Good men and good women have fire in the belly. We are fierce. Don't mess with us if you're looking for someone who will always be 'nice' to you. Nice gets you a C+ in life. We don't always smile, talk in a soft voice, or engage in indiscriminate hugs. In the loving struggle between the sexes we thrust and parry.

Call it "womb awe" or even "womb worship" but it's not simple envy. I don't remember even wanting to be a woman. But each of the three times I have been present at the birth of one of my children, I have been overwhelmed by a sense of reverence... It was quite suddenly, the first day of creation; the Goddess giving birth to a world... Like men since the beginning of time I wondered: What can I ever create that will equal the magnificence of this new life?

I fall into all kinds of inauthenticity when I conspire to forget my mortality.

I think there are families that are very kind and supportive of people's ability to change. People who come from such families may go through life without dipping into the dark night.

The spiritual journey is one that we must take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage involves a dance between solitude and communion. The life of the spirit entails a continuous alternation between retreating into oneself and going out into the world: it's an inward-outward journey. There is a solitary part to it, but that solitude helps us to develop richer and more in-depth relationships with our friends, our children, our community, and the political world.

We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!

In the beginning, we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We think others to death and then invent the battle-axe or ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.