few years ago and marveled at the rigorous personal responsibility and communication necessary to support a healthy, respectful open relationship. There's nothing inherently wrong with a person having multiple romantic partners at once. The problem I see arising as more people take to this relational model is that good communication and personal responsibility are not naturally occurring in most relationships, polyamorous or otherwise. I won't pretend to be some kind of ascendant master. I have made irresponsible choices in my romantic relationships...which is why I feel like it's okay for me to let you know that polyamory probably isn't for you, either. Like so many things, polyamory is something that's worth doing well. We should strive to be excellent to one another in all our relating, but this becomes especially important the more intimate the relating becomes. If you are uncomfort...