It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

Ram Dass

Dear Friends-

This morning the world view is both crystalline beautiful and mud filled tragedy.

No words can express or sense make from tragic events in Nepal, the ongoing waste of lives in the Middle East or the seeming cascade of idiocy running this country.

What then can we do?

Continue to stand as signs of compassion and kindness in a world filled with tumult and fear.

We all hold invisible pieces of our collective whole.

Responsible for our own gardens and to the world beyond our own safety and beauty-

Any of the themes and resources that I normally share seem frivolous on this day.

So- just two Mary Oliver poems this morning-

Sip them and take them in. Listen to her. Practice compassion

Be still and know.

Bill

When Death Comes – Mary Oliver

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Wild Geese – Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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Christopher Germer

Dear Friends,

I spent some time this week with people in transition this week. Time was spent with others who are helping others in their lives make transitions of heart and home. Nothing is constant. Every healing prepares us for the next loss.

Our emotional life connects our internal world with the external realities. How we read ourselves, how we read others creates a container of how we understand and react to this world of ours.

We sense make with the language we have and what we hope to continue to understand. Sometimes we need to label the realities- with the danger that we start to pretend that the label is the thing. A pretend mastery over the larger world. It is always more complex than that.

Shankar on Emotional Intelligence- This American Life on the power and importance of labels. Some labels give us warning- others give us comfort.

Then Psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell encounters the power of self-diagnosis and influencers. Why do we take on the mantel of categories of illness?

Lastly- David Whyte on Mercy….

Something we need more of in our lives-

Mother Mary calls to me- Let It Be.

Bill

How Feelings Make Us Smarter
Hidden Brain

Some people are remarkably good at reading the emotional temperature of a situation. They can pick up on what others are feeling, manage their own emotions, and respond skillfully. What’s their secret? This week, we explore the science of emotional intelligence with psychologist Peter Salovey. Emotional intelligence is one of the most popular ideas in psychology. It’s also a term that’s widely misused and misunderstood. We explore these misconceptions in a bonus conversation with Peter Salovey

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Label Maker!
This American Life

Labels are powerful. They can distill you down to a single word. They can get stuck on you without your permission. And sometimes, when they get taken away, they can upend your entire life. On this episode: labels and the havoc they wreak.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

“I am a Psychiatrist. I’m Hearing Something New from Young Women. By Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell

Dr. Garfinkle-Crowell, a psychiatrist, is the author of the forthcoming “Girlhood, Translated: Understanding Young Women in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis.”

Self-diagnosis bis Instagram and Tic-Toc:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/opinion/therapy-speak-daughter-trauma-anxiety.html?unlocked_article_code=1.61A.e5a1.j7xISIx5oO75&smid=nytcore-ios-share

MERCY- David Whyte

Mercy is hard to ask for, as it arrives, almost by definition from beyond the limits of our imagination and enters our lives almost always in a guise we cannot recognise. Mercy tells us that who you thought you were is not after all who you are and therefore not the one who needs mercy, what you did wrong does not account fully for the wrong you did; those you thought you hurt are not those whom you actually hurt. Mercy is forgiveness through the arrival of a perspective more sweeping and wide ranging than our previous bodies and our previous imagination could hold or sustain. Mercy can’t arrive without our already occupying the merciful state that powerlessness grants. Mercy therefore, is the only thing that earns mercy.

Mercy waits through all our indifference, our intolerance and our tiny, every day, astonishingly cruel, and multitudinous judgements of others: mercy waits quietly until we are ready to give up : mercy is the only thing we will really want in the end because of the absolute and timeless necessity of giving it generously in our dying, and at that end, the hope of receiving it. The central, eternal question for everyone approaching the end still conscious or with a shred of conscience is, can they forgive and will they be forgiven themselves? Dying well might be the act of sincerely trying to do both.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Dear Friends,

Sometimes these weekly posts simply align around themes and threads. Sometimes the connections need to evolve with more thought.

Sometimes it is simply elusive- but when one believes in the incarnation- the connections between the physical world and the spiritual world- you simply must look harder.

I love this podcast from Ezra Klein. He moves from the pattern of Hero-Victim-Villain- to the Trickster. Not a fraud- but a symbol of transformation and not getting locked into our existing narrative. We all need more tricksters.

Tim Ferris podcast on creative writing with some truly great writers. This is a master class on the hardest topics in creative writing.

Richard Rohr speaks of our spiritual vision and the meaning of the concept of “incarnation”.

“The only hindrance to our seeing is our own lack of fascination, humility, curiosity, awe, and willingness to be allured forward.”

Closing with Naomi Shihab Nye- That Mysterious Word Holy.

Blessed be-

Bill

Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse
The Ezra Klein Show

‘The Odyssey’ is the political movie of the decade. “What a trick Christopher Nolan pulled off here”. The power and meaning of the Trickster and a potential way out of our current situation.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

How to Start When You’re Stuck, Finish What You Begin, and Stop Waiting for Inspiration — Creative Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Lamont

Tim Ferris

“This is a special compilation devoted to a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. Over the years, I’ve asked some of the writers I admire most questions like: How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? And how do you keep going when you fear your pages are terrible? Listen in to some of my favorite authors answer these and other questions. Please enjoy this special compilation on the craft of writing.”

Tim Ferris Podcast

Father Richard explores how Franciscan mysticism invites us to encounter divine presence in our concrete, specific lives:

Francis of Assisi knew that if we could accept that the finite manifests the infinite, and that the physical is the doorway to the spiritual (which is the foundational principle we call “incarnation”), then all we need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth. Time opens us up to the timeless, space opens us up to spacelessness, if only we take them for the clear doorways that they are. There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our willful blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. We really cannot get any better or more simple than that in terms of a spiritual vision…..

By taking the mystery of the Incarnation absolutely seriously and gradually extending it to its logical conclusions, the seeming limitations of space and time are once and for all overcome in Francis. The Christ Mystery refuses to be vague or abstract and is always concrete and specific. When we stay with these daily apparitions, we see that everything is a revelation of the divine—from rocks to rocket ships. There are henceforth no blind spots in the divine disclosure, in our own eyes, or in our rearview mirrors. The only hindrance to our seeing is our own lack of fascination, humility, curiosity, awe, and willingness to be allured forward.

