I look at the Augusteum,and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could...

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life...

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life...

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family’s history.

I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it’s all...

I was struck – not for the first time in my years of travel – by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion...

Wonder isn’t about finding answers; it’s about becoming more comfortable with questions.

Do little things every day that no one else seems to want to do, be patient, and success will find you.

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.

Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they’re experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the...

The child is taught form earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brothers inhabit the four virtues...

I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort...

You have no idea how strong my love is!

How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It’s the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt...

I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn’t wake him to share in my distress.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have...

The Buddha taught that most problems – if only you give them enough time and space – will eventually wear themselves out.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

ceremony is essential to humans: It’s a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one...

Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means ‘two,’ and the word zweifel, which means ‘doubt’ – suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic...