Melanie Gruenwald So many times, we experience life, thinking “I’ll feel better when… ”I’ll feel calmer when…” “I’ll feel less anxious when….” And “when” comes, and we’re all still feeling a bit muddled… what is going on? My first thought is the need to take more deep breaths and hydrate. Read more…
Yesterday, a student sent her class a story she read about a young man, a football star who was adopted as an infant and his search for his biologic family. It turned out that his biologic father, who had not known that he had a son (the mother did not Read more…
I search and I scan for the perfect metaphor Abhorring imprecision or worse selling out To the exigencies of a concocted cocktail A ballerina poising on a sharpened pinkie The tone of skin, voice or deafness. What can one say of no-thingness Without being led into a perjury trap Ayin Read more…
What does the electrician who is now a spiritual teacher and the postal worker who now interprets dreams share in common? Typically, we see metaphor as beyond the concrete and literal—traversing imaginative realms of our symbolic experience. The Kabbalah takes a hybrid position. If we were using a metaphor to Read more…
God has given you one face, and you make yourself another. The Book of Genesis starts off with a bang and ends with some dust. In between it is one masquerade after another. The ball gets rolling from the beginning —energy slows down to parade as matter. Then comes the Read more…
The United States remains one of only a handful of countries to retain the Fahrenheit temperature system and therefore, we are aware that ice begins to melt as it reaches and moves beyond 32 degrees. How Daniel Fahrenheit’s system places water’s freezing (and melting) temperature at 32 degrees is a Read more…
Louis Kahn, the great American architect, died in 1974 in a washroom at Penn Station. He was alone when his heart gave out. His only son, Nathan was eleven. A shadowy figure in his life, his famous Dad was busy at work, travelling abroad, and unbeknownst to Nathan, a father Read more…
Which is it—grey or gray? Isn’t it fitting that there isn’t a black and white answer. Turns out they are both acceptable ways to spell my favorite color. Gray is a great color to represent ambiguity and grey is also a great color to represent ambivalence. The fourth principle of Read more…
Awareness principle four: Live by setting intention. Be open to possibility—one door closing opens another. Measure success by effort not by outcome. In the Tree of Life this awareness principle is connected with the Sefirah energy called Netzach-Hebrew for the words Victory and Orchestration. Sometimes victory, such as Read more…
The voice synthesizer fell silent, the screen turned black. The vast network of neurons in his brain, much like the stars in the sky at dawn, began to recede from view as Stephen Hawking took his last thought with him beyond the space-time continuum. The screen reads: ACCEPT REALITY Read more…