And That Mysterious Word Holy

Naomi Shihab Nye

You might as well take a rotten lemon,
squeeze it in your hand.
Let the juice trickle down your wrist and arm,
sharp bite of acidity prickling your
scratches and scars and say,
I bow down to you.
When the almond tree erupts into
blossom without help from any people—
I bow down. Here we are in the land
of sacred story, chant, shrines,
altars and grottoes, parables,
and soldiers in camouflage are carrying guns.
What does that say about holy?
How much power it doesn’t have—
Thou shalt not kill crumpled under our feet.
Whose religion would you follow?
And why do they wear camouflage?
We can still see them.
Who are they hiding from?
The guns are bigger than we are.
The tanks are bigger than shrines.
Tear gas canisters, grenade casings
littering graves of our ancestors in the cemetery.
I bow down. You bow to the big shining platter
everyone eats off together. Sit in a circle
for your holy rice. Speak after me.
Holy eggplant, my best angel.

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Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

Mary Oliver

Dear Friends,

Aloha from Honolulu. Returning here is a constant state of giftedness. Community, conversations, contributions and connections. It is a place that holds the most precious elements of a good life. There is a depth of being here – a constant call to the soul. Just be. Presence is the requirement if one is to see the beauty of people and place. It is almost impossible not to be present here. The geography where being is simply enough, and you want to be all in.

A few gems today. A lovely article about Jack Johnson. A man who simply knows his gifts and is extremely comfortable in attending to his vocation.

One of my favorite songs is Ulili E. Go full screen listen and watch. Come visit.

Then a close by William Merwin. He and his wife Paula lived on Maui for decades and the Merwin Conservancy- let by the brilliant Sonnet Coggins- have maintained the palm forest , the legacy and their home since they have passed. It is near the town of Haiku upcountry Maui.

Sonnet, Haiku, WS Merwin… You can’t make this up.

Be amazed- Tell about it.

Bill

Stressed? Overwhelmed? Have You Tried Being Jack Johnson Instead?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/style/jack-johnson-summer-surfilmusic.html?unlocked_article_code=1.21A.0PAr.u19DZ6H5v2hK&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Ulili E music video with Kuana Torres Kahele

For the Anniversary of My Death

By W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

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https://billcoy.substack.com.

We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Dear Friends,

There are so many elements of being a human that we are all subjected to. So many parts of this life, that we hope to avoid- but it is not possible. Today I will share reflections on pain, on grief and on our mortality.

Yep- no getting around it.

Shankar interviews psychologist Rachel Zoffness. Her research on pain asks us to look not only at nerve endings and chemical reactions- but also look at social and environmental domain and our emotional health. The bio-social-emotional Venn diagram is a better way to understand and treat pain

Hemmingway wrote a note to friends who lost a son. No words of comfort are enough, but the idea that the loss- the pain is there pain- is a deep truth that may or may not comfort- but is a better response that most of the answers given by well-meaning friends.

And of course- Mary Oliver- who knows that this human endeavor is not only filled with delight- but deep sorrow- and to respect them both. Please read the last two stanzas of The Blackwater Woods at least three times.

Know pain- know love- know loss.

It is the only way.

Abide

Bill

How to Combat Pain
Hidden Brain

Pain feels like a simple message from the body. If your elbow hurts, there must be something wrong with your elbow. If your back is painfully stiff, you need some work done on your back. But psychologist Rachel Zoffness says our minds play a much larger role in our experience of pain than many of us realize. This week, we look at what’s really happening when we experience pain, and how a better understanding of this process can open up new possibilities for treatment and healing.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life.

Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties and living in France when he befriends Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after a savage struggle with meningitis.

Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).

Dear Sara and Dear Gerald:

You know there is nothing we can ever say or write… Yesterday I tried to write you and I couldn’t.

It is not as bad for Baoth because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do. He has just gotten it over with…

About him having to die so young — Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better. And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.

It is your loss: more than it is his, so it is something that you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I can’t be brave about it and in all my heart I am sick for you both.

Absolutely truly and coldly in the head, though, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one ever made a happier childhood than you made for your children, has won a great victory. We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.

E

In Blackwater Woods- Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

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https://billcoy.substack.com.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Albert Camus

Dear friends-

Today’s Bread is a study in contrast. How obsessed we are in how we look. Focusing resources and self-worth on the face we show to the world. How we might use technology to create artificial responses to deep questions of intimacy. Our world is pushing us to polish the external persona at the cost of any deeper sense of self. Compare that to a reflection on the deep presence of poetry- “the deep accord of everything”

I have been fortunate enough to get to know the work of the amazing Jane Hirschfield in a more direct way in the past month. If you only read one book on poetry- I must recommend “Nine Gates: Enter the Mind of Poetry”. Every sentence, every chapter is a total gift.

Find a poet that you love- spend time with that gift of presence and permeability.

Listen with your whole heart.

Abide-

Bill

Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’
Fresh Air

Botox, fillers, facelifts: Plastic surgery is becoming so normalized and undetectable, it’s changing our relationship to reality. ‘New Yorker’ staff writer Jia Tolentino considers how beauty standards have dovetailed with AI. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air Archives See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Is Using ChatGPT Hurting My Relationship?
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

She comes to Esther with a question that feels distinctly of this moment: when does a tool become a transgression? After leaving a long, stable marriage, she finds herself in a new relationship marked by intense highs and low lows. She turns to AI, using it as a real-time coach to navigate arguments and break painful communication loops. She shows up differently, and the relationship begins to shift. But as the dust settles, a new question emerges. What does it mean to rely on something your partner doesn’t know about, and wouldn’t agree with? Is her use of ChatGPT a tool or a transgression? \

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Jane Hirshfield

Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections — language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration.

By concentration, I mean a particular state of awareness: penetrating, unified, and focused, yet also permeable and open. This quality of consciousness, though not easily put into words, is instantly recognizable. Aldous Huxley described it as the moment the doors of perception open; James Joyce called it epiphany.

