This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When people become fused-when two become one-connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.
Etty Hillesum, formally Ester "Etty" Hillesum
We are always in search of the redeeming formula, the crystallizing thought.
There is a Life Stream that flows to you, and this is a Stream of clarity, a Stream of wellness, a Stream of abundance - and in any moment, you are allowing it or not. What someone else does with the Stream, or not, does not have anything to do with how much of it will be left for you.
Emotions | Good | Guidance | Hope | Right | Thinking | Guidance | Happiness |
O, sheep if I do not eat you, you will eat me, said the hyena.
Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.
Many people protest when we explain to them the power of telling the story of their finances as they want it to be rather than as it is, because they believe that they should be factual about what is happening. But if you continue to look at lackful what-is and speak of what-is, you will not find the improvement that you desire. If you want to effect substantial change in your life experience, you must think thoughts that feel different as you think them.
In order to be one, you must first be two.
Commitment | Love | Marriage | Relationship | Security | Story | Will | Writing |
When the impulse to share becomes obligatory, when personal boundaries are no longer respected, when only the shared space of togetherness is acknowledged and private space is denied, fusion replaces intimacy and possession co-opts love. It is also the kiss of death for sex. Deprived of enigma, intimacy becomes cruel when it excludes any possibility of discovery. Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.
We judge the objects to touch only because we have learned to judge. In fact, if we consider the size of an object, we see that it is relative to that of other objects, so we have to compare it with and judge the extent to which these differ from them, if we want to get an idea of its size, and so for ideas of substance, of shape and weight. In other words, all the ideas that come from touch presuppose the comparison and judgment.
It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.
Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. ...I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them...
Reading |
All the things you did until you turned forty confront you again after midlife as a task, but this time inwardly.
A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, that one.