A while ago, when I posted about gratitude, my cousin Kristina recommended another book called Sleeping with Bread: Holding What Gives You Life. She mentioned that she and her husband use its principles each night with their kids. [Thanks, Kristina!] Although the book includes a lot of overlap, it distills beautifully what should be a […]
How to Heal a Broken Wing
Curiosity and empathy are two traits I crave for Liliana. Of course, they can’t be forced. She has to see Dan and me practicing both on a daily basis. How to Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham is a perfect tool to encourage growth and foster discussion in these areas. A boy named Will […]
Kindness
Taken from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness”: Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been […]
Compassion
Last night, I had to trek up to the cities for a get-together with people from the film/screenwriting community, and on my way up, I listened to the latest podcast of MPR’s Speaking of Faith with Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known and revered Zen master and poet who did an unusual thing during the Vietnam […]
What Kind of Child Do You Want?
I tell the following story not as an inspirational one, in the sense that you’ll feel happy at the end of it, but as an urgent heartfelt plea to change what we’re doing with our children. I have a friend–let’s call her M.–who wrote me an e-mail the other day. She had a genuine question […]