The experience of concentration may be quietly physical — a simple, unexpected sense of deep accord between yourself and everything. It may come as the harvest of long looking and leave us, as it did Wordsworth, a mind thought “too deep for tears.” Within action,

it is felt as a grace state: time slows and extends, and a person’s every movement and decision seem to partake of perfection. Concentration can also be placed into things — it radiates undimmed from Vermeer’s paintings, from the small marble figure of a lyre-player from ancient Greece, from a Chinese three-footed bowl — and into musical notes, words, ideas. In the wholeheartedness of concentration, world and self-begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.

The Weighing. Jane Hirshfield

The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

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https://billcoy.substack.com.

“I am no longer orthodox, but I do have a mezuza on my doorway. I mean what am I, an animal?”

Robby Hoffman

Dear friends-

A real mixed collection this morning. There is a quirkiness to each of the offerings today.

An older interview with Stephen Speilberg with Terry Gross from 2022- which really reinforces the concept that any art we create must be autobiographical.

The film- “The Invite” is so very good. Ester Perel was the technical advisor on this- and the dynamic of the deceptions we carry that are more painful than what is real- and what is real can be very hard.

Robby Hoffman is an actor/ comedian- who came from an orthodox Jewish community leading a different life than she does today. It made me think about all the transformations we all undergo- and how much we do carry from chapter to chapter.

Lastly from a Lutheran Pastor- a new reflection on the meaning of the Beatitudes.

If you find something of value to you- well that is enough.

Blessed are you-

Bill

Steven Spielberg
Fresh Air

After making ‘ET’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Steven Spielberg returns to the theme of extraterrestrials in his new film, ‘Disclosure Day.’ He spoke with Terry Gross in 2022 about how he fell in love with movies, became a filmmaker, and about growing up Jewish in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. A

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

‘The Invite’ screenwriters Rashida Jones & Will McCormack
Fresh Air

The new film, ‘The Invite,’ directed by Olivia Wilde, offers a portrait of a marriage in middle age, told over the course of one dinner party that spirals out of control. Screenwriters Rashida Jones and Will McCormack have been mining this territory together for decades, while finding the funny inside the painful. “We are never above a laugh,” Jones says. “There’s nothing that’s grave enough for us not to laugh about, because that’s how we release. That’s how we process our pain.” They spoke with Tonya Mosley about their creative process and their other films, ‘Celeste & Jesse Forever,’ ‘Quincy,’ and ‘If Anything Happens I Love You.’

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Robby Hoffman Will Always Feel Poor, No Matter How Rich She Gets
The Daily

The comedian and actor says class and the way she grew up inform everything about the way she lives now. Thoughts?

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

From Richard Rohr- Center for Contemplation and Action:

The Lutheran priest and author Nadia Bolz-Weber questions how we might follow the Beatitudes:

It can be easy to view the Beatitudes … as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourn-ier in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of God…. But what if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed?

What if they are not virtues we should aspire to?... Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside … who that world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.

Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards…. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?

Bolz-Weber offers her own version of beatitudes for people who may not feel blessed today:

Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.
Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are the motherless, the alone, the ones from whom so much has been taken….
Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.
Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small, the parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that loves only the winners.
Blessed are the forgotten.
Blessed are the closeted.
Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented….

I imagine Jesus standing there blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.”… [Jesus] was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.

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Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Dear Friends-

I so loved putting this bread together today.

Two of the best episodes of Hidden Brain… Please- please give yourself the gift of listening to Lisa Miller about spirituality and our real craving for transcendence. The science of spirituality is one of simply observing our daily life and looking at our ordinary existence with a more profound appreciation of what is really happening.

Peter Asher is interviewed by Terry Gross- a musician and a producer- his life is the story of some specific talent- combined with a drive and the incredible alignment and opportunity of other people. We need to learn about our genius in recognizing the genius of others.

The incredible Jane Hirshfield speaks to us about poetry-permeability and healing. After spending time with Jane at Tassajara, learning from her genius and appreciating her wisdom and compassion- I have become a true fan boy- or fan old guy.

Ending of course with the always insightful Charles Bukowski- a song with no end. Indeed.

Transcendence- Music- Poetry- Mortality. So much to celebrate.

May you be free from suffering.

Bill

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1
Hidden Brain

Food, safety, and strong relationships are essential to our survival. Psychologist Lisa Miller says our brains also crave something else: transcendence. She suggests that spirituality is a universal human capacity, and that feeling connected to something larger than ourselves may be essential to a fulfilling life.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 2
Hidden Brain

Last week, we talked with psychologist Lisa Miller about the science of spirituality. Today, we explore what those ideas can look like in everyday life. Miller explains why moments of connection, spiritual practices, and even periods of suffering can sometimes open the door to deeper meaning and growth.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Legendary record producer & manager Peter Asher
Fresh Air

Asher remembers when Paul McCartney and John Lennon played “I Want to Hold Your Hand” for him for the first time. “I thought, am I losing my mind, or is this one of the best songs I’ve ever heard in my life?” McCartney, who was dating Asher’s sister at the time, was living with his family. A new documentary, ‘Peter Asher: Everywhere Man,’ chronicles Asher’s life in the record industry. He spoke with Terry Gross about his own band in the British Invasion (Peter and Gordon), discovering James Taylor and launching Linda Ronstadt.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Poetry, Permeability and Healing by Jane Hirshfield

Part of the reason people turn to poetry—its writing or read­ing—is that they have some belief, experience, perhaps fool­ish faith that language in itself is a reservoir, needed and almost infinitely useful.

I like to begin understanding almost any idea by looking closely, if I can, at the words that hold it. At the etymological root of both healing and health is the idea of “wholeness.” To heal, then, is to take what has been broken, separated, frag­mented, injured, exiled and restore it to wholeness.

I think all of us these days feel a particularly acute awareness of the breadth of what feels cur­rently injured and exiled. Many things beyond physical illness and physical fracture need healing. Some are personal, some are collective, and these two realms are not disconnected. We don’t live in compartments; we live in our lives.

