“Nothing is harder to do than nothing” is how artist Jenny Odell begins her book, How to Do Nothing. Resisting the Attention Economy. I was intrigued by the title of this book as I have felt the pressure of quarantine, after quitting my job to aid my three kids in remote learning, to “upskill”, take…
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I live in one of the least religious cities in America, Portland, Oregon. We are progressive freethinkers who are generally a “spiritual but not religious” people. Yet this religiously independent attitude, one that I am guilty of as well, keeps us spiritually stunted. Karen Armstrong, one of our great contemporary religious scholars, has convinced me…
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It is difficult for me to explain what I mean when I say the word God. It started in my teens, when I began to study the world’s religions, and I continue to stumble over my words when I share my thoughts about the Divine with my children. I envy those who can articulate, with…
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The holiday season in the US is a season of feasting. We simultaneously feel entitled to eat more cookies in December than we ate during the entire year while also feeling guilty for our overindulgence, which inevitably leads to the surge of gym memberships come January. This complex winter holiday pattern isn’t solely a cultural…
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Religious scholar and author Karen Armstrong, gives me hope for a modern religious renaissance. She describes in her book, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts how we have lost touch with the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side of the brain that thinks in myth, metaphors, and symbols. The explosion of technology…
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After reading Anne of Green Gables to my ten-year old daughter, I continued on my own and have now found myself in the third book of the Anne series written by L.M Montgomery. I read these books as a teenager, and I am remembering again why they’re my favorite book series of all time. I…
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The conversations became louder and more intimate as the wine continued to flow into the third hour of our ladies retreat happy hour. We had spent the day bonding, hundreds of feet above the forest canopy, zip-lining at 25 mph from tree to tree. We hiked the dewy Washington woods, bathing in the smells of…
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One of my projects during quarantine was reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a hefty novel, my translation running around 1,200 pages. I read it relatively fast because I didn’t want to keep forgetting the numerous characters and multiple nicknames for each character. I must have referred to the character list at the…
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I found myself startled in the 20th chapter, of Yuval Noah Harari’s book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The chapter was titled “Meaning”, and in it, Harari explains the human tendency to create meaning through stories and how this kind of thinking is flawed. He begins with the fact that we are story-telling animals…
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Anchored to Wise 