I came upon a box of a few dozen random—utterly random—photographs yesterday: family photos in NYC from a half-century before I was born, pics of my childhood on Long Island, my first wedding, my son’s earlier years, my summer camp, his summer camp, graduate school. I scanned a few of them, put them back, and…
Sometime after her sister, my mother, died and before her Alzheimer’s developed to the point she didn’t recognize or know me, my aunt Hattie started using this especially emotional turn of phrase at the end of our phone conversations. I’d say, “I love you,” and she’d reply, with vibrant care and warmth, “I adore you.”…
I’ve been thinking a lot about joy lately, and especially about how the same experience or circumstance or day or week or year of your life, and perhaps the entirety of your life, can seem joyful or joyless depending on vision and context. All the things we all talk about, maybe too often, come into play:…
I am 47 years old. I turn 48 late this month. I haven’t been someone who has ever given too much weight to birthdays or the passing of the years. But this year my impending birthday is hitting me some. I’ve really not thought too much about age until very recently, but at some time…
Full title and full disclosure: Autism 101: hating your autistic child … and teaching her or him self-loathing. Twice in the past week I’ve seen “I love my child, but I hate autism” posts by parents of autistics. One was written by a real-life friend I respect greatly, and one was by a Facebook friend…
Do we love? Do we love another person less because he or she happened to be born in another country and we happened to be born in this one? Do we love her less because she has a different skin color? Or speaks a different language? Do we love him less because he worships a…
Ray: What would you most like the enduring legacy of your sound-healing music and work to be? Jonathan: Love. If there is an intention of intentions, a secret of secrets, that could be imbibed and encoded on everything I do, it is the energy of love. I’m talking about unconditional love–divine love that lets us…
Ray: When you publish a water-crystal photograph — say, for example, in The Hidden Messages in Water, your first book popular in North America — how do you select the photograph? I imagine for any given word or piece of music, you take multiple samples and so have many images of the water from…