There is almost nowhere on earth, I recently heard, where you can stand more than six feet away from a spider. Poems—and griefs—are simi­larly ubiquitous. Poems can be found, if they’re looked for, addressing every realm of what in our lives can feel broken: the heart’s injuries in the realms of intimate connection, in love, in friend­ship, in family. The distancing that comes with any form of grief, of fear, of anger. The brutalities and violence that occur among people whenever we feel ourselves set against one another, divided by any kind of boundary. Injustice. Powerlessness. The sense of erasure that comes with disrespect, nonrecognition, exclusion. The sense of our lost-ness, confusion, incomprehension. The sense of isolation and separation from one’s own participa­tion in existence. The evasion of death, which is ultimately an evasion of life.

How can poems solve any of these conditions? Outwardly, they cannot. Yet we’re haunted by W. H. Auden’s statement that “poetry makes nothing happen” exactly because it stands so powerfully as its own disproof. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats is itself an enactment of the shift from powerless grief to something, to use Yeats’s own words, utterly changed by its own terrible beauty, both born and borne. By a poem’s held beauty, our held terrors become bearable.

To be seated in full reality is to be seated also in permeability, interconnection, and compassion: the qualities of good poems. My experience, then, is that every truly good poem has in it, somewhere, an anchor dropped down into wholeness—findable even in poems in which that may be hard, at first, to see.

a song with no end

by Charles Bukowski

when Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric”

I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can’t cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.

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The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Shunryū Suzuki

Dear friends-

I took last week off to go on retreat. Something I want to recommend, and hopefully do it longer than I was able to do. The patterns of our lives require our own intention- breaking those patterns also require specific intention. Good to be writing this.

We celebrate (!?) America today. Her virtue and failings. Her aspirations and her heroic deeds. Our faults, failings and sinfulness. It has been said that true evil is when you stand as a saint in the middle of your own garden. When you only see your gifts and your good, and you refuse to see the shadow of lack or sinfulness. Slavery being the true original sin of these colonies. Let us not allow ourselves to be blinded by the bombs bursting in air.

This week’s Bread is about gratitude- about going outside- and about connections.

Louie Schwartzberg’s film about gratitude always lifts my spirit.

Part of the series of the NY Times- Getting outside is good for what ails you.

Shankar connects kindness with our feelings of incompetence. -

Closing with the most amazing Wendell Berry. How to Be a Poet.

Make a place to sit down. Sit down and be quiet.

Pax et bonum-

Abide-

Bill

Gratitude Film: Schwartzberg

Week 4: A Double Dose of Brain Benefits

Mixing creativity and time outdoors is good for your mental health.

Here’s how.

A Secret Source of Connection
Hidden Brain

We all have moments in our lives when we see someone who could use a helping hand. It could be a friend who recently went through a breakup, or an older person trying to load groceries into their car. We tell ourselves we should help, but then something stops us. This week, psychologist Amit Kumar helps us understand what keeps us from taking a moment to be kind, and how to overcome these barriers to create stronger, happier connections.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensioned life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Subscribe for free on Substack, Bread posts will only be available on Substack. Don’t miss any slices—subscribe your email for free at

Bill Substack

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Shunryū Suzuki

Dear friends-

I took last week off to go on retreat. Something I want to recommend, and hopefully do it longer than I was able to do. The patterns of our lives require our own intention- breaking those patterns also require specific intention. Good to be writing this.

We celebrate (!?) America today. Her virtue and failings. Her aspirations and her heroic deeds. Our faults, failings and sinfulness. It has been said that true evil is when you stand as a saint in the middle of your own garden. When you only see your gifts and your good, and you refuse to see the shadow of lack or sinfulness. Slavery being the true original sin of these colonies. Let us not allow ourselves to be blinded by the bombs bursting in air.

This week’s Bread is about gratitude- about going outside- and about connections.

Louie Schwartzberg’s film about gratitude always lifts my spirit.

Part of the series of the NY Times- Getting outside is good for what ails you.

Shankar connects kindness with our feelings of incompetence. -

Closing with the most amazing Wendell Berry. How to Be a Poet.

Make a place to sit down. Sit down and be quiet.

Pax et bonum-

Abide-

Bill

Gratitude Film: Schwartzberg

Week 4: A Double Dose of Brain Benefits

Mixing creativity and time outdoors is good for your mental health. Here’s how.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/25/well/summer-challenge-land-earth-art.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.kVV9.Lim2oMQfekb9&smid=em-share

A Secret Source of Connection
Hidden Brain

We all have moments in our lives when we see someone who could use a helping hand. It could be a friend who recently went through a breakup, or an older person trying to load groceries into their car. We tell ourselves we should help, but then something stops us. This week, psychologist Amit Kumar helps us understand what keeps us from taking a moment to be kind, and how to overcome these barriers to create stronger, happier connections.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

How to Be a Poet

By Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration,

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity. Any readers

who like your poems,

doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensioned life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.

Subscribe for free on Substack, Bread posts will only be available on Substack. Don’t miss any slices—subscribe your email for free at

https://billcoy.substack.com.

In an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.

Pico Iyer

Dear Friends-

This weeks Bread… no videos-pods or songs- just straight-ahead words.

Getting ready to head to Tassajara Zen Monastery for a week. The poet Jane Hirshfield is leading a retreat- integrating meditation with poetry. Learning to read poetry and learning to write poetry are two different acts. Both embodied.

No internet- there- so no Bread next week.

In this issue:

Bob Dylan reflects when he turned 80- five years ago. The best thing- and the worst thing. Mar Hernandez on the value of simple 24 hour retreats away from home. This was in the Wall Street Journal. James Crew reminds us that we belong on this earth. It is home to us.

I am going to listen to Pico-sit still. See what surfaces. Be present.

How incredibly terrifying and needed.

May you be free from suffering and find grace in your life.

Peace and Good-

Bill

Bob Dylan reflects on being 80:

Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and Nobel Prize recipient

The best thing

The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.

