Ecstasy

Is it not like little child

upon a rocker-horse

a steeple-chase knight

bursting with play

in wild Exuberance

joying out, hollering

"Look, Daddy, look!"

while Laughter flies free

and Smiles stretch glees

with generations of saints

who Candor knows, swells

with soul-pealed bells

in the presence of God

ever present to each hair

ever laughing with each child?

*At kairos [the end-time], what may be the hardest thing to realize is that we already have everything we need.

-William Bryant Logan

*Men raised in traditional masculine ways usually have trouble with interpersonal relationships and tend to see people mainly in terms of social roles, rather than as individual persons.

-Allan B. Chinen

*Some tales are about weak, submissive men, lacking self confidence and authority, whose task at midlife is to reclaim their heroic, masculine energises.  These stories are deeply relevant to two groups of men today.  The first are wounded men, injured by traumatic childhoods, depression or racial oppression, who have never been able to exercise their strengths.  The second are men who have learned to value the feminine and to honor the goddess, but who have in the process forgotten their masculine energy.  The task of both groups of men at midlife is to reclaim the male fierceness they neglected in youth.

-Allan B. Chinen

*Teenagers are often exasperating to parents, but if parents remind themselves that the turmoil is normal and time-limited, and the teenagers eventually grow out of it, the difficulties are easier to bear.

-Allan B. Chinen