Brian Allain

Makes You Come Alive

From “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman” by Lerita Coleman Brown “Once, when I was seeking the advice of Howard Thurman and talking to him at some length about what needed to be done in the world, he interrupted me,” writes Gil Bailie in the acknowledgments of his book Violence […]

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it’s not either – or

From “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S. Dweck, PhD Who’s right? Today most experts agree that it’s not either – or. It’s not nature or nurture, genes or environment. From conception on, there’s a constant give-and-take between the two. In fact, as Gilbert Gottlieb, an eminent neuroscientist, put it, not only do

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commonplacing

From “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters – just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period – Milton, Bacon, Locke – were zealous believers

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Artful Dodging

From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner I hear the creaking of a chair being tipped back on its hind legs. “Sir, this is all fairly effective in a literary sort of way, I suppose, but since you have already put most of it in a novel. I’m afraid

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It seems to have been ‘given.’

From “The Discipline of Inspiration: The Mysterious Encounter with God at the Heart of Creativity” by Carey Wallace Many artists are skeptical of the claim that inspiration is a product of the unconscious mind. “I dislike learned talk about ‘the unconscious,’ which always seems to imply that the very intelligent are able somehow to know

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Our self-certainty

From “The Soulwork of Justice: Four Movements for Contemplative Action” by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson. Here’s what happens. Our self-sufficiency, which works well because we are smart and talented, keeps us from vulnerable commitments to others, pushing us into lonely emptiness and isolation. Our certainty, reinforced through a thirst for psychic security, becomes rigid and judgmental, repressing

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Ping-pong between my parents

From “Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma” by Ellen Corcella The divorce left me to ping-pong between my parents. I was the telegraph line through which they communicated their resentments, anger, and irritation. I was the weapon each used to retaliate against the other. I was referee, negotiator, and confidante. Sometimes

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