The worst thing

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

Mar Hernandez – 24-hour Micro- Retreats (WSJ)

So I decided to take a cue from the writer Joyce Maynard, who sometimes holes herself up in motels to write. In chats with my husband, I floated the idea of a micro-retreat: checking into a room a little after noon, then returning around the same time the next day.

These micro-retreats have proven so energizing that I now take a few each year—and science suggests such hiatuses, despite their brief duration, can renew enthusiasm and relieve mental exhaustion in potent ways. They’re a welcome temporary escape from a chaotic and overclocked world.

During my 24-hour retreats, I alternate between deep creative work and relaxation. I use travel points to book a hotel room in or near my hometown—I favor those that let me check in early. Somehow, just entering the room and sitting at the desk seems to prime my mind for this kind of deep dive. I reach a point of no return by late afternoon, when I stop to relax over dinner, then write or brainstorm for a couple more hours. The next morning, I dive into one final writing session before heading home.

One reason micro-retreats suit me so well is that they usher me into a flow state deeper than anything I can achieve in everyday life. On normal days, most of us do a lot of what’s called “context-switching,” toggling from one unrelated task to another (answering emails, filing reports, leading meetings). Studies show that not only do we lose time amid this constant task-switching, our cognitive reserves get depleted: 43% of workers report that context switching is mentally exhausting.

For me, micro-retreats eliminate about 90% of this juggling. Clearing away background static allows me to plunge into extended mental flow as I write, a state that researchers report is simultaneously absorbing and rewarding. And because flow activates brain networks that consume low amounts of energy, we experience it as a fun, playful state rather than a draining one.

You Belong. James Crew

Step out and breathe in the fog

that smudges this summer morning.

Touch the hot-pink petals

of echinacea studded with droplets

each of which contains whole planets

you will never set foot on.

Know that you also hold many worlds

unseen inside you, as do

the tiny leopard frogs who leap up

out of the way when you walk

through the grass. Let the wet blades

stroke your legs, soak your sandals,

and call each shiver evidence

of your aliveness, proof that you too

belong on the earth.

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Carl Jung

Dear friends-

It is getting warm here in Walnut Creek. Well beyond warm. Warm is comfort. Warm is relief coming in from the cold. There is more concern than welcome to this warmth. In Northern California we have become cautious around hot and dry- when the winds are up and the humidity does not register. May we welcome the summer, in all that the season brings. Stone fruits as well as caution.

I love each offering here today. Pieces of restoration- celebration of fatherhood and weddings. Warmth in song- heat that could melt a stone, knowing that we need to love people and let go of them at the same time.

This weekend we celebrate Father’s Day. The lesser of the two parental holidays. Not complaining here- just noting that of the two Hallmark Holidays we get the one we deserve, the one where we BBQ and get a card. No Brunches or flowers. No flourish or trumpets. And I am good with that. While we draw deserved attention to the maternal- who let us admit it- did all the work, we are happy to be acknowledged for knowing how to cook meat and select bourbon. But that is just me- adjust as appropriate.

That is enough. To my vegan friends and my friends in AA- you know my intention. Acknowledge those who have fathered, mentored and loved you in your imperfection.

Having recently returned from Auschwitz- Birkenau- the Bearing Witness podcast from the Zen Peacemakers really hit home. Bearing witness is not about the past, but the present. The song of the young autistic son made me weep. The poems of fathers and weddings made me more aware of the memories I hold.

Be still and abide-

Bill

The Summer Challenge Week 1: Log Off and Get Outside

Your phone may distract you, but it doesn’t restore you. Here’s what does.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/04/well/summer-challenge-touch-grass-outdoors-benefits.html?unlocked_article_code=1.olA.oSlQ.biAaRhhAD4h1&smid=em-share

His Autistic son sings while he plays

Turn up the volume- and be patient- it is worth it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/s/iRqATq1jj8

Bearing Witness at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Peacemakers Podcast

There is a difference between knowing a thing and being changed by it. In this episode of The Peacemakers Podcast, we enter the heart of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Bearing Witness Retreat, held each November by Zen Peacemakers. Through the voices of Barbara Wegmüller, Bernie Glassman, Fleet Maull, Genro Gauntt, Tani Katz, and Jishu Holmes, this episode explores what it means to sit at the selection site, read the names of those who were killed, and allow the place itself to become the teacher. This is not simply an episode about history, memory, or the past. It is about what happens when we stop holding suffering at a distance and allow it to change us. Again and again, the voices in this episode point toward the same realization: Auschwitz is not only about what happened then. It is about what lives in us now. Bernie Glassman reminds us that to remember is “to make whole again,” and this conversation becomes an invitation into that difficult and necessary work of remembrance. Not as an idea, not as blame, and not as despair, but as a practice of presence.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Father

by Ted Kooser

May 19, 1999

Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day — the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.

Wedding Poem For Schele and Phil

by Bill Holm

A marriage is risky business these days

says some old and prudent voice inside

we don’t need twenty children anymore

to keep the family line alive,

or gather up the hay before the rain.

No law demands respectability.

Love can arrive without certificate or cash.

History and experience both make clear

that men and women do not hear

the music of the world in the same key,

rather rolling dissonances doomed to clash.

So what is left to justify a marriage?

Maybe only the hunch that half the world

will ever be present in any room

with just a single pair of eyes to see it

whatever is invisible to one

is to the other an enormous golden lion

calm and sleeping in the easy chair.

After many years, if things go right

both lion and emptiness are always there;

the one never true without the other.

But the dark secret of the ones long married,

a pleasure never mentioned to the young,

is the sweet heat made from two bodies in a bed

curled together on a winter night,

The smell of the other always in the quilt,

the hand set quietly on the other’s flank

that carries news from another world

light years away from the one inside

that you always thought you inhabited alone.

The heat in that hand could melt a stone.

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I, believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

Mary Oliver

Dear Friends

Writing this morning from Honolulu. A week of great people, meaningful conversations and some real challenges.

It continues to amaze me how when we sit across from a person. We sit with their history, their talents, their accomplishments and their sorrow. It is a sacred moment when we can sit in the presence of their grace and their sorrow. The completeness of who they are, and the incompleteness of the missing pieces. Always a gift if we pay attention.

