Almost a year ago when a massive tree fell on our kitchen and crashed through the roof, it split beams, smashed chairs and scarred the old pine farmhouse table. That table had stood at the center of our home for nearly thirty years. It had witnessed meals and conversations, laughter and sadness, emails and books written, and prayers said. It was never just furniture. It had been a quiet companion to our life. If that old table could speak … When the kitchen was finally rebuil

I have been writing in journals on and off since the early 1980s. It has not been continuous. There have been long stretches when I have not written at all. Yet I always seem to return to it. I drift away and come back. Over the years I have tried different methods. Different diary systems. Even digital journals. I suppose this biweekly blog is a kind of journal, though it is always digital. Yet over time one thing keeps reasserting itself. I return to analog. Paper. Pencils.

People often think of Tai Chi as a gentle form of exercise. It can certainly be that. Yet it is better understood as a whole practice in which movement, attention, and breathing are trained together. Developed in China as a martial art, it is rooted in classical Chinese cosmology and medicine, drawing on ideas of yin and yang, balance, and the circulation of vital energy. These ideas were never abstract theories but ways of describing how human beings participate in the large

Before anything else, philosophy is simply the habit of asking basic questions and refusing to leave them unexamined. What is real? What can I know? What matters? How should I live? These are not technical problems. They are the questions that sit quietly beneath ordinary decisions. Philosophy begins when one takes them seriously and is willing to test one’s own assumptions. Traditionally, philosophers have grouped these questions under a few headings. Metaphysics asks about

Not every struggle is a psychological disorder. Sometimes the issue is not pathology but perplexity. A person feels unsettled, misaligned, uncertain. The questions are philosophical: What matters? What kind of life am I trying to live? What do I owe others? What do I owe myself? Philosophical counseling offers a structured conversation about such questions. It is not therapy. It is not treatment. It is disciplined dialogue. The work begins wherever the concern lies—a career d