I have a favorite tree that I like to sit in. Going there is a form of meditation for me. I like to climb up into the branches and look out over the Bay.The birds fly around me and my cares just melt away. I feel like I am in a sacred and safe world. I love it.

The word "faith" doesn't occupy the same place of prominence in Unitarian Universalism that it does in some religious traditions. For many of us, faith has become synonymous with blind acceptance of particular religious beliefs ...

It was the weekend before I was scheduled for a biopsy. Marta spent the morning gathering stones on the beach. Later that evening, she pressed a smooth round stone into my hand and said I know that when you're facing a challenge it helps to have something to hold onto.

Have you ever had an all-out, meltdown, full-on temper tantrum? I don't remember having major hissy fits when I was little, although if you asked my mom you would probably learn that's more about my faulty memory than my good temper.

My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days.

We don't get a say in the roots we inherit, even as they stretch beneath the surface of our daily lives and contain within them countless stories of danger and survival and elation and heartbreak that inform our living in ways we understand and ways we do not.

Oh, letting go. Every so often a minister has to preach on something that is absolutely not a personal strength. And this is one of those times. I'm not a letter-go; I'm an attacher and a holder-on. I hold onto people and relationships I love.

A one-paragraph newspaper article describes a subway platform during the morning rush hour at Grand Central Terminal. A train pulls in; a well-dressed woman gets off. Before the doors close, the woman realizes that she is holding only one of her leather gloves.

Your great mistake is to act the dramas if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions.

When I was in my twenties, so many possibilities about what life might hold for me beckoned from so many directions that the upshot was I was fairly immobilized. Many futures were possible, but none of them called my name. Then one day, I stopped into a book-store and picked up a book.