I am pressed this morning- heading to the airport. So minimal reflection.

Today’s Bread- a reflection from Thomas Merton- A reflection on the new papal encyclical on AI-) (really on humanity. A piece of hard poetry from Mark Nepo on the Shape of Things. Then David Whyte- Santiago- both written and performed by the poet.

Abide- Be Still

Bill

Thomas Merton Reflection on War

Thomas Merton: Contemplative Monk or Catholic Activist

Thomas Merton Reflects On War: Part 1

Here are some of Thomas Merton’s reflections on war to spur the imagination for the poetry contest, The Root of War Is Fear…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Thomas Brennan

What the Tech Gods Should Learn From the Church

WSJ

In an age of artificial intelligence, which voice of authority carries more weight? A priest who’s advised the Vatican weighs in.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/church-pope-ai-belief-33d3c158?st=xE8bUG

The Things that Shape us- Mark Nepo

As I look back, there were

crucial times I was locked

out.

Early on, my father locked

the screen door when the

bully chased me, wanting

me to fight and be a man.

I thought he didn’t love

me.

Later, my first wife, so

pained by being here, tried

to run me down with a car.

So cutting were her chains

that she lashed out at

everyone.

After that, it wasn’t safe

to go back in.

And when I kept throwing

up on chemo in a Holiday

Inn, my parents wouldn’t

come. So great was their

fear. Our cord was cut.

This all made the welcome

of friends and strangers

my chosen family.

This is why I welcome

everything and everyone,

why the deepest thing I

keep learning and teaching

is the mystery that

waits in the garden of

welcome.

Santiago

David Whyte

Santiago

A new video of David in Tuscany by Bodi Hallett. May 2026…

Listen now

3 months ago · 55 likes · 9 comments · David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding

then revealing the way you should take, the road

dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk

on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,

when you thought you would fall, and the way

forward always in the end the way that you followed,

the way that carried you into your future, that brought

you to this place, no matter that it sometimes took

your promise from you, no matter that it had to break

your heart along the way: the sense of having walked

from far inside yourself out into the revelation,

to have risked yourself for something that seemed

to stand both inside you and far beyond you,

that called you back in the end to the only road

you could follow, walking as you did, in your rags

of love and speaking in the voice that by night

became a prayer for safe arrival, so that one day

you realized that what you wanted had already

happened, and long ago and in the dwelling place

in which you had lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried

the heart and the mind and the promise

that first set you off and then drew you on

and that, you were more marvelous in your

simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs

of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point

might be a city with golden domes, and cheering

crowds, and turning the corner at what you thought

was the end of the road, you found just a simple

reflection, and a clear revelation beneath the face

looking back and beneath it another invitation,

all in one glimpse: like a person or a place

you had sought forever, like a broad field of freedom

that beckoned you beyond; like another life,

and the road still stretching on.

-from David Whyte: Essentials

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What you seek is seeking you.

Rumi

Dear Friends

May is closing the door. We walk through the portal into summer.

This last month has taken me to Berlin-Krakow-Honolulu- and Denver. It was a month of deep learning, exposure to pain and loss- celebrations and joy- appreciations and service.

The poets ask us to always be grateful for what comes. That every day there is an invitation to deepen our human experience. Some we welcome. Others we do not.

Can we treat them all as teachers? For they ask us to participate in the depth of our connection and own humanity.

Just for today- can we open ourselves to what is, and not what we pretend it to be.

It was Flannery O’Connor who said, “The truth will make you odd”.

I just finished a series of Sundays with David Whyte on creativity where he quotes William Blake on writing, “There are moments every day when Satan cannot find you”. That is where we are free to focus our intention and live in the spirit of divine inspiration.

A few short pieces of poetry for today….

May you sit in the moments when Satan cannot find you.

May you make your own rules.

Peace and good

Bill

Some Rules by Wendy Cope

Stop, if the car is going “clunk”

Or if the sun has made you blind.

Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.

You fire off something fierce. You’re sunk.

It’s irretrievable. It’s signed.

You feel your spirits going “clunk.”

Don’t hide your face with too much gunk,

Especially if it’s old and lined.

Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.

Don’t live with thirty years of junk—

Those precious things you’ll never find.

Stop, if the car is going “clunk.”

Don’t fall for an amusing hunk,

However rich, unless he’s kind.

Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.

In this respect, I’m like a monk:

I need some rules to bear in mind.

Stop, if the car is going “clunk.”

Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.

Let Them Not Say. By Jane Hirshfield

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say : it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something:

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

The Guest House by Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

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Pablo Neruda

Dear Friends

A short and delayed Bread this morning-

I am on the 20^th floor of the Waikiki Prince hotel after a full and rich week of connections- friendships- and hopefully being of service.

As anyone who loves this beautiful place knows- it is like returning home and being here for the first time.

Feeling the gratitude of the morning and the grace that it gifts us.

Given the late hour and the low energy of the author- and some technical challenges- I am only sharing two slices this morning. One from David Whyte on time- and a second piece about the life of a day…

It seems both appropriate and significant.

Abide- and be grateful-

Bill

-excerpts from Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity David Whyte

Most traditional human cultures have seen the hours of the days in the same way as they have encountered the seasons of the year: not as clear lines drawn across our experience, but as an advancing quality, a presence, a visitation, and an emergence of something growing inside us as much as it is growing in the outer world. A season or an hour of the day is a visitation whose return is not always assured. Every spring following a long winter feels as miraculous as if we are seeing it for the first time. Out of the dead garden rises abundance beyond a winter eye’s comprehension.

The hours and the seasons are sometimes a flowering, sometimes a disappearance, and often an indistinguishable transience between the two, but all the hours of the day and the seasons of the year enunciate some quality in the world that has its own time and place. To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. The tragedy of constant scheduling in our work is its mechanical effect on the hours, and subsequently on our bodies, reducing the spectrum of our individual character and color to a gray sameness. Every hour left to itself has its mood and difference, a quality that should change us and re-create us according to its effect upon us.

