In time, even the reddest of roses lose their bloom and gracefully let their petals fall. When half of all marriages end in divorce and -- despite our initial hopes for them -- many more informal relationships flicker out after just a few months or a year or two, we...

Is there an innate spiritual impulse independent of the fear of death and of religion itself? I have never been able to espouse any religion, even as I have been attracted to various elements in all of them. I am often moved by religious art and architecture in all its...

One of the most profoundly moving testimonies I have ever read on love, and letting go even as you love, is a poem by E.E. Cummings. This is why it is in my upcoming book, Ten Poems to Say Goodbye. True to Cummings' idiosyncratic taste in punctuation, it is called...

Christopher Hitchens, who died on Dec. 15, was like all of us: he embodied some of the best and also the worst of human nature. He did so, however, on a scale that was larger than the average life, on a very public stage, from his own bully pulpit. His...

The Lord gives everything and then charges
By taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while.

These are the opening lines of Jack Gilbert's poem The Lost Hotels of Paris. It was written while he was already beginning to experience the onset...

When my sun was nearer noon, my days were all too easily obscured by the endless rush of days coming after it. There was a whole life left to live, with the best surely still to come. So many moments were left unrecognized for what they were -- my life...

These were the center page headlines in the UK's Independent newspaper while I was in England a couple of weeks ago. Not only was I in England, I was in the very village itself -- East Coker, which gives its name to the second of Eliot's famous Four Quartets --...

The first person I normally greet in the morning is Diego. Today, I look at him with eyes whose vision has been altered by reading the opening lines of a poem by Ellen Bass called "If You Knew":

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?

Only the shallow know themselves.
-- Oscar Wilde

We all know that life lived with our attention solely in the shallows of gossip, the headlines of newspapers and our daily round of worries and responsibilities easily becomes two dimensional, dry and empty of meaning. Turn inward, the wise say,...

Why all the embarrassment
about being happy?

Wendell Berry asks in his poem "Why." Why indeed! In the novel "Snow," by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, one of the characters says to another, "You got drunk so you could resist the hidden happiness rising inside of you."

What...

Something always seems to be missing, even if we can't put our finger on it. It's in our hard drive. We aren't earning enough, we don't have the right partner, we haven't found our life purpose, we aren't living in the right city or our nose isn't straight enough.

So...

Day and night torrents of words cascade through every building down every telephone line and out of all our wireless paraphernalia. Every public space -- elevators, shopping malls, hotel lobbies, restaurants, airports -- is plastered with some variety of musical wallpaper. In her novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,"...

In the last few years I have spent much of my time writing books on poetry. Sometimes, while sitting alone in front of my computer, I have wondered whether I was wasting my time. After all, the world is in trouble. It has always been in trouble. Surely there must...

In Isfahan, Iran, blue against a blue sky, is the most beautiful building I have ever seen. Entering the Lotfollah Mosque, I made my way to a corner and sat on the floor beneath the soaring dome to take it all in. Then I lay down and gazed up. A...

Who would have thought it? To live a life of words spilling out of the mind, out of the heart onto the page and into the eyes of invisible strangers. Who would have thought to spend the best hours of your day wrapped up in yourself, by yourself, with the...

Is life worth living without a goal?

Do we ever really know where our lives are leading or what we are doing? Our culture places an enormous premium on the accumulation of knowledge and the development of strategies to achieve our personal ends -- including our spiritual goals as well...

"Who sent you here?" Baldy asks his question without seeming concerned for my answer.
I am in an interrogation room at Tehran airport.