In many traditional cultures, a particular hour of the day is seen to have a personal, almost angelic presence, something that might be named - though only in hushed tones, and only in ways that reinforce its unknowingness. The Benedictine, Brother David Steindl-Rast, defines an angel as the eternal breaking into time, each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary and utterly itself. Time and each hour of time is a season, almost a personality, with its own annunciation, its own song, its whispering of what is to be born in us. Its appearance like a new conversation in which we are privileged to overhear ourselves participating.

To escape from the prison of time is to grant the hours their own life; to uncurl the iron grip of our hand on any given moment while at the same time finding the ability to be more present, more robust, more open to our own self-evident absurdities, while continuing the conversation.

A healthy relationship with time is an exact template of a healthy relationship between two human beings. When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person.

If we want to understand the particulars of our reality, we must understand the way we conduct our daily relationship with the hours. In the hours is the secret to the workday, and in every workday the manner of our marriage to the hours and subsequently, our journey through the day, is crucial to the happiness we desire.

The Life of a Day

By Tom Hennen

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has it’s own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that is would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves , and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

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I tried to post this podcast last Friday the 8th- and the link did not work

Radical Acceptance
Hidden Brain

Last week, we looked at the hidden beliefs that can leave us feeling stuck in life. This week, in the second part of our conversation with behavioral scientist Dave Evans, we talk about radical acceptance. Dave shares why accepting reality as it is can be so difficult — and why it’s an essential first step in building a meaningful life. Then, in the latest installment of Your Questions Answered, psychologist Sarah Schnitker returns to answer listeners’ questions about patience. When something terrible happens in your life, are you destined to fall apart? In our latest YouTube video, we explore decades of research about how humans respond to grief, loss, and tragedy.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Let us try this again-

Abide-

Flowers fall even though we love them, and weeds grow even though we dislike them.

Dōgen Zenji

Dear Friends

As I get older-and I seem to continually get older- it seems to be the default position of the system- I find travel weighs on me more and I have a harder time recovering from long trips. It is accepting what is versus what we want to be…

Back from Berlin and Krakow, with a most amazing group of people. We explored professional ethics through the lens of a most dark chapter in our human history- 1933-1945. It was brilliantly done by FASPE- Foundation at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics-

https://www.faspe-ethics.org/

They are the most amazing group of scholars, educators and allied professionals who create a container of learning that you must experience to understand. At this moment in our history- as we continue to spin out as a society- we all must look at our common responsibility.

A rather eclectic collection today. From Flea and Nick Offerman to the concept of Radical Acceptance- to a short bit from a collection of authors on how to simplify your life… that is really all we want…. Artists-acceptance-simplicity.

Every year before Mothers Day- (I know a Hall mark Holiday) I republish Billy Collins’ poem- The Lanyard.. It holds the deepest truth- You can never repay your mother… Read this again. Sip and savor the meaning. Give thanks to all of those who have mothered you- cared for you and given you sight.

For some reason- as I am trying to post this- the links to the podcasts are not showing up- sorry about that- but you can find them. Will trouble shoot but I wanted to get this out- even if only for the poem.

Abide- and be grateful-

Bill

Best Of: Flea / Nick Offerman
Fresh Air

Flea co-founded the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1982. The bass/trumpet player spoke with Terry Gross about how his music and his life have changed. “Thank God I’ve changed. I was a lunatic. I was 19 going on 10.” He has a new solo jazz album called ‘Honora.’ Also, we’ll hear from Nick Offerman. He stars in the new series ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles,’ about a bright college freshman who gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Offerman plays her estranged father, a former pro wrestler who comes back into her life to help. The ‘Parks and Rec’ actor spoke with producer Ann Marie Baldonado about transforming for the role. TV critic David Bianculli will review Zach Galifianakis’ new gardening show.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Radical Acceptance
Hidden Brain

Last week, we looked at the hidden beliefs that can leave us feeling stuck in life. This week, in the second part of our conversation with behavioral scientist Dave Evans, we talk about radical acceptance. Dave shares why accepting reality as it is can be so difficult — and why it’s an essential first step in building a meaningful life. Then, in the latest installment of Your Questions Answered, psychologist Sarah Schnitker returns to answer listeners’ questions about patience. When something terrible happens in your life, are you destined to fall apart? In our latest YouTube video, we explore decades of research about how humans respond to grief, loss, and tragedy.

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

#864: How to Simplify Your Life in 2026 — New Tips from Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman
The Tim Ferriss Show

Many of us feel like we’re drowning in invisible complexity. So I wanted to hit pause and ask a simple question: What are 1-3 decisions that could dramatically simplify my life in 2026? To explore that, I invited four long-time listener favorites—Anne Lamott, Claire Hughes Johnson, David Yarrow, and Diana Chapman.

The Lanyard by Billy Collins


The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

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Dear Friends

In a few hours I am leaving for Berlin. A symposium on ethics in leadership and the consequences of failing the ideals we state so easily. Doing s deep dive into the history and society of Germany 1933-1945. Then to the camps outside of Warsaw. The result of the failure of ethical leadership. How appropriate to examine this historical reality in this most brutal of times. It is sponsored by FASPE.

https://www.faspe-ethics.org/

Looking for hope and beauty in the face of all of it.

From the NY Times: Six Things to Add Delight to your Day. From Frank Bruni- nothing can nourish us more than a well-constructed sentence. A short Raymond Carver poem. His last poem and the inscription on his tomb stone.

I will need to take a break next week- but will return the first full week in May.

Be still and know-

Abide-

Bill

From the NY Times: The Good List: 6 Things to Add Delight to your Day

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/briefing/22-the-good-list-bears-ritual.html?unlocked_article_code=1.dFA.Eyn_.OcOt0X1N3u_R&smid=nytcore-ios-share

From Frank Bruni. For Love of Sentences:

In The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich profiled the Vermont singer and songwriter Noah Kahan, who produces “music for people who own too much performance fleece to embrace the bombast of Taylor Swift but aren’t quite feral enough for the cacophony of Geese,” she wrote. “It’s the kind of thing that sounds really nice in a Subaru, on your way to work, with an iced coffee nestled in the cup holder.” (Christopher Feeney, Brooklyn)

In his newsletter, Ron Charles praised the new book “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy,” by Ray Madoff, who explains the system’s concentration of wealth and perpetuation of inequality: “Every copy should come with a coupon for a torch and a pitchfork.” (Estelle Vickery, Waynesville, N.C.)

“Once,” Sam added, “a Cybertruck came rumbling toward me, and as I reached up to snap a picture with my glasses I felt that something momentous was about to happen — that this collision of two notoriously obnoxious technologies might rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and send confetti raining down, and we would all wake up in a new reality where everyone is kind and all leaders are competent and the world’s abundant resources end up where they belong. Instead, the Cybertruck drove on. And my sunglasses were still on my face.” (Stephen Waxman, San Francisco, and Miriam Bulmer, Mercer Island, Wash.)

And Abdi Latif Dahir evoked a recent day in Lebanon: “The mechanical growl of Israeli warplanes mixed uneasily with the soft, reverent hymns coming from the church near my home in Beirut on Easter Sunday. For a moment, the two sounds coexisted, as if the city itself were holding its breath, caught between faith and fear.” (Robert K. Leaverton, Absarokee, Mont.)

And in The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig remarked on the folly and futility of the president’s war with the pope and the Roman Catholic Church: “Trump, accustomed to playing the bully to forge deals, is perhaps discovering that his tactics make little sense against a power that has little need for currying favor. The Vatican is a 2,000-year-old global institution with a divine remit. The 250-year-old United States is still only a footnote, and this president’s term is barely a thought.” (Robert Depczenski, Manhattan)

Late Fragment- by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.

Dylan Thomas

Dear Friends,

An early Bread- as I am heading out on a few days of retreat in Calistoga.

Creating the Yutori or spaciousness that I preach to others.

Sometimes our meaning making breaks down- and all we can do is to take solace in the simplicity of a tree, or people singing on a train- or listening to the heartbreak and the hope of a a beloved figure.

3 short film clips-

One long poem- from Mary Oliver

May it be sufficient-

May you be free from suffering

May abundance and grace be present.

Deep bows of gratitude

Bill

Nature: Oak Trees in Northern California- from CBS Sunday morning.

Train Passengers Sing Over the Rainbow:

Ted Lasso: End of Season One- You will never walk alone:

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?

By Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or two of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?

And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.

Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.

I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

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https://billcoy.substack.com.

In a world that has seen more than its fair share of chaos, create an island of calm where you currently are.

Sam Harris

Dear Friends-

I woke up this Friday morning and after my morning practice I realized that what I had intended to send out simply did not fit… So I am rewriting this at 6:30 when I should be pressing the send button.

Great lesson there- Sometimes, when you listen to your gut- better things occur. Regardless of any effort- the impact is what we want- and need to let go of….

Four offerings in this revision- Oliver Burkeman- The Imperfectionist. And an article from the Times on a practice that is ruining our relationships- then a Zen Fable from Henry Shukman and a poem from David Whyte-.

The imperfectionist- the relationalist- the Zen Master- and the poet. A good group to have on your side.

As we walk down this long road, we are not alone. May we find each other in our own aloneness and the quiet of our hearts.

Abide-

Bill

Reality is right here- Oliver Burkeman

…Keeping your centre of gravity immediate and local means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.

One very good way to tell that your centre of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, the internet – contrary to the dreams of its hippie pioneers – hasn’t created a flourishing, supersized, wonderfully democratic public sphere in which we all get to constructively debate the issues of the day. Instead it erodes the public sphere, by connecting our minds directly to the unedited neediness, rage or fear inside everyone else’s minds, which in turn trigger such reactions in us. And so to follow American politics at the moment isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well. This isn’t healthy. To get along successfully with each other, Han argues, we need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.

And, yes, returning your centre of gravity to your immediate world means doing all those things you already know you ought to be doing – removing news notifications from your phone; spending time in nature; considering a return to printed news, and so on. But it also means remembering that “the way you want the world to be” is something you can live, here and now, not just something for which you advocate or argue. Your immediate world isn’t only somewhere you come to recharge, before heading back to the arena. It is the arena.

I mean, step back for one moment and consider the absolute outrageousness of the idea that focusing on the concretely real in this way – on looking people in the eye or walking in the woods, on building organisations or solving problems, on bringing creative works into the world or paying attention to your kids – that any of this somehow automatically constitutes “retreating” or “disengaging” or “looking away” from reality! (Link)

Turning words

…The spiritual writer Michael Singer points out somewhere that reality doesn’t need you to help operate it. It gets along just fine without your worrying.

Who knew? Look, I don’t think of myself as an obscenely self-centered narcissist. And yet I have to admit that when I heard those words, I suddenly perceived the subtle sense in which my thoughts and actions – and especially the background muscular tension I instinctively bring to them – were indeed somehow premised on the notion that reality itself would be badly affected were I to relax my guard.

I’m talking here about something slightly more profound than the idea that I’m a catastrophist by nature, prone to worrying too much, although that’s definitely true. It’s more about the specific way in which I seem to imagine that my worrying is effective – that there’s something about the very act of fretting about the future that helps keep everything on track. This is, rather obviously, false. All I really need to do is to show up for what’s happening, appreciate the spectacle of it, and go with the flow.
(Link)

This Habit is Quietly Ruining Your Relationships- NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/well/silent-treatment-ruin-relationship.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Z1A.H_eh.YSgKhKdFLXwV&smid=nytcore-ios-share

From Henry Sukkman- a Zen fable- Isan and the Tiger:

https://the-way.app.link/ygPEABoZd2b

Admit

Admit,

your distant love affair

is with yourself,

and that

no one

can play

harder to get:

the unwritten letters,

the plays for time,

the heartbreak

over never being

properly answered.

That coy look

of false seduction

in the mirror,

or that hard look

to hide

what should not

be hidden.

The invitation

to undoing,

and to allowing

yourself to want

at last

what you feel

you never deserved,

the fervent wish

to come closer,

and the loving

word

of understanding

you say

to yourself

when you finally admit

to it all,

the only declaration

that counts.

David Whyte

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